🇨🇱Pablo
Neruda

He began writing poems at the age of ten and published his first book at nineteen. Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto — who adopted the pen name Pablo Neruda at fifteen to avoid his railway-worker father's disapproval of poetry — was born in Parral, in the Chilean heartland, on July 12, 1904, and grew up in the frontier town of Temuco in the rainy south. His mother died of tuberculosis within a month of his birth. His childhood was shaped by the forests and rains of Araucanía, the crash of the Pacific, and the vast solitudes of the Chilean landscape, all of which would saturate his verse with a quality of elemental longing that no other poet in the language has quite matched.

In 1924, the twenty-year-old Neruda published Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada — Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair — and changed the Spanish language. The book is direct in its desire and melancholic in its tenderness in a way that had never been done before in Latin American poetry: "I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees." It has never gone out of print. It has sold more than a million copies in over forty languages. It remains, a century after publication, one of the best-selling poetry collections in world history. No poet writing in Spanish before or since has achieved its combination of accessibility and depth.

Neruda served as Chilean consul in Burma, Ceylon, Java, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid through the late 1920s and 1930s, years during which he wrote the three volumes of Residencia en la tierra — Residence on Earth — a dark and disorienting surrealist masterwork in which the speaker dissolves into the material world around him, losing selfhood in a cascade of geological and organic imagery. It is the work for which many critics consider him the greatest surrealist poet in any language, more fully committed to the irrational flux of the unconscious than even the French surrealists who theorized it. The Spanish Civil War, in which Neruda watched friends — including the poet Federico García Lorca, murdered by Francoist forces — die for the Republican cause, transformed him politically. He became a committed communist and began writing public, collective, political verse.

Canto General, published in 1950, is his most ambitious work: a twelve-book epic poem of the American continent, from the pre-Columbian geological origins of the land through its flora and fauna, its indigenous civilizations, the Spanish conquest, the independence movements, and the struggles of the twentieth-century left. It is a work of staggering range and energy — part natural history, part political manifesto, part mythological creation narrative — and it stands as the single most important long poem written in Latin America. Neruda composed much of it while in hiding after the Chilean government of Gabriel González Videla outlawed the Communist Party and issued a warrant for his arrest. He spent two years clandestinely crossing the Andes on horseback, eventually reaching exile in Europe.

The Odes — Odas elementales and its sequels, written in the 1950s — reveal another dimension of Neruda's genius: a tender, democratic celebration of ordinary things. Odes to a tomato, to a pair of socks, to a dictionary, to salt. The form is spare and the lines are short, each object elevated to cosmic significance without irony. They are poems of joy, written by a man who had been through exile and political persecution and chose, in the end, to find the miraculous in the quotidian. They are among the most read poems in Spanish high schools throughout Latin America.

Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, with the Swedish Academy citing his poetry as giving voice to "a whole continent's destiny and dreams." He was, by that point, the most widely translated and read poet in the Spanish language, and one of the most beloved poets on earth. He died on September 23, 1973, twelve days after the military coup that killed his friend President Salvador Allende. The official cause of death was prostate cancer; subsequent investigations have suggested he may have been poisoned by agents of the Pinochet regime. His house in Santiago — La Chascona — was ransacked by soldiers on the night of his death. Thousands of Chileans lined the streets to escort his coffin in a spontaneous act of mourning and resistance that became one of the first public protests against the dictatorship. His three homes — La Chascona in Santiago, La Sebastiana in Valparaíso, and Isla Negra on the Pacific coast — are now among Chile's most visited cultural sites.