Pablo Neruda

I

Introduction

Pablo Neruda, pseudonym of Neftali Ricardo Reyes y Basoalto (1904-1973), Chilean poet, whose verse helped shape 20th-century Latin American literary and political consciousness. He won the 1971 Nobel Prize for literature.

II

Life

Neruda was born in Parral, Chile. His mother died shortly after his birth. While still very young, he moved with his father, a railroad worker, to the town of Temuco. There Neruda attended a boys’ school until 1920. He began to write poetry in his teens and studied to be a teacher. His first book, Crepusculario (Twilight, 1923), was privately printed. In 1924 Neruda’s Viente poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 1969) became a best-seller, making him one of Latin America’s most famous young poets.

In recognition of his literary eminence, Neruda was appointed to the Chilean consular service, and from 1927 to 1944 he held posts in Asia, Latin America, and Spain. While in Argentina in the 1930s he met and befriended renowned Spanish writer Federico García Lorca. Lorca was killed by the conservative, right-wing Spanish Nationalists at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). During that war, Neruda worked in Spain in support of the more liberal and left-wing Spanish Republicans. In 1937 he returned to Chile. A political radical, Neruda became prominent in the Chilean Communist Party and served in the Chilean Senate from 1945 to 1948.

After the Communist Party was outlawed in Chile in 1948, Neruda and many others had to choose between arrest or exile. Neruda chose exile. From 1948 until Chile lifted its ban on Communism in 1952, he wrote and traveled in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Europe, and Mexico. Neruda returned to Chile in 1952, and the following year he won the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1970 he was the Communist Party’s candidate for the presidency, and from 1970 to 1972 he was the Chilean ambassador to France. In 1971, just two years before he died of cancer, Neruda won the Nobel Prize in literature.

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III

Work

The style of Neruda’s early work was characteristic of the symbolist movement, whose writers expressed their ideas, feelings, and values by means of symbols or suggestions rather than by direct statements. He then moved closer to surrealism, which emphasized the unconscious in the creation of literature. Surrealists allowed their minds to flow freely and then wrote down their thoughts without alteration. But Neruda finally became a realist, forsaking the formal framework of traditional poetry for simpler, more down-to-earth expression that was more easily understood.

The subject matter of Neruda's immense body of work ran through several phases, from early erotic poetry basically devoted to his own private passions, to later poetry that expressed his political viewpoints. But the phases are not entirely successive; sometimes they coexist in the same period, or even in a single book.

While in exile from 1948 to 1952, Neruda wrote and published the Canto General (1950; Canto General, 1991), an epic poem portraying Spanish America and its history from a Marxist viewpoint. The poem explores the struggles the South American people face in their fight for freedom from poverty and oppression. The work also describes the continent’s geography, plants and animals, and ancient Inca and Aztec peoples. Two well-known Mexican painters, Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros, illustrated the original version of the book.

Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1958; The Heights of Macchu Picchu, 1966), which was originally published as the second section of Canto General, summarizes the gradual transition of Neruda’s poetry from private matters to more public ones. Inspired by a trip to the ancient ruined stronghold of Machu Picchu in Peru, the poem begins with a surrealistic description of the narrator’s separation from the world around him: “From air to air, like an empty net, dredging through streets and ambient atmosphere, I came....” Once he reaches the end of his lonely pilgrimage, he climbs to Machu Picchu, and after describing the city of stones and the plight of its long-dead, humble builders, the narrator promises to give them the voice they never had when alive. In this process, Neruda moves from the examination of his private life to an acceptance of his role as a public voice for those who cannot speak for themselves.

Neruda’s numerous other well-known works include the three-volume Residencia en la tierra (1933, 1935, 1937; Residence on Earth and Other Poems, 1946), whose poems feature tragic, despairing images of the havoc wreaked on earth by civilization; Odas elementales (1954; The Elementary Odes, 1961), whose poems describe and pay tribute to everyday things; and Cien sonetos de amor (1959), a volume of love poetry. Neruda also wrote an autobiography in poems, Memorial de Isla Negra (1964; Isla Negra, 1981). Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda (1961) contains a representative collection of his poems in the original Spanish, with English translations.

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