Author Archives: Jotsna Jari

    “I want to do with you what the spring does with the cherry trees.” – Pablo Neruda

❤️   PABLO NERUDA   🔼

(12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973)

Born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in the town of Parral in southern Chile on July 12, 1904, Pablo Neruda led a life charged with poetic and political activity. In 1923, he sold all of his possessions to finance the publication of his first book, Crepusculario (“Twilight”). He published the volume under the pseudonym “Pablo Neruda” to avoid conflict with his family, who disapproved of his occupation. The following year, he found a publisher for Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (“Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”). The book made a celebrity of Neruda, who gave up his studies at the age of twenty to devote himself to his craft.

 In 1927, Neruda began his long career as a diplomat in the Latin American tradition of honoring poets with diplomatic assignments. After serving as honorary consul in Burma, Neruda was named Chilean consul in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1933. While there, he began a friendship with the visiting Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. After transferring to Madrid later that year, Neruda also met Spanish writer Manuel Altolaguirre. Together, the two men founded a literary review called Caballo verde para la poesîa in 1935. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 interrupted Neruda’s poetic and political development. He chronicled the horrendous years which included the execution of García Lorca in Espana en el corazon (1937), published from the war front. Neruda’s outspoken sympathy for the loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War led to his recall from Madrid in 1937. He then moved to Paris and helped settle Spanish republican refugees in Chile.

 Neruda returned to Chile in 1938 where he renewed his political activity and wrote prolifically. Named Chilean Consul to Mexico in 1939, Neruda left Chile again for four years. Upon returning to Chile in 1943, he was elected to the Senate and joined the Communist Party. When the Chilean government moved to the right, they declared communism illegal and expelled Neruda from the Senate. He went into hiding. During those years he wrote and published Canto general (1950).

 In 1952 the government withdrew the order to arrest leftist writers and political figures, and Neruda returned to Chile and married Matilde Urrutia, his third wife (his first two marriages, to Maria Antonieta Haagenar Vogelzang and Delia del Carril, both ended in divorce). For the next twenty-one years, he continued a career that integrated private and public concerns and became known as the people’s poet. During this time, Neruda received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Lenin Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

 Diagnosed with cancer while serving a two-year term as ambassador to France, Neruda resigned his position, ending his diplomatic career. On September 23, 1973, just twelve days after the defeat of Chile’s democratic regime, the man widely regarded as the greatest Latin American poet since Darío died in Santiago, Chile.

🌹from “Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon”

Full woman, fleshly apple, hot moon,
thick smell of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what obscure brilliance opens between your columns?
What ancient night does a man touch with his senses?

Loving is a journey with water and with stars,
with smothered air and abrupt storms of flour:
loving is a clash of lightning-bolts
and two bodies defeated by a single drop of honey.

(From “Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon”,
Selected Poems translated by Stephen Mitchell,1997)

💚 writer : jotsna jari

writer : jotsna jari

🌹 Seneca Falls Convention  🔼

The Seneca Falls Convention was the first women’s rights convention. It advertised itself as “a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman”. Held in the Wesleyan Chapel of the town of Seneca Falls, New York, it spanned two days over July 19–20, 1848. Attracting widespread attention, it was soon followed by other women’s rights conventions, 

In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott organized the first convention regarding women’s rights in the United States. Called the Seneca Falls Convention, the event in Seneca Falls, New York, drew over 300 people, mostly women. They wanted to be treated as individuals, not dependents of men. They wanted more employment and education opportunities. They wanted the option to run for office, speak in front of Congress, and vote.

Organizers of the Seneca Falls Convention published this announcement of the two-day event in the Seneca County Courier on July 14, 1848.
IMAGE BY UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE / UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES

On the second day, the attendees signed the Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances. Stanton modeled the document after the Declaration of Independence, which mentions only men. She wrote that men and women should be created equal and have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A hundred people signed the declaration, which included 12 resolutions that supported women’s rights. These resolutions, including the right to vote, would be the guiding principles for the women’s suffrage movement.

The Seneca Falls Convention was attended mostly by white women, even though northern states like New York had outlawed enslavement. But in 1851, Black women, such as Sojourner Truth, a former enslaved person who became a women’s and civil rights advocate, attended the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.

Sojourner Truth
PHOTOGRAPH BY MPI / GETTY IMAGES

When white men tried to take over the meeting, Truth got angry. She stood up and made up a speech on the spot. Called “Ain’t I A Woman,” her speech argued that because she did the same things as men when she was enslaved, she should also have the same rights as men. It was one of the first speeches to address both gender and racial discrimination and is remembered as one of the greatest speeches of the women’s rights era.

This mahogany tea table was used on July 16, 1848, to compose much of the first draft of the Declaration of Sentiments.

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