September 23, 2004 OTTAWA – His Excellency John Ralston Saul was awarded the Pablo Neruda International Presidential Medal of Honour in a ceremony that was held earlier today in the presence of His Excellency José Miguel Cruz Sánchez, Ambassador of the Republic of Chile to Canada. Mr. Ralston Saul is the only Canadian to have received this prestigious honour. The Pablo Neruda International Presidential Medal of Honour was created by the government of Chile to celebrate the centennial of Neruda's birth. President Ricardo Lagos, together with the Advisory Committee, selected the 100 recipients based on nominations from Chile's diplomatic missions around the world. The Pablo Neruda International Presidential Medal of Honour was awarded on this one occasion only. Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), Chilean writer, diplomat and politician, is considered one of the most important poets of the 20th century. Often referred to as the "poet of enslaved humanity", Neruda was born in Parral, Chile, the son of a railroad worker. Shortly after leaving college, Neruda joined the Chilean foreign service to begin a distinguished career as consul and ambassador at a variety of posts around the world and as a politician committed to social reform. His vast literary output won many prizes and honours, including the 1953 Lenin Peace Prize and the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Other worldwide recipients include Nobel Prize in Literature laureates Nadine Gordimer (South Africa) 1991, Wilawa Szymborska (Poland) 1996, and José Saramago (Portugal) 1998, as well as other intellectuals writers and artists, such as Arthur Miller, Carlos Fuentes, Oscar Niemayer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mikis Teodorakis, Paul Hewson (Bono), Ernesto Sábato, Belisario Betancourt, Jack Lang, Ernesto Cardenal, Augusto Roa Bastos, Julie Christie and Mario Benedetti. John Ralston Saul's acceptance remarks are attached. -30- Media information France Langlois Rideau Hall Press Office (613) 993-8157 www.gg.ca Carlos Cuadrado Prats, Counsellor Embassy of Chile (613) 235-4402 www.chile.ca His Excellency John Ralston Saul's remarks on the acceptance of the Pablo Neruda International Presidential Medal of Honour Ottawa, Thursday, September 23, 2004 A truly great poet like Pablo Neruda exists in two times all the time. He exists in the time he lived and is very much a man in a poem of his time. Neruda said at the Nobel banquet "I am a representative of these times and of the present struggles which fill my poetry." The full man is there from the beginning of his writings to the tragic end. In the 1920's his love of poetry is as much about a woman as it is about his perception of the human condition. "To feel you in my veins like God in the rivers and adore you in the sorrowful bones of dust and lime, to watch you passing painlessly by to emerge in the stanza – cleansed of all evil." The man of his time will be revered and reviled. He will struggle with his genius but also his merely human skills to make sense of what is happening around him near and far. If, as with Neruda, he throws himself into the meaning of his society, then he will have to struggle with the full struggles of the society and all of its lack of clarity. But that great poet is also, and perhaps above all, outside of his time and outside of his place. We all know that the 20th Century has been filled with an endless argument about the difference between a particular writer belonging to the place he comes from and writers belonging to the universe and to all time. Neruda is one of those perfect reminders that a great writer is all of those things. They rise out of their place and mark the place they come from and become the mirror, the echo, the informing sounds of millions of people out of whose civilization they have risen. Even those many who may never read poetry once they have left school will feel the reverberations of great poetry through the people around them. There is no lack of clichés about the power of poetry in the real world. What I can only add to that is the simple observation that people who struggle for power come and go. Most of them are forgotten even before they die. Their struggles which seemed so important to their vanity or to their ideologies seem to melt away into the allness of human existence. But the words of great writers somehow persist. Even when words are lost, as those of the Greeks were largely lost, or lost because they are banned or their authors are exiled or murdered, these words somehow find their way back into our consciousness and go on changing us and forming us for as long as we can make any sense at all out of their language. And so there is a direct link between the unknown writers of Gilgamesh 5,000 years ago and Neruda. The central subjects of mortality and love and friendship and ethics and honor and belonging are all still there and we are still struggling with them, waiting for another poet of the strength of a Neruda to come forward to add some new language to what we already know but can never truly come to terms with. In the meantime, I accept this medal the way any writer might, sitting in the shadow of Neruda. Each time I reread him, I rediscover his remarkable ability to set the stage of the writer's reality. About another he said: "Conocí de su boca la historia natural de los enigmas" "I learned from his mouth the natural history of enigmas" Think of the enigma that this celebration of his 100th birthday represents. Think of it this way: one hundred of us around the world shouting out his words: "Give me back the key of the door that was shut." "A mi pecho devuélvele la llave de la puerta cerrada." What is the key? Neruda closed his Nobel acceptance lecture this way: "I wish to say to all people of good will...: only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind. In this way the song will not have been sung in vain." "Así la poesía no habrá cantado en vano." The key of the writer is that burning patience. What is the concrete form of burning patience? It is language, written and used. Language as the weapon of light, justice and dignity. I accept this medal as an evocation of Pablo Neruda's burning patience. It will sit before me where I write as a reminder of the great man and the great man's example.
