ABSTRACT
Neruda had his own verse form, which he used to write about anything at all – love, separation, General Franco, the defence of Stalingrad, the volcanoes in Chili, and his own fatigue. When critics discuss the poetry of Neruda, they often mention the name of Maiakovskii. It is true that Pablo once wrote, “The power, tenderness, and fury of Maiakovskii remain today the greatest examples of our poetic epoch”. Maiakovskii’s biography, thematics, and his break with the Romanticism of the recent past, however, exerted more of an influence on the young Chilean poet than did his poetic form. In fact, I cannot imagine how verses read in translation could influence a poet. Even reproductions of paintings provide a better impression of the original than do wonderful poetic translations since every language has its own fauna of words, its own sounds, its own associations. Maiakovskii’s article on how he writes verses reveals the poet’s path to be almost diametrically opposed to that of Neruda. Maiakovskii spoke of the “stockpiling of rhymes”, and several of his poems were born out of unusual rhymes. At the age of 20, Neruda bid farewell to rhyme. From the enormous number of Neruda’s poems and lyric verses, I know of only two exceptions: ‘A New
recounted that he rhymed the sonnet because he wanted to show the critics that it wasn’t all that hard. Maiakovksii’s verse form was the modern iamb, while Neruda rejected the classical metres of Spanish poetry in his earliest years. Maiakovskii wrote in order to recite his verses in packed halls, while it was extremely rare for Neruda to recite his verse in public – he didn’t like that.
