Neruda and Faiz: Great Contemporary Poets

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) and Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1910-1984) were contemporary poets, intimate friends, and outstanding humanists. They have left a lasting impression on the world of politics and literature, and their work is recognized globally. One was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature and the other with Lenin Peace Prize. Both Neruda and Faiz, like many others, notably Nazim Hikmet and Mahmoud Darwish, were essentially anti-colonialists and anti-imperialists. Their great struggle and work was interwoven and inseparable. The life and work of Neruda has amazing similarities with that of Faiz.


Pablo Neruda (1904-1973):

Neruda (real name Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto), was born on 12 July, 1904, in the town of Parral in Chile. His father was a railway employee and his mother, who died shortly after his birth, a teacher. Some years later his father remarried a woman named Doña Trinidad Candia Malverde, and moved to the town of Temuco. Neruda spent his childhood and youth in Temuco where he also got to know Gabriela Mistral. She was the head of the girls' secondary school who took a liking to him. At the early age of thirteen he began to contribute some articles to the daily La Mañana, among them, Entusiasmo y Perseverancia –his first publication– and his first poem.

In 1920, he became a contributor to the literary journal Selva Austral under the pen name of Pablo Neruda, which he adopted in memory of the Czechoslovak poet Jan Neruda (1834-1891). Some of the poems Neruda wrote at that time can be found in his first published book, Crepusculario (1923). The following year he published "Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada", one of his best-known and most translated works. Alongside his literary activities, Neruda studied French and pedagogy at the University of Chile in Santiago.

Between 1927 and 1935, the government put him in charge of a number of honorary consulships, which took him to Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. His poetic work during that difficult period included the collection of esoteric surrealistic poems, Residencia en la tierra (1933), which marked his literary breakthrough.

The Spanish Civil War and the murder of García Lorca, whom Neruda knew, affected him strongly and made him join the Republican movement, first in Spain and later in France. There he started working on his collection of poems "España en el Corazón" (1937). The same year he returned to his native country and his poetry during the following period was characterized by an orientation towards political and social matters. "España en el Corazón" had a great impact by virtue of its being printed in the middle of the front during the civil war.

In 1939 Neruda was appointed consul for the Spanish emigration while residing in Paris. Shortly afterward he became Consul General in Mexico, where he rewrote his "Canto General de Chile", transforming it into an epic poem about the whole South American continent, its nature, its people and its historical destiny. This work, entitled "Canto General" was published in Mexico 1950, and also underground in Chile. It consists of approximately 250 poems brought together into fifteen literary cycles and constitutes the central part of Neruda's literary work. Shortly after its publication, "Canto General" was translated into some ten languages. Nearly all these poems were created in a difficult situations while Neruda was living abroad.

In 1943 Neruda returned to Chile and in 1945 he was elected senator of the Republic. He also joined the Communist Party of Chile. Due to his protests against President González Videla’s repressive policy against striking miners in 1947, he had to live underground in his own country for two years until he managed to leave in 1949.

After living in different European countries he returned to Chile in 1952. A great deal of what he published during that period bears the stamp of his political activities; one example is "Las Uvas y el Viento" (1954), which can be regarded as the diary of Neruda's exile. In "Odas elementales" (1954- 1959) his message expands into a more extensive description of the world, where the objects of the hymns (things, events, and relations) are presented in alphabetic form.

Neruda's work is exceptionally extensive. For example, his "Obras Completas", was comprised of 459 pages in 1951, in 1962 the number of pages was 1,925, and in 1968 it amounted to 3,237, in two volumes. Among his works are "Cien sonetos de amor" (1959), which includes poems dedicated to his wife Matilde Urrutia. "Memorial de Isla Negra" is a poetic work/autobiography done in five volumes: "Arte de pajáros" (1966), "La Barcarola" (1967), the play Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (1967), Las manos del día (1968), Fin del mundo (1969), Las piedras del cielo (1970), and La espada encendida.


Faiz as a young man:

Faiz Ahmed Faiz was born in Sialkot in the Punjab and hailed from a well-to-do landowner’s family. Faiz's father was a prominent lawyer who was interested in literature and whose friends included several prominent literary figures (Muhammad Iqbal (1873-1938), national poet of Pakistan). Faiz received his education at mission schools in Sialkot in the English language, but he also learned Urdu, Persian, and Arabic. He studied English and Arabic literature at Government College, Lahore, and received his M.A. in English, and in Arabic from Oriental College, Lahore. Besides formal studies, Faiz actively participated in the literary circles which held meetings at homes of established writers. After graduating, he worked as a teacher from the mid-1930s in Amritsar and Lahore.

In the 1930s, Faiz joined the famous leftist progressive movement under the leadership of Sajjad Zaheer (1905-1973). During World War II, Faiz served in the Indian army in Delhi, and in 1944, he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. With the division of the subcontinent in 1947, Faiz resigned from the army and moved to Pakistan with his family. His wife Alys Faiz (died in 2003), later published a book of memoirs called Over My Shoulder (1993). Faiz became editor of the English daily, the Pakistan Times. He also worked as managing editor of the Urdu daily Imroz, and was actively involved in organizing trade unions.

In 1951 Faiz and a number of army officers were implicated in the so-called Rawalpindi Conspiracy case and arrested under the Safety Act. The government authorities alleged that Faiz and others were planning a coup d’état. He spent four years in prison under a sentence of death and was released in 1955. Faiz became the secretary of the National Council of the Arts, and in 1962 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union. After the military takeover of General Ziaul Haq on July 5, 1977, Faiz was once again in trouble and was forced to exile. After a period of exile in war-torn Lebanon from 1979 to 1982, Faiz returned to Pakistan and died in Lahore on November 20, 1984.

Faiz's first collections of poetry, Naqsh-e faryadi (1943), Dast-e saba (1952), and Zindan Namah (1956), include his experience of imprisonment. Faiz describes his life behind the walls, in confinement, finding consolation in the thought that "though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed / in rooms where lovers are destined to meet / they cannot snuff out the moon..."

The remarkable thing about Neruda and Faiz was that in spite of their overwhelming revolutionary ideas, they never allowed ideological epiphany to burden their poems with shoddy rhetoric. They were masters of art and craft, a quality lacked by many revolutionary poets of their time.

Neruda-Faiz legacy is universal and everlasting. For nearly six decades both men inimitably articulated the suffering of their people, the agony of dispossession and exile. Today, Ismail Kadare, winner of 2009 Spanish literary prize who is considered one of the greatest writers and intellectuals of the 20th century, narrates in the same masterly language and style the tragedy of his land (Albania), an incessant battleground. It is, in fact, not a story of one land alone. It is tragedy of millions of others as well—living in troubled lands around the globe where wars, civil strife, hunger, terrorism and militancy are posing problems of day to day survival. Today, Pablo Neruda and Faiz Ahmad Faiz are not alive, but the courage they demonstrated in their work is source of inspiration for all the leading poets and writers of the world.



The writers, ardent readers and admirers of Pablo Neruda and Faiz Ahmad Faiz, during their recent visit to Chile (June11-22) met people from cross sections of Chilean society and discussed with Mr. Burhanul Islam, Pakistan’s first Ambassador to Chile, various vistas of promoting cultural ties between the two countries by highlighting the past connection like that of Faiz and Neruda.