A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), 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. Neruda 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. While still very young, he moved with his father, a railroad worker, to the town of Temuco, where he also got to know Gabriela Mistral, head of the girls' secondary school, who took a liking to him. There Neruda attended a boys' school until 1920. He began to write poetry in his teens and studied to be a teacher. At the early age of thirteen he began to contribute some articles to the daily "La Mañana", among them, Entusiasmo y Perseverancia - his first publication - and his first poem. In 1920, he became a contributor to the literary journal "Selva Austral" under the pen name of Pablo Neruda, which he adopted in memory of the Czechoslovak poet Jan Neruda (1834-1891). His first book, Crepusculario (Twilight, 1923), was privately printed. In 1924 Neruda's Veinte 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. Between 1927 and 1935, the government put him in charge of a number of honorary consulships, which took him to Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. His poetic production during that difficult period included, among other works, the collection of esoteric surrealistic poems, Residencia en la tierra (1933), which marked his literary breakthrough. Neruda married in 1930 María Antonieta Hagenaar, a Dutch woman who couldn't speak Spanish; they separated in 1936. At that time Neruda lived in Paris, where he published with Nancy Cunard the journal Los Poetas del Mundo Defienden al Pueblo Español. Nancy Cunard was the sole inheritor of the famous Cunard shipping company, who later followed Neruda to Chile with a bullfighter. Her mother disinherited her when she escaped from the high society with an black musician. In the 1930s and 1940s Neruda lived with the Argentine painter Delia del Carril, who encouraged Neruda to participate in politics. Neruda and Delia del Carril married in 1943, but the marriage was not recognized in Chile; they separated in 1955. Neruda married in 1966 the Chilean singer Matilde Urrutia. She was the inspiration of much of Neruda's later poetry, among others One Hundred Love Sonnets (1960). 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). During that war, Neruda worked in Spain in support of the more liberal and left-wing Spanish Republicans. In 1937 he returned to Chile. 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. The work 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 this work Neruda examined Latin American history from a Marxist point of view, and showed his deep knowledge about the history, geography and politics of the continent. The central theme is the struggle for social justice. Canto General includes Neruda's famous poem 'Alturas de Macchu Picchu', which was born after he visited the Incan ruins of Macchu Picchu in 1943. In it Neruda aspires to become the voice of the dead people who once lived in the city. In 1943, Neruda returned to Chile, and as a political radical, Neruda became prominent in the Chilean Communist Party and served in the Chilean Senate from 1945 to 1948. 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. 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. The Soviet Union was for Neruda a country, where libraries, universities, and theatres were open for all. He refers to dogmatic views in the Soviet art, but optimistically beliefs that the views have been condemned. Neruda's colleagues also read him Boris Pasternak's poems but they don't forget to mention that Pasternak is considered politically reactionary. Neruda returned to Chile in 1952, and the following year he won the Lenin Peace Prize. 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. Among his works of the last few years can be mentioned 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 pájaros (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. 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, 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; Book of Questions), reflect philosophical and whimsical questions about the present and future of humanity. In 1970 he was the Communist Party's candidate for the presidency, and from 1970 to 1972 he was the Chilean ambassador to France. Neruda died of leukemia in Santiago on 23 September in 1973. His death was probably accelerated by the murder of Allende and tragedies caused by Pinochet coup. |
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