Neruda, Pablo (1904–1973)

Pablo Neruda, one of the greatest Latin American poets, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. During his life he was an active member of the Chilean Communist Party and suffered imprisonment, persecution, and exile. He died of cancer a few days after the Chilean military coup while soldiers searched his home and vilified his person and his writings.

Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basualto (his real name) was born in Parral on July 12, 1904. His father was a railway employee and his mother a teacher. After the death of his mother, the family moved to Temuco, where he met another great Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, who at that time was head of the girl's secondary school for girls. At the age of 13 he started contributing to a daily newspaper and to literary reviews. He took the pseudonym Neruda after the Czech poet Jan Neruda and wrote several poems that became in 1923 his collection Crepusculario (1923). A year later he published Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, one of his best-known works. Neruda's main poetic influence during his younger years came from the American poet Walt Whitman, and for years he kept a framed portrait of Whitman on his desk.

Neruda studied pedagogy and French at the Chilean University in Santiago, and between 1927 and 1935 he served appointments as honorary consul for Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. In 1930 he married a Dutch woman, Maria Antonieta Hagenaar, but they separated in 1936. It was an exciting but difficult time for him. His travels and his literary contacts inspired him, but personal tragedies, the death of a daughter in 1934 and the end of his marriage, tempered his excitement. In 1933, he wrote a challenging collection Residencia en la tierra that finally constituted a breakthrough in his literary career. His diplomatic existence came to an end with the start of the Spanish Civil War and the assassination of his friend, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. He joined the republican movement in Spain and France and worked on a new collection, España en el corazón (1937), work that had enormous international impact because it was published while the Spanish Civil War was taking place.

After a brief spell in Chile, Neruda returned to Europe and was appointed consul for the Spanish émigré community residing in Paris. In that capacity he facilitated the journey of the vessel Winnipeg, which, in a journey from France to the Chilean port of Valparaíso, carried 2,000 Spaniards who were escaping from the Spanish Civil War. It was in Paris that Neruda developed a professional outlook as an intellectual and a social activist. With Nancy Cunard he published the journal Los poetas del mundo defienden al pueblo español. Neruda cohabited with Delia del Carril, who encouraged him to get involved in politics. They married in 1946 but separated in 1955.

After the defeat of the Spanish republican movement, Neruda was appointed Chilean consul general in Mexico, where he wrote Canto general de Chile (1950), his epic narrative of the encounter between the Latin American indigenous populations and the conquistadors. Canto general was originally published in Mexico and underground copies were sent to Chile, where President Carlos Ibáñez del Campo had started a political persecution of the Chilean Communist Party, of which Neruda was a member. Neruda's Canto general was quickly translated into 10 languages and had an enormous influence on the growing social and political movements that wanted cultural and political change in Latin America. A massive corpus of poetry, 250 of them, organized in 15 literary units, it narrates the origin and the precolonial and colonial history of Latin America with a particular emphasis on the crushing of ancient civilizations and the impact of the people's struggle for social justice. It includes Neruda's poem “Alturas de Macchu Picchu,” which he wrote after visiting the Inca ruins in 1943. The Canto general could be considered the central work of Neruda's large opus and the most influential within his political activism and his cry for social justice.

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