Clash of literary titans.

• Author: Contreras, Jaime Perales
• Position: Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda

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"It can take me months to write a poem! I correct it endlessly," Octavio Paz once confessed to Argentine photographer Sara Facio, when she was taking his portrait for a book about writers. That was in 1970, and he was marveling to Facio about the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, during a conversation at Cambridge University in England. Paz found it incredible that Neruda had written a poem dedicated to the Chilean singer-songwriter Violeta Parra during the short trip from Isla Negra to Valparaiso. And Neruda's work would go straight to the printer without major corrections.

Pablo Neruda was ten years older than Octavio Paz and one of his intellectual mentors. Neruda had invited the Mexican poet and essayist to participate in the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers in Madrid in 1937; the first such event was in Paris in 1935. Neruda saw a great future for Paz, as he indicated in the only paragraph about him in his Memoirs (Confieso que he vivido): "Along with the Norwegians, the Italians, the Argentines, the poet Octavio Paz arrived from Mexico, after a thousand adventures and misadventures. I was proud of having brought him. He had published just one book [Raiz del hombre], which I had received two months before and which seemed to contain genuine promise. No one knew him yet."

Paz and Neruda, who had met in Paris in the 1930s, nearly came to blows in 1942, when Neruda was a consul in Mexico. The story of that encounter appeared 40 years after the fact, in an essay on modern poetry ("Laurel en la poesfa moderna") that Paz wrote for Vuelta magazine in 1982. What set off the cultural sparring between Neruda and Paz was Laurel, an anthology of modern Spanish-language poetry published in 1940 by the Mexican publisher Seneca. The Spanish writer Jose Bergamin, who was an editor at Seneca, had assigned the task of compiling the anthology to two Mexican poets, Xavier Villaurrutia and Octavio Paz, and two Spanish poets, Emilio Prados and Juan .Gil Albert. Neruda was invited to contribute but refused, due to differences between him and Bergamin. Paz never knew what was behind Nernda's refusal, although it is believed the problem had to do primarily with Bergamin's exclusion of the Spanish poet Miguel Hernindez from the anthology. In fact, there's a coded allusion to the Laurel anthology in Nernda's Canto General, in the poem "To Miguel Hernindez, Murdered in the Prisons of Spain." Nernda writes:

Let the wretches who today include your name in their books--the Damasos, the Gerardos, the sons of bitches, silent accomplices of the executioner-know that your martyrdom won't be expunged, that your death will fall on their entire moon of cowards. And to those who denied you in their rotten...