*Other notable subscribers included Neruda’s friends Rubén Azócar; Tomás Lago; Diego Muñoz; Juvencio Valle; Gabriela Mistral; his sister, Laura Reyes; and the Partido Comunista de Chile—a total of thirty from his home country. Also on the list were the Lyceum and Lawn Tennis Club and Nicolás Guillén from Cuba, Luís Carlos Prestes from Brazil, and Miguel Otero Silva from Venezuela. There were subscribers from a total of twelve Latin American countries, as well as Picasso, Aragon, Éluard, and four others from France; twenty-eight total from the “Spanish Republic,” including Luis Buñuel and Rafael Alberti; Nancy Cunard and one other from England; and people from Hungary, Italy, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia.
*An English translation of the entire Canto general would not be published until 1991, by the University of California Press, translated by Jack Schmitt.
*Neruda described the poem as such in a 1971 interview, in the midst of his great opposition to the Vietnam War and America’s subversive acts against the Allende government. “I think that these United States exist, that they will revive and shine in the coming years,” he added.
*Hirschman said this in the poetry room of the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. He turned to the legendary Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights’ cofounder, who was sitting next to him, and told him tenderly, “I think it was a great tribute that Allen [Ginsberg] understood also, because in the collected works of Allen, there’s only one poem that’s translated, and it’s the poem Allen translated of Pablo Neruda, which is saying something.” That one poem that Ginsberg translated was “Let the Rail-Splitter Awake.”
*The edition included an explanation from Neruda for why this hadn’t happened until then: his anonymity, about which “much has been said,” had lasted so long “because of nothing and everything, because of this and that, because of improper pleasures and the suffering of others.” He was also reluctant to expose the “private aspects of the book’s birth,” as that seemed “unfaithful to the fits of love and fury, the disconsolate and ardent climate of exile that had brought it forth.” He concludes that “with no further explanation, I present this book as if it was mine and not mine: it’s enough that it might go out into the world and grow on its own. Now that I recognize it, I hope that its furious blood will recognize me as well.”
*Franulic is considered to be Chile’s first important female journalist, at the time working for the magazine Ercilla.
*This includes the book Navegaciones y regresos (Voyages and Homecomings), subtitled “Este libro es el cuarto volumen de las Odas elementales”—“this book is the fourth volume of Elemental Odes.”
*Neruda (already with an honorary doctorate from Oxford) was in London with Matilde in 1967. His favorite translator, Alastair Reid, was living on a houseboat with his son; Neruda went to inspect it, fascinated. He decided to hold his birthday fiesta on the boat, during which a Ukrainian poet fell overboard and had to be rescued from the Thames mud, and then got back on board as the party continued. During that trip, as Reid accompanied Neruda through London’s markets to search in vain for a ship’s figurehead, Neruda conveyed his anxiousness that Reid translate all of Estravagario. It was evident that it was one of his favorite books, perhaps second only to “The Heights of Macchu Picchu.” Neruda then gave a spectacular reading at Queen Elizabeth Hall, for which Reid served as translator onstage. Once Neruda had left London, Reid was able to closet himself “for a spell with the still photographs of the poems. I found it a relief to spend time with the moving original. I knew Neruda much better now, by way of his poems. He was always ready to answer any questions I had about them, even to talk about them, fondly, as about lost friends, but he was not much interested in the mechanics of translation. Once, in Paris, while I was explaining some liberty I had taken, he stopped me and put his hand on my shoulder: ‘Alastair, don’t just translate my poems. I want you to improve them.’”
Besides Estravagario, Reid translated Isla Negra and Fully Empowered, along with some selected poems. He found that Neruda’s voice was the clue to translating his poetry, that all of Neruda’s poems were “fundamentally vocative—spoken poems, poems of direct address—and that Neruda’s voice was in a sense the instrument for which he wrote.” Neruda once made a tape for him, reading pieces of different poems in different tones and rhythms. Reid would listen to it at odd moments, on buses, in the middle of the night when he was still wakeful—“so many times that I can hear it in my head at will,” he wrote thirty years later.
*In fact Guevara wasn’t carrying Canto General with him, but rather a green notebook in which he had copied seventy-nine poems by hand. Eighteen were Neruda’s, while others were by Nicolás Guillén, César Vallejo, and the Spanish Civil War veteran León Felipe.
*When Neruda asked him to translate the book, Alastair Reid titled the English version Isla Negra: A Notebook.
*The wife he refers to is the celebrated photographer Inge Morath. His marriage to Marilyn Monroe had ended five years earlier.
*The Johnson administration implemented a system to grant a group waiver for attendees of conferences (and sporting events) when it was in the national interest to not exclude anyone invited “who had at any time been associated with a Communist party.” But this did not pertain to individuals wanting to enter when not attending an international event.
*Francisco Aguilera, the library’s specialist in Hispanic culture, a Chilean, and a longtime friend of Neruda’s, arranged a lunch in the chief librarian’s office. This dignified location was a rare and notable exception to the norm; after their recordings for the Hispanic division, most writers were simply taken
