SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 39
SINE QUA NON
scrapbook. While they can evoke a pleasant sense of presence, they are not the memories that
form the core of great writing.
Every attempt to learn a language or use words creatively involves giving shape to moments
of living.
In Memoirs, where he talks about his evolution as a poet, Pablo Neruda says, “In my
poems I could not shut the door to the street, just as I could not shut the door to love, life,
joy, or sadness in my young poet's heart.”6 Neruda connects the street with love, life, joy, and
sadness, bringing together the concrete with the abstract, the heart with the mind, and the
body with the soul. What immediately follows the quote is a poetic manifesto on language
called “The Word.”
…Everything exists in the word . . . An idea goes through a complete change
because one word shifted its place, or because another settled down like a spoiled
little thing inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her . . . They
have shadow, transparence, weighty feathers, hair, and everything they gathered
from so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from country to
country, from being roots so long . . . They are very ancient and very new . . .
They live in the bier, hidden away, and in the budding flower . . . What a great
language I have, it’s a fine language we inherited from the fierce conquistadors .
. . They strode over the giant cordilleras over the rugged Americas; hunting for
potatoes, sausages, beans, black tobacco, gold, corn, fried eggs, with a voracious
appetite not found in the world since then . . . They swallowed up every-thing,
religions, pyramids, tribes, idolatries just like the ones they brought along in their
huge sacks . . . Wherever they went, they razed the land . . . But words fell like
pebbles out of the boots of the barbarians, out of their beards, their helmets, their
horseshoes, luminous words that were left glittering here . . . our language. We
came up losers . . . We came up winners . . . They carried off the gold and left us
the gold . . . They carried everything off and left us everything . . . They left us
the words.7
The passage is a celebration of the power of words to describe the world. When we
talk about the world, we mean human feelings. Neruda celebrates the power of language to
describe one’s thoughts and feelings. Words make life beautiful because they have the power
to describe reality. They serve as tools for describing both the subjective or personal world
and the objective or real world, although they can be interchanged in numerous ways. Words,
however, don’t happen automatically, like sunshine on a spring morning. The poet, like any
ordinary person, struggles to find the right kinds of words. He needs to fall in love with
words before he can use them to describe the world. The poet’s relationship to language is an
emotional and spiritual one.
The fact is that we are born into a language, which exists before we are on the world’s
stage and remains after we have left the stage on which we performed as social and political
6
7
Pablo Neruda, Memoirs, Translated by Hardie St. Martin, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, 53.
Neruda, Memoirs, 53-54.
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