by Karina Guzzi
Daily Lobo
A mix of art, music and bilingual poetry readings will celebrate the life of a Chilean poet.
This weekend the Outpost Performance Space will feature the reading of 25 poems written by Pablo Neruda. The poems will be read in Spanish and English and some will be accompanied by projections of their English translation. Illustrative artwork, such as Pablo Picasso's "Guernica," will also be projected onto a screen.
"It's going to be very high class," creator and director Crawford MacCallum said. "It's going to flow and be theatrical and dramatic. It's not just a poetry reading where you stand up, read a poem and sit down, next person stands up."
Some of the readings will also be accompanied by Spanish guitar music performed by Robert Tanner.
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"Poes°a de Pablo Neruda" will also include an exhibition of 27 lithograph panels.
The Tamarind Institute is lending the lithographs to hang in the Outpost, said Enid Howarth, who was described by Outpost owner Tom Guralnick as the performance's co-conspirator.
The lithographs were inspired by Neruda's poems and done by nine Latin American artists, she said.
The events in the 25 poems will span Neruda's life, MacCallum said. At age 18, Neruda published a book, Crepusculario, that is still on bookstore shelves.
"Then he was honored with a diplomatic post overseas where he was miserable and wrote really sad, surrealistic poems," he said.
Neruda worked in Spain when the war broke out and wrote anti-war poems, MacCallum said.
"Then he finally settled down with the love of his life and wrote beautiful romantic poems, and the later ones have to do with death and getting ready for that," he said. "We have the whole spectrum."
This is not MacCallum's first time presenting Neruda's poems.
"We did it in Santa Fe last July for the 100th anniversary of Neruda's birth, and we decided to do it again," he said.
Neruda has been MacCallum's favorite poet for 40 years, he said.
"People often say, 'Pablo Neruda. Oh, he's my favorite poet,'" he said. "He really is a world-loved poet."
MacCallum also said author Gabriel Garc°a M†rquez described Neruda as "the best poet of the 20th century in any language."
The proceedings from the performance will go to the Center for Peace and Justice, which Howarth said is appropriate because Neruda was an activist.
"It's not enough money for us to be doing it for money," MacCallum said. "We're doing it for love."
Neruda's activism is reflected in his poetry, MacCallum said.
"One of his poems is about the National Fruit Company and is about the colonial exploitation of the Central American countries, the banana republic countries," he said. "Another one is anti-Franco, from the civil war."
Neruda won a Nobel Prize in literature and the International Peace Prize.
Among the performers are actors, teachers and a lawyer who, Howarth said, are "all native speakers."
The event is produced and presented by Teatro Paraguas.
"Poes°a de
Pablo Neruda"
Outpost Performance Space
210 Yale
Boulevard SE
Saturday at 7 p.m.
Sunday at 2 p.m.
Tickets are $8 and $5
268-0044
