This chapter illustrates the major claims of the countershelf through its most frequent occupant, Pablo Neruda. Yet his appearance is different than later Latin American authors, who act primarily as stylistic models. Instead, it is Neruda himself who lives on, reincarnated as a “transmigrant,” who acts as a site of internal contestation between projects that are stylistically, even generically, quite distinct. After Neruda’s Nobel Prize and untimely death in the early 1970s, the painter Vivan Sundaram, poets including Agha Shahid Ali, Marie Cruz Gabriel, and Sirsir Kumar Das, and prose writers like Mohsin Hamid and Ravish Kumar all reincarnate Neruda’s persona as a way of thinking about the contest between aesthetic and political commitment through which their own creative endeavors might become global. Their perception of Neruda’s conflictual commitments emerges out of the real arc of his poetic career. These prompt a reconsideration of one of the most discordant – and yet essential – moments of Neruda’s oeuvre: his reincarnation-themed poetry of the first volume of Residencia en la tierra – written while Neruda worked as a consular functionary in British India from 1927 to 1929.

This chapter assesses Wallace Stevens’s relationship and relevance to world literature under Pascale Casanova’s rubric of the “two orders,” political and aesthetic, that constitute the “world literary space.” Jenkins’s chapter argues that Stevens’s involvement in the global cultural marketplace and his defense of poetic autonomy, his projection of his poetry as a world in itself, are not incompatible but mutually constitutive of his complex relationship to world literature. The chapter explores Stevens’s orientalism and his reception, in translation, in contemporary Chinese poetry and in the Anglophone world poetries of Kashmiri American and Iranian American poets Agha Shahid Ali and Roger Sedarat. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Stevens’s significance, in translation, for contemporary Italian poets like Valerio Magrelli, and of his mixed reception in postwar British and Irish poetry.