‘Slaves of the slogan’, the second part of the memories of the Cervantes Prize in 1999, is replete with Neruda, Vargas Llosa, Cuba, the Paris of the 60’s and Chile’s wealthy family
Jorge Edwards is a catalogue of names (Pablo Neruda, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, Cortázar, Onetti…) and places or events in which it has been protagonist (ascension to power of Salvador Allende or the cuban revolution of Castro). In addition to writer and Cervantes Prize, has been an ambassador (or almost) of Chile in Paris, Lima and Havana. Edwards or received or was received, and between receptions and dinners I wrote what I saw, heard or told. And even today, 87 years, impeccable memory and appearance, although the recent Constitution day, dress brown from the shirt to the feet, fit the right shoe on the left foot.
The library of the room where he writes at his home in Madrid, close to the headquarters of the Supreme Court, welcomes the search of lost time Proust in French, and tragedies of Shakespeare in English and don Quixote in Spanish. On the low table in the living room high and bright, Memorial de Isla Negra of Pablo Neruda. Joyful and foot, reads (to the pleasure of the visit an excerpt of the poem-The truth (Viewer) of that book, that begins “I love idealism and realism,/ as the water and stone/ are/ parts of the world,/ light and root of the tree of life”. “Are your memories in verse, very little known but very revealing, and where you check your stalinism, where he speaks not of the first of may, but on may 2,” says Edwards, though it is not known if apologizing for the Nobel Prize or informing.
Always Neruda, always with Pablo Neruda, both in his life as in his books, as in this interview, that he is not as much as Edwards speaks, and speaks in a monologue enthusiastic and prodigal of memories and anecdotes. As well, it evokes that Neruda studied at the school male-Temuco (“where it is always raining”) and that being a kid taught him a few verses to the director of the Lyceum and female neighbor, who was delighted by the precocity of the boy, so I lent him books to encourage the budding vocation. Years later, she and he would be a Nobel Prize. She was called and is called Gabriela Mistral. Closing the circle, these days, Jorge Edwards reads with renewed passion to the woman, the same man who in 1990 published the biography Goodbye poet: Pablo Neruda and his time.
At Edwards, everything is a loop, from her beloved Paris to Santiago de Chile with a stopover in Julio Ramón Ribeyro (“I remember working in France-Press in Paris while he was writing The guys Sunday”, and rises from the sofa and shows the book. “Now it is forgotten,” he says, turning off the voice). Near the book of Ribeyro, one fantastic storyteller who sometimes did not smoke, lie half a dozen bolaños Borges, Nietzsche, Céline in French, Pamuk, Emmanuel Carrère, Rulfo, cds Claudio Arrau, pictures of Carlos Faz and photos of his wife, Pilar Fernández de Castro, the granddaughter of Spanish.
do you Type a lot or are already sick?Now I’m with the third installment of the memories. You must have a hard head for writing, a lot of perseverance, you must write against the whole. The head has to be the bow of the writer… I have written about Idea Vilariño… There are regions of the poetics of the language, such as Montevideo, where was born Back Vilariño and also Isidore Ducasse, and Jules Laforgue. Or Temuco. The people believed that Neruda was one of the ignorant who only read poetry…
mr. Edwards, because it is all one lord, invites to coffee, although it does Ximena, his daughter, who was born in Paris. “He told Me one day that I didn’t want to be an intellectual, that I wanted to pursue something that is done with the hands. She studied at the Cordon Bleu, so I became a chef”. Next to the coffee at the high table of the hall, a book in evidence of self Edwards, O Malignant, which deals with the passionate relationship of Neruda with Jossie Bliss in Burma (“Oh Evil, you may have already found the letter, as you cried of rage,/ and you have insulted the memory of my mother/ calling her bitch rotten and the mother of dogs”) and his final days.
…I Write a lot, almost every day. Yesterday, five pages of memories. I like it more in the morning but yesterday I was in the afternoon until eight or 10. I write mentally, so that I always write, as Borges used to say of himself. Borges had the head of a ruminant. Cuba appears, in one way or another, always (or almost in their books. The revolution was a drama, the people who were…the three hours of arriving in Havana [in 1970 as a manager of business of the Chile of Salvador Allende] I saw that there was a lot of fear. Then there were concentration camps. The death of Fidel ended with the fear, with Raúl people could travel, and that a cuban could stay in a hotel.
Edwards ended up being expelled from the island and our man wrote it, Persona non grata, a book that was censored in several countries and by the fact that a large part of the left will be turned back.
George Edwards of the Edwards of all life, the Rothschild of Chile, a child of Jesuits, he studied Law, spent a year at the University of Princeton (there you saw stroll to Faulkner and listened to Fidel), he travelled to Paris in transatlantic and lived in France as a member of the diplomatic corps of your country. He has travelled extensively and continues to do so, drank and loved, came up with Vargas Llosa to some scenarios of Proust, read with admiration to Machado de Assis, Flaubert, and Onetti, met Oscar Niemeyer and was an intimate of Enrique Lihn.In May of ‘ 68 I was in Paris and in February of that year in Prague. All of this comes and speaks to Edwards ‘ Slaves of the slogan (Lumen), the second part of his memoirs which has just been published. And also that he was “bored with the fantasy excess of one Hundred years of solitude”.
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