Biography
Born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in southern Chile on July 12, 1904, Pablo Neruda
led a life charged with poetic and political activity. In 1923 he sold all of his possessions
to finance the publication of his first book, Crepusculario ("Twilight"). He published
the volume under the pseudonym "Pablo Neruda" to avoid conflict with his family, who
disapproved of his occupation. The following year, he found a publisher
for Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada ("Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair").
The book made a celebrity of Neruda, who gave up his studies at the age of twenty to devote
himself to his craft.In 1927, Neruda began his long career as a diplomat in the Latin American
tradition of honoring poets with diplomatic assignments. After serving as honorary consul
in Burma, Neruda was named Chilean consul in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1933. While there,
he began a friendship with the visiting Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. After transferring
to Madrid later that year, Neruda also met Spanish writer Manuel Altolaguirre. Together the two
men founded a literary review called Caballo verde para la poesîa in 1935. The outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War in 1936 interrupted Neruda's poetic and political development. He chronicled
the horrendous years which included the execution of
García Lorca in Espana en el corazon (1937), published from the war front.
Neruda's outspoken sympathy for the loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War led to his
recall from Madrid in 1937. He then returned to Europe to help settle republican refugees
in the United States. Neruda returned to Chile in 1938 where he renewed his political activity
and wrote prolifically. Named Chilean Consul to Mexico in 1939, Neruda left Chile again for
four years. Upon returning to Chile in 1943, he was elected to the Senate and joined the
Communist Party. When the Chilean government moved to the right, they declared communism
illegal and expelled Neruda from the Senate. He went into hiding. During those years he wrote and
published Canto general (1950). In 1952 the government withdrew the order to arrest leftist
writers and political figures, and Neruda returned to Chile and married Matilde Urrutia,
his third wife (his first two marriages, to Maria Antonieta Haagenar Vogelzang and
Delia del Carril, both ended in divorce). For the next twenty-one years, he continued a career
that integrated private and public concerns and became known as the people's poet.
During this time, 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.
Recommended Reading
Selected Poems
Publisher : Penguin
The Esential Neruda
Publisher : City Lights Books
Memoirs
Publisher : Condor Books
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'Tonight I can write the saddest lines'
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write for example: 'The night is fractured
and they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like these I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could I not have loved her huge, still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think I do not have her, to feel I have lost her.
Hear the vast night, still vaster without her.
Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grass.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is fractured and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
As though to reach her, my sight looks for her.
My heart looks for her and she is not with me.
The same night whitens, in the same branches.
We, of that time, we are not the same.
I don't love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the breeze to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I don't love her, that's certain, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so brief: forgetting lasts so long.
Because through nights like this when I held her in my arms,
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer,
and these are the last lines I will write for her.
Poor Creatures!
What it takes on this planet
to love each other in peace:
all the world examines the sheets,
all of them trouble your love.
And they say terrible things
about a man and a woman
who, after lots of vacillations,
and lots of deliberations,
do something incomparable,
fall together into one bed.
I ask myself if the frogs
stake out, sneeze at, themselves,
whether they whisper in ponds
against the outlaw frogs
against the joy of spawn.
I ask myself if the birds
make bird enemies
and if the bull listens to oxen
before he pays court to the cows.
Now the streets have eyes,
the parks have police,
the hotels have their spys,
the windows note down names,
troops and guns are sent out
resolute against love,
working incessantly
the throats and the ears,
and a guy and his girl
are forced to burst into flower
while fleeing on a bike.
Your hands
When your hands leap
towards mine, love,
what do they bring me in flight?
Why did they stop
at my lips, so suddenly,
why do I know them,
as if once before,
I have touched them,
as if, before being,
they travelled
my forehead, my waist?
Their smoothness came
winging through time,
over the sea and the smoke,
over the Spring,
and when you laid
your hands on my chest
I knew those wings
of the gold doves,
I knew that clay,
and that colour of grain.
The years of my life
have been roadways of searching,
a climbing of stairs,
a crossing of reefs.
Trains hurled me onwards
waters recalled me,
on the surface of grapes
it seemed that I touched you.
Wood, of a sudden,
made contact with you,
the almond-tree summoned
your hidden smoothness,
until both your hands
closed on my chest,
like a pair of wings
ending their flight.
The Portrait in the Rock
Oh yes I knew him, I spent years with him,
with his golden and stony substance,
he was a man who was tired -
in Paraguay he left his father and mother,
his sons, his nephews,
his latest in-laws,
his house, his chickens,
and some half-opened books.
They called him to the door.
When he opened it, the police took him,
and they beat him up so much
that he spat blood in France, in Denmark,
in Spain, in Italy, moving about,
and so he died and I stopped seeing his face,
stopped hearing his profound silence ;
then once, on a night of storms,
with snow spreading
a smooth cloak on the mountains,
on horseback, there, far off,
I looked and there was my friend -
his face was formed in stone,
his profile defied the wild weather,
in his nose the wind was muffling
the moaning of the persecuted.
There the exile came to ground.
Changed into stone, he lives in his own country.
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