Yesterday morning I came across a lovely travel piece on the BBC website – Dave Seminara’s exploration of Chile through Pablo Neruda’s eyes. I visited Chile a couple of years ago and really liked the country – so I tweeted the story. In response, my friend Professor Kanishka Jayasuriya at the University of Adelaide sent me a link to a 50-page MA dissertation written at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. This is it: “Neruda in Asia/Asia in Neruda: Enduring Traces of South Asia in the Journey through Residencia en la tierra“ by Roanne Leah Sharp.

I’ve long known of Neruda in Burma, but never much about this episode in his life. Here, then, was a chance to fill the gap. It’s a very interesting dissertation, arguing that the period was critical to Neruda’s development both as the poet who in 1971 would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and as the committed social activist who would experience the Spanish Civil War, become a lifelong Communist, and in the mid-1940s serve a term as a Chilean senator. It is by no means uncritical, painting Neruda’s work as Orientalist, and Neruda himself as racist and complicit in imperialism.

Burma was Neruda’s initial experience of Asia – in 1927. On the way he stopped in Singapore, but it was in Rangoon that he first alighted for several months, working as an honorary Chilean consular official to make money. His impressions were largely unfavourable. In an early letter to a friend, he wrote that “everything is charming the first week. But then the weeks pass, time goes by”. Sharp’s contention is that heat, fever and the monotony of Rangoon life all contributed to a general disenchantment, persuading Neruda soon to move to other parts of the region before leaving Asia altogether in 1932.

There are other accounts of Neruda in Burma, including his own poetic statement in Isla Negra: A Notebook. Among these, Sharp’s is well worth reading.