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Neruda Info & Links |
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"A poet nearer death than philosophy, nearer pain than intelligence, nearer blood than ink; a poet possessed by mystical voices which he fortunately cannot interpret, a real man who knows that the reed and the swallow are more immortal than the hard cheek of a statue." -- García Lorca (on Neruda)
Quick Neruda Facts:
Pablo Neruda started to write poetry when he was ten years old. At the age of 12 he met the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, who encouraged his literary efforts.
Neruda's second published work, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), written at age 20, has sold over a million copies since it first appeared
Neruda is the most translated poet in the world and is considered the most widely read of the Spanish American poets.
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), whose real name is Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, was born on 12 July, 1904, in the town of Parral in Chile. His father was a railway employee and his mother, who died shortly after his birth, a teacher. Some years later his father, who had then moved to the town of Temuco, remarried doña Trinidad Candia Malverde.
Neruda started to write poetry when he was ten years old. At the age of 12 he met the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, who was head of the girls' secondary school in Temuco. Mistral took a liking to Neruda and encouraged his literary efforts. Neruda's first published literary work, at the early age of thirteen, was to contribute some articles to the daily "La Mañana", among them, Entusiasmo y Perseverancia - his first publication - and his first poem. Perseverancia was followed by the poem, 'Mis ojos', which appeared in 1918 in Corre-Vuela. In 1920, he became a contributor to the literary journal "Selva Austral" under the pen name of Pablo Neruda, which he adopted to avoid conflict with his family, who disapproved his literary ambitions. He choose Neruda in memory of the Czechoslovak poet Jan Neruda (1834-1891). Some of the poems Neruda wrote at that time are to be found in his first published book: Crepusculario (1923).
From 1921 he studied French at the Instituto Pedagógico in Santiago. A year after Crepusculario, at age twenty, Neruda gained international fame with the publication of "Veinte Poemas de Amor y Una Cancion Desesperada" (1924), one of his best-known and the most translated work of poetry in the world. The success of "Veinte Poemas de Amor y Una Cancion Desesperada", made a celebrity of Neruda and allowed him to give up his studies at the age of twenty to devote himself to his craft.
At the age of only 23 Neruda was appointed by the Chilean government as consul to Burma (now Myanmar). Between 1927 and 1935, the honorary consulships took him from Burma to Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. While in Spain Neruda befriended many Spanish writers and poets, among them the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. During his consulship, Neruda continued to write for several literary and other magazines, among them La Nación, El Sol, and Revista de Occidente. He also started to edit in 1935 a literary magazine, Caballo Verde para la Poesía. His poetic production during this difficult period included, among other works, the collection of esoteric surrealistic poems, Residencia en la tierra (1933), which marked a literary breakthrough. Neruda's Residence on Earth (1933), was a visionary work, emerging from the birth of fascism.
The Spanish Civil War and the murder of García Lorca, whom Neruda knew, affected him strongly and made him join the Republican movement, first in Spain, and later in France, where he started working on his collection of poems España en el Corazón (1937). The same year he returned to his native country, to which he had been recalled, and his poetry during the following period was characterised by an orientation towards political and social matters. España en el Corazón had a great impact by virtue of its being printed in the middle of the front during the civil war.
In 1939, Neruda was appointed consul for the Spanish emigration, residing in Paris, and, shortly afterwards, Consul General in Mexico, where he rewrote his Canto General de Chile, transforming it into an epic poem about the whole South American continent, its nature, its people and its historical destiny. This work, entitled Canto General, was published the same year in Mexico, and also underground in Chile. It consists of approximately 250 poems brought together into fifteen literary cycles and constitutes the central part of Neruda's production. Shortly after its publication, Canto General was translated into some ten languages. Nearly all these poems were created in a difficult situation, when Neruda was living abroad.
In 1943, Neruda returned to Chile, and in 1945 he was elected senator of the Republic, also joining the Communist Party of Chile. Due to his protests against President González Videla's repressive policy against striking miners in 1947, he had to live underground in his own country for two years until he managed to leave in 1949. In 1952 the government withdrew the order to arrest leftist writers and political figures, and Neruda returned to Chile. A great deal of what he published during that period bears the stamp of his political activities; one example is Las Uvas y el Viento (1954), which can be regarded as the diary of Neruda's exile. In Odas elementales (1954- 1959) his message is expanded into a more extensive description of the world, where the objects of the hymns - things, events and relations - are duly presented in alphabetic form.
Upon Neruda return to Chile in 1952 Neruda married Matilde Urrutia, his third wife (his first two marriages, to Maria Antonieta Haagenar Vogelzang and Delia del Carril, both ended in divorce).
Neruda's production is exceptionally extensive. For example, his Obras Completas, constantly republished, comprised 459 pages in 1951; in 1962 the number of pages was 1,925, and in 1968 it amounted to 3,237, in two volumes. Later works of mentioned include Cien sonetos de amor (1959), which includes poems dedicated to his wife Matilde Urrutia, Memorial de Isla Negra, a poetic work of an autobiographic character in five volumes, published on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Arte de pajáros (1966), La Barcarola (1967), the play Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (1967), Las manos del día (1968), Fin del mundo (1969), Las piedras del cielo (1970), and La espada encendida.
During his lifetime, 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 thus 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 of leukemia in Santiago, Chile.
Nobel Prize Site
Biography and an English translation of his Nobel lecture.
Universidad de Chile
Detailed Neruda information at the University of Chile site (in Spanish)
Poets.Org
Neruda section on Poets.org (biography, bibliography, and links)
Pablo Neruda Documentary
information about a Neruda documentary, bilingual poems and links
Remembering Pablo Neruda
Detailed Neruda Site, in Spanish
Poetry Connection.net
Biography and selected works
Pablo Neruda
Biography and bibliography
The Passions of Pablo Neruda
Biography and selected works
Neruda Site
Detailed Neruda Site (in Italian) with poems in Italian, Spanish, and English
Poesia-inter.net
Selected works
Pablo Neruda
Selected works