This morning I was listening to the radio in the kitchen, which is part of my usual routine, when I heard the deep sonorous voice of Pablo Neruda, his slow oceanic rhythms breathing phrases in and out, instantly recognizable. I was stunned. They're playing tapes of Neruda on the radio. Is Chile a great country, or what?But wait, listen to the words more carefully, the poem is talking about taking digital photographs, and now the spell is broken and I realize that this is all a hoax, and that it was a Neruda impersonator and this is a commercial! They have hijacked the voice and spirit of Don Pablo for the dirty business of selling! What an outrage. What kind of country is this?
But wait, think again. Try to imagine which poet's voice would be instantly recognizable in the USA, so that such a trick could even be attempted. Alan Ginsberg? Billy Collins? Robert Frost? Here in Chile, it seems to me that everyone would immediately know that the voice in the commercial was supposed to be Neruda, and the conceit, wink, wink, knudge, knudge, of using the voice of a communist poet to sell stuff would have a certain cheeky resonance. In the USA, there is no such single shared literary awareness on which to base the joke.
What a great country is Chile!
You can listen to the commercial here:
Better yet, you can listen to the real Neruda reading Love Poem #20, recorded in Washington, DC in 1966, Note the obvious similarity of the lines in the commercial to the initial lines of this poem.
