Rodrigo Rojas, a poet and professor at Chile’s Universidad Diego Portales, says that to this day he encounters many kids who come from “very humble origins who see poetry as a very complex art that they can have access to. It’s not something that is reserved exclusively for very rich or very well-educated people, although it still remains very difficult. But you don’t need a huge education for that.”
Chile has an extraordinary concentration of poets, of all levels of brilliance, per capita. Raúl Zurita provides yet another reason this has happened, why other countries may have somewhat similar social and anthropological histories, but Chile is still unique as a “nation of poets”: geography may have played a role in the flourishing of the art form. Zurita illuminates the circumstances, explaining that while Chileans were not blessed with an Italian Renaissance so that one can walk around the city and say, “There’s the Sistine Chapel!” or “Michelangelo made that sculpture,” Chile does have a huge landscape, a varied landscape. Chile’s Sistine Chapel is the Cordillera de los Andes and its Italian Renaissance painters are its poets. Out of this geographical landscape, the social landscape was molded by their words. That’s Chile’s cultural background, Zurita and others attest. Within such a small country, rugged and sparsely populated, isolated in many ways from the rest of the world, especially before modern communications and transportation, and surrounded by such an overpowering, dominant, impressive landscape, what do you do with it? Do you fight off the situation, or do you celebrate it with language? Chileans have done the latter.
Basic Chronology
July 12, 1904—Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (Pablo Neruda) is born in Parral, Chile.
1915—Neruda writes his first poem.
1918–20—Nearly thirty of Neruda’s poems are published in a variety of different journals, magazines, and newspapers throughout Chile.
1920—Neftalí begins to sign his poems as Neruda. He wins first place at the Temuco spring festival and graduates from high school.
1921—Neruda moves to Santiago and enters the University of Chile to study French pedagogy; he wins first prize in the Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile poetry competition.
1923—First book, The Book of Twilights, is published.
1924—Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song is published.
1927—Neruda assumes the position of Chilean cónsul in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar).
1928—Consul in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
1930—Consul in Holland’s colony of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia). He marries Maria Antonia Hagenaar Vogelzang (“Maruca”).
1932—Neruda and Maruca return to Chile.
1933—Neruda publishes the first of three volumes of Residence on Earth. He is named consul to Argentina, where he meets Federico García Lorca in Buenos Aires.
April 1934—Neruda is named consul to Barcelona, then Madrid.
August 1934—Neruda and Maruca’s daughter, Malva Marina, is born prematurely with hydrocephaly.
July 1936—General Francisco Franco leads an uprising in Morocco, starting the Spanish Civil War. Lorca is killed by firing squad in August.
January 1937—Neruda abandons Maruca and Malva Marina to be with Delia del Carril.
1938—The Spanish Republican Army prints Neruda’s Spain in the Heart on the front lines of the war.
April 1939—Franco declares victory.
August 1939—Neruda organizes the immigration of more than two thousand Spanish Civil War refugees to Chile aboard the Winnipeg.
1940—Neruda named cónsul general de Chile in Mexico.
1943—Malva Marina dies at age eight.
1945—Neruda is elected senator as a member of the Chilean Communist Party.
1947–49—As senator, Neruda denounces President Gabriel González Videla’s oppression of workers and Communists. His arrest is ordered and he escapes over the Andes into exile in March 1949.
September 1949—Neruda begins his affair with Matilde Urrutia.
April 1950—Neruda holds a signing party with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros for Canto general.
1952—Delia returns to Chile and Neruda and Matilde stay in Capri. The Captain’s Verses is published anonymously.
March 1953—Joseph Stalin dies; Neruda writes “On His Death” in his honor.
1954—First book of odes, Elemental Odes, is published; Neruda officially chooses Matilde over Delia.
1958—Estravagario is published.
1959—One Hundred Love Sonnets is published.
1961—The millionth copy of Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song is sold.
1962—Fully Empowered is published.
1964—Memorial de Isla Negra is published.
1966—Neruda travels to the United States on the invitation of Arthur Miller and the PEN Club.
1967—Neruda’s only play, The Splendor and Death of Joaquín Murieta, premiers in Santiago.
1970—Salvador Allende is elected president of Chile.
March 1971—Neruda arrives in Paris as the Chilean ambassador to France.
October 1971—Neruda wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.
April 1972—Neruda travels to New York City to deliver the opening speech at the PEN American Center’s fiftieth anniversary celebration.
December 1972—Neruda, too sick from cancer to continue as ambassador, returns to Chile.
September 11, 1973—Augusto Pinochet stages a military coup. President Allende dies, and a seventeen-year-long dictatorship begins.
September 23, 1973—Neruda dies of prostate cancer. His public funeral two days later becomes the first act of resistance against the dictatorship.
Books by Pablo Neruda and Their Selected In-Print English Translations
In-print English versions, when available, listed with translator name, publisher, and year of first edition.
Crepusculario [The Book of Twilights]. Santiago: Ediciones Claridad, 1923. (William O’Daly, Copper Canyon Press, 2017.)
Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada [Twenty Love Songs and a Desperate Song]. Santiago: Nascimento, 1924. (Most popular English version is by W. S. Merwin, Twenty Love Songs and a Song of Despair, Jonathan Cape, 1969; Penguin, 2006 [with an introduction by Cristina García].)
tentativa del hombre infinito [venture of the infinite man]. Santiago: Nascimento, 1926. (Jessica Powell, City Lights Books, 2017 [with an introduction by Mark Eisner].)
El habitante y su esperanza [The Inhabitant and His Hope]. Santiago: Nascimento, 1926.
Anillos [Rings], with Tomás Lago. Santiago: Nascimento, 1926.
El hondero entusiasta [The Enthusiastic Sling-Shooter]. Santiago: Empresa Letras, 1933.
Residencia en la tierra [Residence on Earth]. First volume published by Nascimento (Santiago), 1933; volumes 1 and 2 then published by Ediciones Cruz y Raya (Madrid), 1935. All three volumes together published by Editorial Losada (Buenos Aires), 1947. (Donald Walsh, New Directions, 2004 [with an introduction by Jim Harrison].)
España en el corazón [Spain in the Heart]. Twenty-three poems dealing with
