Pablo neruda

(1904-1973)

Biography

Pablo Neruda, original name Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, (born July 12, 1904, Parral, Chile—
died September 23, 1973, Santiago), Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He was perhaps the most important Latin American poet of the
20th century.
Early life and love poetry

Neruda was the son of José del Carmen Reyes, a railway worker, and Rosa Basoalto. His mother
died within a month of Neruda’s birth, and two years later the family moved to Temuco, a small
town farther south in Chile, where his father remarried. Neruda was a precocious boy who began
to write poetry at age 10. His father tried to discourage him from writing and never cared for his
poems, which was probably why the young poet began to publish under the pseudonym Pablo
Neruda, which he was legally to adopt in 1946. He entered the Temuco Boys’ School in 1910 and
finished his secondary schooling there in 1920. Tall, shy, and lonely, Neruda read voraciously and
was encouraged by the principal of the Temuco Girls’ School, Gabriela Mistral, a gifted poet who
would herself later become a Nobel laureate.

Neruda first published his poems in the local newspapers and later in magazines published in the
Chilean capital, Santiago. In 1921 he moved to Santiago to continue his studies and become a
French teacher. There he experienced loneliness and hunger and took up a bohemian lifestyle. His
first book of poems, Crepusculario, was published in 1923. The poems, subtle and elegant, were in
the tradition of Symbolist poetry, or rather its Hispanic version, Modernismo. His second book,
Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924; Twenty Love Poems and a Song of
Despair), was inspired by an unhappy love affair. It became an instant success and is still one of
Neruda’s most popular books. The verse in Twenty Love Poems is vigorous, poignant, and direct,
yet subtle and very original in its imagery and metaphors. The poems express young, passionate,
unhappy love perhaps better than any book of poetry in the long Romantic tradition.

Communism and poetry

In 1934 Neruda took up an appointment as consul in Barcelona, Spain, and soon he was
transferred to the consulate in Madrid. His success there was instantaneous after García Lorca
introduced him. Neruda’s new friends, especially Rafael Alberti and Miguel Hernández, were
involved in radical politics and the Communist Party. Neruda shared their political beliefs and
moved ever closer to communism. In the meantime, his marriage was foundering. He and his wife
separated in 1936, and Neruda met a young Argentine woman, Delia del Carril, who would be his
second wife until their divorce in the early 1950s.

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A second, enlarged edition of the Residencia poems entitled Residencia en la tierra, 1925–35 was
published in two volumes in 1935. In this edition, Neruda begins to move away from the highly
personal, often hermetic poetry of the first Residencia volume, adopting a more extroverted outlook
and a clearer, more accessible style in order to better communicate his new social concerns to the
reader. This line of poetic development was interrupted suddenly by the outbreak of the Spanish
Civil War in 1936, however. While García Lorca was executed by the Nationalists and Alberti and
Hernández fought at the front, Neruda traveled in and out of Spain to gather money and mobilize
support for the Republicans. He wrote España en el corazón (1937; Spain in My Heart) to express
his feelings of solidarity with them. The book was printed by Republican troops working with
improvised presses near the front lines.

Later years of Pablo Neruda

In 1952 the political situation in Chile once again became favourable, and Neruda was able to
return home. By that time his works had been translated into many languages. Rich and famous,
he built a house on Isla Negra, facing the Pacific Ocean, and also maintained houses in Santiago
and Valparaíso. While traveling in Europe, Cuba, and China, Neruda embarked upon a period of
incessant writing and feverish creation. One of his major works, Odas elementales (Elemental
Odes), was published in 1954. Its verse was written in a new poetic style—simple, direct, precise,
and humorous—and it contained descriptions of everyday objects, situations, and beings (e.g.,
“Ode to the Onion” and “Ode to the Cat”). Many of the poems in Odas elementales have been
widely anthologized. Neruda’s poetic output during these years was stimulated by his international
fame and personal happiness; 20 books of his appeared between 1958 and his death in 1973, and
8 more were published posthumously. In his memoirs, Confieso que he vivido (1974; Memoirs),
Neruda summed up his life through reminiscences, comments, and anecdotes.

In 1969 Neruda campaigned for the leftist candidate Salvador Allende, who appointed him
ambassador to France after being elected president of Chile. While already ill with cancer in
France, Neruda in 1971 learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. After
traveling to Stockholm to receive his prize, he returned to Chile bedridden and terminally ill and
survived by only a few days his friend Allende, who died in a right-wing military coup.

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Legacy

Neruda’s body of poetry is so rich and varied that it defies classification or easy summary. It
developed along four main directions, however. His love poetry, such as the youthful Twenty Love
Poems and the mature Los versos del Capitán (1952; The Captain’s Verses), is tender,
melancholy, sensuous, and passionate. In “material” poetry, such as Residencia en la tierra,
loneliness and depression immerse the author in a subterranean world of dark, demonic forces.
His epic poetry is best represented by Canto general, which is a Whitmanesque attempt at
reinterpreting the past and present of Latin America and the struggle of its oppressed and
downtrodden masses toward freedom. And finally there is Neruda’s poetry of common, everyday
objects, animals, and plants, as in Odas elementales.

These four trends correspond to four aspects of Neruda’s personality: his passionate love life; the
nightmares and depression he experienced while serving as a consul in Asia; his commitment to a
political cause; and his ever-present attention to details of daily life, his love of things made or
grown by human hands. Many of his other books, such as Libro de las preguntas (1974; The Book
of Questions), reflect philosophical and whimsical questions about the present and future of
humanity. Neruda was one of the most original and prolific poets to write in Spanish in the 20 th
century, but despite the variety of his output as a whole, each of his books has unity of style and
purpose.

Neruda’s work is collected in Obras completas (1973; 4th ed. Expanded, 3 vol.). Most of his work is
available in various English translations. Four essential works are Twenty Love Poems and a Song
of Despair, translated by W.S. Merwin (1969, reissued 1993); Residence on Earth, and Other
Poems, translated by Angel Flores (1946, reprinted 1976); Canto general, translated by Jack
Schmitt (1991); and Elementary Odes of Pablo Neruda, translated by Carlos Lozano (1961). All the
Odes (2013) collected Neruda’s odes both in the original Spanish and in English translation. Then
Come Back: The Lost Neruda (2016) is a collection (in Spanish and English) of 21 previously
unpublished poems discovered in his archives.