Neruda’s Maremoto: Hidden Biological Treasures in Art and Poetry

摘要

Maremoto is a playful collection of marine-themed poems and prints produced togetherby Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Swedish artist Karin Oldfelt Hjertonsson. Nerudaloved the sea, and was an informed natural historian and scholar who collected andstudied marine life and scientific literature. Oldfelt Hjertonsson’s fifteen woodcuts arebased on her close observation of coastal Chilean species, and the poems are similarlyaccurate in their biological detail. We adopt a modified geopoetics approach toanalysing the paired images and poems of Maremoto in the context of contemporaryscientific knowledge of these organisms and their ecosystem. This approach enhancesthe meaning of the work in four primary ways. First, identifying the focal organisms tospecies reinforces the literal meaning and the biogeographic patrimony of the work.Second, these identifications deepen our understanding of metaphors and narratives inthe individual poems. Third, they complexify meaning when the identificationshighlight contradictions between image and poem, or between poem and currentscientific knowledge. Finally, the identifications allow us to extend our view of thevolume as a whole: by lifting the poems and images from their separate pages andplacing them together into the web of ecological interactions we see that they are allconnected to each other – and to us. Our biogeopoetic approach thus reinforces thetheme of the overall volume, in which the persona is transformed through closeobservation of the central species from a distant witness to one who is united with theorganisms and who belongs to the sea.