General sing

Canto general is the tenth collection of poems by Pablo Neruda, Chilean Nobel Prize winner for literature, published for the first time in Mexico, at the Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, in 1950., and which he began composing in 1938. A few weeks apart, a clandestine version was printed and circulated in Chile, with a fictitious imprint (Imprenta Juárez, Reforma 75, Mexico City), by Américo Zorrilla and the illustrator Jose Venturelli. The original edition that came out in Mexico included illustrations by Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Neruda explained in his memoirs that he considered Canto general his most important book. He conceived it as a "monumental poetic project" that addresses the history of Latin America following the ancient epic songs.It consists of fifteen sections, 231 poems and more than fifteen thousand verses.

Sections

The fifteen sections or "cantos" that make up the construction of this work, essentially following the critic Mario Ferrero, correspond to:

• "The lamp on earth": set that contains a naturalistic panoramic view of the social contour of pre-Columbian communities;
• "Altitudes of Macchu Picchu": dedicated to the incaic ruins and to the human drama of the servants who built that fortress. Some critics consider this song as the most important contribution of Pablo Neruda to poetry; the Chilean group Los Jaivas adapted it for his work of the same name;
• "The conquerors": it reflects the historical alternatives and contradictions inherent in the expansionist wars of Spain in America, although it condemns the pillage and theft also values the Spanish people's gestation;
• "The liberators": epic of the defenders of the American land from Cuauhtémoc and the indigenous and popular defense of the natives passing through the pro-independencers to the new workers' leaders e.g. Luis Emilio Recabarren and the traitors of the new imperialism;
• "The arena betrayed": portrays the underworld of the traitors, dictators and lackeys, begins with the significant "The Dead of the Plaza (28 January 1946. Santiago de Chile)";
• "America, I do not invoke your name in vain": kind of ritual poem to the native and libertarian reserves of the continent;
• "Canto general de Chile": contains the lyric description of American flora, fauna, strawberries and nature, while exalting the primitive forms of work and life in the indigenous community;
• "The earth is called John": anonymous voice of the popular insurgency in the face of invading abuses, a series of poems to real workers from different latitudes reflecting abuse and suffering;
• "Wake up the wooder": call to alert the social conscience of the United States, destined for Walt Whitman; perhaps a preamble to future struggles for civil rights in the United States. U.S.;
• "The fugitive": biography of the persecution of Neruda in hiding and song of exaltation to the solidarity of the Chilean people;
• "The flowers of Punitaqui": reconstruction of the poet's personal experiences in northern Chile and their contact with the workers' organizations;
• "The rivers of singing": homage to fallen fighters and friends who accompanied their social adventure in those days;
• "New Year's Coral for the Homeland in Darkness": greeting of the fugitive to those who continue in the internal struggle against the government of González Videla;
• "The Great Ocean"I sing to the cosmogonies and the vast coastline of Latin America; and
• "I am": vigorous reaffirmation of his personality as a heroic symbol of the popular resistance of the continent.

Style

This work is circumscribed within the Soviet socialist realism promoted by Andrei Zhdanov, a style that Neruda brought to its culmination later, in The Grapes and the Wind (1954).

Some critics have described it as epic poetry, since its song is addressed to the nature and entire history of the American continent. It has also been said that in it the poet reflects his political commitment and with the Party Communist, in addition to showing its more social facet, close to nature and taking empathy as elements to transmit poetry as the engine of social change. Its transcendence ends up turning it into popular poetry.

The Canto general is a mix of recent Latin American history and ancient civilizations, with propaganda denunciations, global politics, and autobiography. It begins with a cosmogony with allusions to the biblical genesis, to lead to recent politics with the government of González Videla, positioning Neruda as narrator and protagonist, as Alonso de Ercilla did, since Neruda, a member of the Communist Party in the middle of the Cold War, decides to use heroism. of the resistance, in the same way that Ercilla used it in La Araucana. In this way it ends with "The earth is called Juan" to celebrate the survival of the persecuted. The General Song could be categorized as an Anti-Epic, exemplified in the second section of the General Song, which is not a description of Machu Picchu, but a journey from the present to the past. past, because those ruins were discovered in the 20th century, which begins from Neruda's perspective because they represent self-discovery.

Criticism

For the critic Mario Ferrero, this is a "dense and monumental work, the one with the greatest thematic breadth and Americanist synthesis that has been produced on the continent".

The anti-poet Nicanor Parra, for his part, in a critique carried out in 1962, opined that this was an uneven work, that like the Andes Mountains, had "its ups and downs".

Interpretations

The Canto general has been interpreted by many musicians, being the representation of the Chilean progressive rock group Los Jaivas in their album Alturas de Machu Picchu (1981) the most known in Latin America. This album also included a staging in the ruins of Machu Picchu. The song "Rise to be born with me brother", for example, corresponds to the practically complete Canto XII.

Another of the best-known interpretations belongs to Mikis Theodorakis, a Greek musician and politician, with the voices of Maria Farantouri and Petros Pandis, who sang in Spanish on the original recording. This interpretation materialized in the album Canto general of 1980.

In 1983, five poems from the Canto general make up the work Amor América by the Venezuelan composer Oswaldo González. «Amor América», «Vienen por las Islas», «Elegía», «Los enemigos» and «Siempre», are the poems of the Canto general set to music.

Several Latin American classical music composers have composed works using texts from the Canto general, including Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt, Fernando García, Celso Garrido Lecca and Leon Schidlowsky.