Still, he assembled it so as to reflect his distinctive, individual, vanguard style. The aging Augusto Winter, his yellow-and-white beard overflowing, helped him type it all up in the same house and library in which Neruda had read so many books over the years, by the shores on which he first discovered the sea. Now, looking past the words themselves, Neruda insisted that they use square sheets of brown kraft wrapping paper to produce a unique look for presenting the book to publishers. Winter even gave in to Neruda’s impulse to make the pages appear crimped. The elder poet used the edge of a handsaw to press the edges of the pages to create the effect.
Neruda’s first efforts at convincing the more esteemed editors were not successful, and he took the rejections as personal affronts. Carlos Acuña, director and editor of Zig-Zag, turned him down. Neruda then sent the manuscript to Carlos George Nascimento. A Portuguese immigrant from the Azores, Nascimento had bought a bookstore in Santiago in 1917 that became a center for writers, critics, and other intellectuals to gather and discuss literary trends. Later, Nascimento expanded into publishing. He would go on to be known as one of the greatest editors in Chile’s literary history, but at the time, he was still just starting out as a publisher; he turned Neruda down.
“He’ll be sorry; they’ll all be sorry,” Neruda wrote to Pedro Prado. “Oh, bad man!” Neruda’s attitude toward his work during this time is noteworthy: he was absolutely certain of its quality and was stubbornly steadfast in his determination to achieve his lofty literary aspirations. His ambition and belief in his own greatness—narcissism—would characterize and propel Neruda throughout his life. His resilience and persistence in the face of rejection are also what had allowed him to follow his calling despite his father’s denigrating attempts to deter him.
Pedro Prado, now even more established as a leading poet than when Neruda first met him fresh from Temuco, lobbied Nascimento on Neruda’s behalf. Then Eduardo Barrios, one of Chile’s leading novelists and a mentor to Nascimento, told him, “A very calm, modest muchacho who uses the pseudonym Pablo Neruda is going to talk to you. He’s going to be a great poet. He’s going to give them something to talk about someday. Keep your eye on him.”
In the small confines of the publisher’s office and bookstore, Neruda seemed very pale and skinny to Nascimento. The poet barely spoke, but still there was a fine sensibility emanating from him, and Nascimento felt it, to the point that the publisher would later admit that Neruda had convinced him without Nascimento’s realizing it. Despite the fact that Neruda was so “frail and quiet; he still got his way,” Nascimento reminisced years later. In person, Neruda was able not only to convince Nascimento of the inherent virtues of the collected verses, but also to convince him to publish the book in the form that he wanted: large and square, which was expensive because it was a nonstandard paper size. That square shape had recently provoked a small revolution in the design of poetry books. It stood out in bookstore windows, signaling the difference between cutting-edge poetry and regular old prose, even before a single line was read.
In June 1924, one month before Neruda turned twenty, the book was out. Nascimento’s original printing was probably fewer than five hundred copies, but when Neruda first held the book in his hands fresh off the press, its ninety-two pages within a cover of thick paper, his heart palpitated triumphantly. So much of his young life had been devoted to the development of this book, whose poems had gestated over the better part of a decade, in which he had undertaken “the greatest departure from myself: creation, wanting to illuminate words.” Now he had done it. And not just with a book of youthful poems published by a student press, but what he felt was a “real” book of poetry published by a press that, in the same year, was the first to publish a book in Chile by his old mentor Gabriela Mistral.*
In this book, Neruda developed a lyrical style in which he truly illuminated words in a revolutionary way, packing them full of emotion and imagery. This “greatest departure” from his creative self came only when he allowed himself to give up on his writing that too closely echoed Sabat Ercasty’s. He stripped that style away to reveal a new potency. Making that break was anguishing at the time, but instead of stagnating in his sullenness, Neruda swallowed his pride and shut those old poems in a drawer. He forged forth and triumphed.
The book generated excitement from the start. For Neruda’s generation, it became a monumental cultural event, breaking through the formal strictures that had previously defined Latin American poetry and employing a new, frank, often brutal and brutally beautiful language. The book was particularly moving to students; even engineering students were seen reading it. For many, just reading and rereading the verses wasn’t enough. They had to read them out loud, at lunch with friends or at sunset all alone. Neruda’s friends and many others quickly memorized a large portion of the book. People listened to recitals of the poems in theater halls and other spaces, not necessarily by Neruda but by professional readers of poetry who immediately made his Twenty Love Poems part of their repertoire.
It was a book that made the era and was made by it. The youth of that generation discovered themselves in the poems, recognized themselves in them. They identified with the love they were reading. In those years, young women had started to assert themselves on the social scene. The 1920s was a time of budding sexual freedom in many parts of the world, and the time was ripe for a
