“Then I wanted to smoke”. Opium in César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda: Asian Roads of Experimentation
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Abstract
César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda smoked opium when they are writing Trilce (1922) and Residence on Earth (1935), respectively. There is no mention of the drug in their poetry collections, but both wrote literary texts telling their narcotic experience: a short-story in Vallejo; confessions and memoirs, in Neruda. The two poets also described the opium as a door to Asia, its customs and people. Through an analysis of Vallejo´s short story, “Cera”, included in Escalas Melografiadas (1923) and Neruda´s poem “El opio en el Este”, included in Memorial de Isla negra (1964), this paper investigates, on the one hand, the aesthetic´s concepts revealed thru the relationships between opium and the writing of these poets, and on the other hand, the connections thru opium with the Asia ad way to define the political views of the poets.
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