The Conflicting Vernacular
open and provisional – poetry and dwelling grew together as the Isla Negra and Neruda’s best-known poem, Canto General, developed simultaneously for more than a decade. 23 Yet, the sensibility which governed Neruda’s material expression stemmed mainly from his recovery of the sensual world, that occurred when he encountered Spanish poets in Madrid in the mid-1930s. When he met Federico García Lorca, Three Material Songs emerged, and with it a new poetry that shifted his production from the cold intellectual modernism of the first Residence on Earth to the engagement with the sensuality of material life. 24 This recuperation which had evolved in his poetry culminated in Canto General, the epic poem he began when he started to build Isla Negra. From that moment on, both the house and the poetry would be interwoven as a twofold material expression – the house as yet another ‘material song’. This expression can be apprehended in the palpability of ‘Entrance into Wood’, the first of Three Material Songs, where the exacerbation of the materiality of the wood acquires ‘mystical’ properties:
23 — In Canto General Neruda remembers the same sensitivity in a poetic evocation: ‘My house, the walls whose fresh,/ recently cut wood still smells: dilapidated/ homestead that creaked/ with every step, and whistled with the warrior wind/ of austral weather, becoming stormy/ element, strange bird/ beneath whose frozen feathers my song grew.’ Neruda, ‘The House’, in Canto General , trans. Jack Schmitt (Berkeley: Berkeley University Press, 1991), 415. 24 — According to Neruda, ‘It was the Spanish war that changed my poetry’; for the literary critic Hernan Loyola it was the encounter with the Spanish poets, and especially with Federico García Lorca, that caused the shift from a detached and abstract modernist style to a full engagement with sensuality.
25 — ‘Entrance into Wood’, in Residence on Earth , trans. Donald D. Walsh (New York, 1973), 51. 26 — ‘The house … I do not know when this was born in me. It was in the afternoon, we were on the way to those lonely places on horseback … Don Eladio was in front; fording the Cordoba stream, which had swollen … For the first time I felt the pang of this smell of winter at the sea, a mixture of sweet herbs and salty sand, seaweed and thistle.’ Pablo Neruda, The House in the Sand , trans. Dennos Maloney and Clark M. Zlotchew, (Buffalo: White Pine Press, 2004), 43.
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And I kneel in your hard cathedral Bruising my lips on an angel 25
The mysticism of the flesh and matter bursts out as a poetic storm. Following this perspective, the house appears as a set of seductive and indefinable enveloping sensations. The house is built as a pure sensation rather than a composition or geometric organization; physical matter is organized as a light tapestry of touch and smell [figure 19] . 26 Neruda’s spatial practice is like a continuous backstage recreation, in which the house is endlessly rearranged in search of atmospheric sensations