While his ‘Bliss’ was turning into a taunting jealousy, Neruda receives a cable from Santiago informing him of his immediate transfer to Ceylon. When you die, she used to say to me, my fears will end.’ It was she, walking round and round my bed, for hours at a time, without quite making up her mind to kill me.
It was Josie, flimsily dressed in white, brandishing her long, sharp knife. Neruda who called Josie ‘a love terrorist’ and ‘a species of Burmese Panther’ would document in his memoir: (completed shortly before his death in 1973) ‘Sometimes a light would wake me, a ghost moving on the other side of the mosquito net. She was obsessively devoted to Neruda and possessed by an overwhelming jealousy. The activist-Consul arrives in Ceylon, barely 25 and empty-handed except for his memory of the disengaged relationship with his former Burmese lover, Josie Bliss. He was called ‘the poet of the people, the oppressed and the forgotten.’ His work, Twenty Love Poems and Song of Despair was among the bestselling books of poetry in the 20th century. By then Neruda, had already become an international literary celebrity.
Young Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda whose fame preceded him arrives in the British-occupied Ceylon as the Chilean Consul. The film is to be internationally premiered at the 34th edition of the Tokyo International Film Festival opening on October 30.
In an exclusive interview with the Sunday Island, film maker Asoka Handagama shares the story behind his latest film- Alborada (The Dawning of the Day) inspired by the celebrated poet Pablo Neruda’s stay here as the Chilean Consul.
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