Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz: Clash of Literary Titans (Last Part).

Pablo Neruda according to David Levine.

Photo: Courtesy by David Levine. The New Yoik Review of Books

Jaime Perales Contreras

• Latin Cinema Examiner 

In September 1993, on the twentieth anniversary of Neruda's death, Paz again remembered Neruda with admiration in the pages of the magazine Vuelta. He wrote about the poem "Discurso de las liras," which the author of Canto General had published originally in Paz's Taller. For the Mexican poet, "there is a sustained feeling to the form--stanzas of four verses each--tied to that somnambulant vision of the world that gave his poetry, during those years, a gravity that distinguishes all he wrote at that time."

The relationship between Paz and Neruda was difficult; Paz himself said in his essay for Laurel that the friendship was "as overwhelming as a mountain." This is how Paz put it: "Pablo was very jealous of his friends. He put on the airs of a big fish, an enormous fish from the depths, with an odd sense of humor that, many years later, would be reflected in a book that is one of my favorites of his: Extravagario. He showed that sense of humor in his conversations." The partisan tendency of literary criticism also separated the two writers.

Could there also have been, beyond the political differences, some professional jealousy between the poets? Perhaps. Paz never stopped talking or writing about him, particularly about what he considered Neruda's lack of political prudence with regard to his pro-Soviet commitment.

Despite the distance between the two poets, both politically and in terms of the profound literary beliefs they both held sacred, in his essay "Homenaje" Paz affirmed that the break with Neruda had hurt him and added that he would like to think that it hurt Neruda too. Paz ended the short piece with the following lines: "I utter Pablo Neruda's name and tell myself: you admired him, you cared for him, and you fought him. He was your dearest enemy."

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