By Mursi Saad El-Din The Egyptian National Library, the Embassy of Chile and the Spanish Cultural Centre last week celebrated the centenary of the birth of the great Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. I felt sorry that I missed the celebration. Neruda is one of my favourite poets. I had the pleasure of meeting him twice, once at the 34th International PEN Congress which convened in New York in June 1966, and later in Santiago, Chile, a few months before the military coup against Allende. The first time I heard Neruda speak was at a round table discussion on the writer as a public figure during the 1966 PEN Congress. He said, and here I quote him from the official record of the meeting: "After listening to the earlier statements made by certain colleagues, I had a little surprise. I thought that we had left the cold war behind. Apparently I was dreaming, since there were famous writers present for whom that war was still on. I had visited all the socialist countries which capitalist writers called totalitarian. I also visited all the capitalist countries. Everywhere I talked to writers and found under both social systems writers who were happy and other writers who were unhappy." Neruda then went on to talk about his own country, Chile. It was invented, he said, by a 16th century poet called Ercilla, one of the conquerors sent by imperial Spain. Ercilla, instead of celebrating the conquest wrote an epic, La Araucana, detailing the terrible fate of the Arauncanian Indians. Instead of exalting the Spanish he praised the proud spirit and the prowess of a people destroyed by their conquerors. "Chile," Neruda went on to say, "was born by a poem." Neruda had wandered though all the villages and mines of his country, which extends from below the equator almost to the South Pole. Everywhere the Chilean people had come to talk to him. And what they had said, in effect was "talk in the name of those who cannot write". "I have undertaken this mission with humility and with pride," he continued. "My poetry was written with anguish, but in the hope that my own opposition to war and injustice would contribute to change in Latin America." "I would ask only this," Neruda concluded. "If the poet does not make himself the spokesman of the human condition, what else is there for him to do?" During his intervention in the round table he evoked the memory of his Spanish friend the poet Fredrico Garcia Lorca, whom he had met in Buenos Aires. He had loved Lorca as he had loved no other poet. When Lorca was executed during the Spanish Civil War Neruda went through a new phase in his writing. "The world has changed," he said, "and my poetry has changed. One drop of blood falling on these lines will remain alive in them, indelible like love." During the New York Congress a special session was devoted to the situation of Latin American writers. I had the chance of meeting many Latin American writers, including Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico. It was a frank and deep exchange of opinion. Vargas Llosa was outspoken and highly critical of the situation in Peru. The career of a writer in Peru was one of frustration. In Peru, he said, there was no reading public and the Peruvian writer was a kind of freak, a picturesque but abnormal figure. Latin American writers, in Neruda's opinion, were torn between two poles, universal culture and the condition of their own people. And they had to decide who they were addressing. "You are a committed writer, people were constantly saying to me, either with approval or with fury," Neruda continued. "I am indeed committed, for I carry on my back the shadow of 60 or 80 million Latin American illiterates. My ambition is, as Gabriela Mistral put it, to give shoes to little children in the Antarctic winter of Chile."
