Philippe Noiret credited as playing...
Pablo Neruda
- Pablo Neruda: When you explain poetry, it becomes banal. Better than any explanation is the experience of feelings that poetry can reveal to a nature open enough to understand it.
- Pablo Neruda: When I was a senator of the republic I went to visit the pampas, a region where it only rains once every fifty years, where life is unimaginably hard. I wanted to meet the people who had voted for me. One day at Lota there was a man who had come up from a coal mine. He was a mask of coal dust and sweat, his face contorted by terrible hardship, his eyes red from the dust. He stretched out his calloused hand and said: "Wherever you go, speak of this torment. Speak of your brother who lives underground in hell." I felt I had to write something to help man in his struggle, to write the poetry of the mistreated. That's how "Canto General" came about. Now my comrades tell me they have managed to get it published secretly in Chile and it's selling like hot cakes. That makes me very happy.