Epigraph
If you ask me what my poetry is, I’d have to say: I don’t know. But if you ask my poetry, she’ll tell you who I am.
—PABLO NERUDA, 1943
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Introduction
1: To Temuco
2: Where the Rain Was Born
3: Awkward Adolescence
4: The Young Poet
5: Bohemian Twilights
6: Desperate Songs
7: Dead Gallop
8: Afar
9: Opium and Marriage
10: An Interlude
11: Spain in the Heart
12: Birth and Destruction
13: I Picked a Road
14: América
15: Senator Neruda
16: The Flight
17: Exile and Matilde
18: Matilde and Stalin
19: Fully Empowered
20: Triumph, Destruction, Death
21: The Flowers That Sleep
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Appendix I: Selected Poems in Their Full Length
Appendix II: On the Importance of Poetry in Chile
Basic Chronology
Books by Pablo Neruda and Their Selected In-Print English Translations
Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources
Notes
Index
Photos Section
Credits
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
The word
was born in the blood,
grew in the dark body, beating,
and flew through the lips and the mouth.
—“The Word”
At the break of dawn on September 11, 1973, generals of the Chilean armed forces launched a coup d’état against the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende, a Marxist-Socialist. The air force bombed the presidential palace; soldiers swarmed the grounds. Allende shot himself rather than face capture.
Twelve days later, Pablo Neruda, central figure of the Chilean Left and beloved poet, died in a Santiago hospital. He had been gravely ill with metastatic prostate cancer. Many say he died of a broken heart as well, as terror swept across his beloved country, as his friends were tortured, as all the social progress they had struggled for was quickly destroyed. While he lay in the hospital, the military ransacked his home.
Neruda’s funeral became the first public act of resistance against the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. As thousands of Chileans were being arrested by the regime and many more were beaten or “disappeared,” Neruda’s friends and fans, his people—those who had not already been forced into hiding—marched through the streets of Santiago with his coffin, crying out his name. Throughout his life, Neruda had fought for peace and justice for his people both on the page and off. Now that the military had stripped them of their liberties, he spoke for them—even in death—once more.
His close friends and foreign ambassadors escorted Neruda’s coffin from his poetically distinctive home to the cemetery. Word spread like wildfire through Santiago that morning, about the growing crowds joining Neruda’s funeral procession. Hundreds came out—despite the soldiers who lined the streets armed with automatic rifles—to invoke him as a champion of courage and truth, and to give voice to their pain over what had happened in the thirteen days since the coup. The marchers mourned the death of their poet, they mourned the death and disappearance of friends and family members, and they mourned the death of their democracy.
Neruda had become a symbol. Throughout his life, he had actively positioned himself to play this role. From his arrival in Santiago in 1921 as a shy, young anarchist, through his sudden designation by the student movement as the voice of his generation, through Allende’s election and Chile’s turbulent transition to socialism, Neruda had fulfilled his own sense of the poet’s calling. This sense encompassed the poet’s duty, a social obligation, a vocation and impulse. In turn, many working people and progressive activists—not just in Chile, not just in Latin America, but all over the world—had adopted him as their hero, claimed him as their own. He was the quintessential “people’s poet.”
From all walks of life, from all corners of the sprawling city of Santiago, citizens joined the long procession. They marched with their grief and sang their way through the streets, in resistance, fists raised in solidarity. With their sadness came a unifying strength. The soldiers may have held their guns as if they were ready, but they could only watch. Pinochet didn’t dare do anything, because this was Pablo Neruda, and international news cameras were capturing the streets. The world was watching.
The mourners walked beside the hearse and lined the narrow streets. The flower-covered casket rode atop the vehicle rather than within it, so that his pueblo could see the Poet one last time. Solemnly, defiantly, they sang the Socialist anthem, “The Internationale,” fists in the air: “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise, ye wretched of the earth! For justice thunders condemnation: A better world’s in birth!”
Over the grief came the chants: “He isn’t dead, he isn’t dead! He has only fallen asleep, just like the flowers sleep when the sun has set. He isn’t dead, he isn’t dead! He has only fallen asleep!”
When the procession reached Santiago’s main cemetery, the coffin was carried to the grave, draped in the red, white, and blue of the Chilean flag. With her hand like a megaphone up to her mouth, a woman unflinchingly yelled, “¡Jota! ¡Jota! Juventudes Comunistas de Chile!” “Communist Youth of Chile!” Then she yelled, “¡Compañero Pablo Neruda!”
The crowd answered, “¡Presente!” “He is present!”
“¡Compañero Pablo Neruda!”
* * *
In film footage of this historic moment, its intense emotion is crystallized in the image of a grief-stricken man with a timeworn face, carefully groomed hair, and missing teeth, whose eyes fill with tears as he struggles to choke out the word “¡Presente!” along with the crowd. This man embodies the love Chile had for Neruda—not just the literati or the militant Communists, but the everyman, the everywoman. Beyond the political, for many, this march was about Chile’s soul, the hope and pride of the people, and Neruda was its catalyst.
* * *
This biography was born twenty-one years later in 1994, the year I turned twenty-one. Fascinated by Latin America, I studied abroad in Central America as part of my junior year at the University of Michigan, where I was majoring in political science and English literature.
I had been introduced to Neruda before my trip, and I’d packed a bilingual edition of his selected poems that would accompany me on a spectacular set of voyages to come.
That year, I found myself doing fieldwork in the highlands of El Salvador, observing as the National Association
