Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) was the pen name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and Communist party politician Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basualto, considered one of the most important Latin American poets of the 20th century. His pen name was taken from Czech writer and poet Jan Neruda; it later became his legal name. Neruda received numerous awards, including the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

Life

Neruda was born in Parral, a city some 300 km to the south of Santiago. His father was a railway employee named José del Carmen Reyes Morales and his mother, a schoolteacher named Rosa Neftalí Basoalto Opazo, died two months after he was born. Neruda and his father soon moved to Temuco, where his father married Trinidad Candia Malverde, a woman with whom he had child nine years earlier, a boy named Rodolfo. Neruda also grew up with his half-sister Laura, one of his father's children by another woman.

Young Neruda was called "Neftalí", his late mother's maiden name. His interest in writing and literature was opposed by his father, but he did receive encouragement from others, including future Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, who headed the local girls' school. His first published work was an essay he wrote at age thirteen, "Entusiasmo y perseverancia" ("Enthusiasm and Perseverance"), for the local daily newspaper, La Mañana. By 1920, when he adopted the pseudonym of Pablo Neruda, he was a frequently published author of poetry, prose, and journalism.

The next year, he moved to Santiago to study French at the Universidad de Chile with the intent of becoming a teacher, but soon devoted himself fulltime to poetry. In 1923, his first volume of verse, Crepusculario ("Book of Twilights"), was published, followed the next year by Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada ("Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair"), a collection of love poems which was controversial for its eroticism . Both works were critically acclaimed, and the latter volume would become his most popular work and over the decades sell in excess of a million copies.

Already, Neruda had a significant reputation both inside and outside of Chile, but tired of poverty. This reputation allowed him to get an honorary consulship in 1927 to Rangoon, in then colonial Burma, a place he had never heard of before. From there he was transferred to Colombo, Ceylon, Batavia, Java, and Singapore. In Java he met and married his first wife, a tall Dutch bank employee named Maryka Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang. While on diplomatic service, Neruda read large amounts of poetry and experimented with many different poetic forms. During that time, he wrote the first two volumes of Residencia en la tierra, which included many surrealistic poems which later became famous. Neruda became consul in Barcelona, Spain and soon became consul in Madrid, replacing Gabriela Mistral. His daughter Malva Marina Trinidad was born quite ill and was plagued with health problems for the entirety of her short life. He met Delia del Carril, an Argentinian woman who was twenty years his senior. They began an affair and she would eventually become his second wife.

In the midst of the Spanish Civil War Neruda fully embraced politics for the first time. His experience of the Civil War and its aftermath were a major factor in moving him away from inwardly focused work and towards a more political perspective. The politics of his literary friends as well as that of Carril, an ardent communist, were no doubt contributing factors, but the most important catalyst was the execution of his friend Federico García Lorca by Francisco Franco's forces. Neruda threw his support to the Republican side through his speeches and writing and would publish a collection of poetry called España en el corazón ("Spain in My Heart"). In response, the Chilean government, then led by the pro-Nazi President Arturo Alessandri Palma, dismissed him from his post. Neruda’s wife and child went to Monte Carlo; he would never see either of them again. He took up full time with Carril in France.

Following the election of President Pedro Aguirre Cerda in 1938, whom Neruda supported, he was appointed special consul for Spanish emigration in Paris. There Neruda was given responsibility for what he called "the noblest mission I have ever undertaken," shipping 2,000 Spanish refugees housed by the French in squalid camps to Chile on an old boat called the Winnipeg. Neruda is sometimes charged with strongly favoring Stalinists for emigration while excluding others who had fought on the side of the Republic; others deny these accusations. Neruda chose only a few hundred of the refugees personally; the rest were selected by the Service for the Evacuation of Spanish Refugees, set up by Juan Negrín, president of the Spanish Republican government-in-exile.

Neruda's next diplomatic post was as Consul General in Mexico City, where he spent the years 1940 to 1943. While in Mexico, he divorced Hagenaar, married Carril, and learned that his daughter had died in Nazi-occupied Holland at age eight from her many health problems.

It has been claimed that Neruda, while working in Mexico, played a part in the first, failed assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky in 1940. In his memoirs, Neruda dismissed the allegations he helped Trotsky's assassins as "sensationalist politico-literary harassment". Upon the request of Mexican President Manuel Ávila Camacho, Neruda arranged for a Chilean visa for one of the nine would-be assassins, Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros. In exchange for his Neruda's assistance, Siqueiros spent over a year painting a mural in a school in Chillán, Chile.

On March 4, 1945 he was elected a Communist party senator for northern Atacama Desert provinces Antofagasta and Tarapacá. He officially joined the Communist Party of Chile four months later. That year he completed his collection Alturas de Macchu Picchu ("The Heights of Machu Picchu"), inspired by an October 1943 visit to the ancient Incan city in Peru on his way back from Mexico.

In 1946, Radical Party presidential candidate Gabriel González Videla asked Neruda to act as his campaign manager. Videla was supported by a coalition of left-wing parties and Neruda fervently campaigned on his behalf. Once in office, however, Videla turned against the Communist Party. The breaking point for Senator Neruda was the violent repression of a Communist-led miner's strike in Lota in October 1947, where striking workers were herded into island military prisons and a concentration camp in the town of Pisagua. Neruda's criticism of Videla culminated in a dramatic speech in the Chilean senate on January 6, 1948 called "Yo acuso" ("I accuse"), in which he read the names of the miners and their families who were imprisoned at the concentration camp.

A few weeks later, Neruda went into hiding and he and his wife were smuggled from house to house, hidden by supporters and admirers for the next thirteen months. While in hiding, Senator Neruda was removed from office and in September 1948 the Communist Party was banned altogether under the Ley de Defensa Permenente de la Democracia (Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy), called by critics the "Ley Maldita" ("Accursed Law"), which eliminated over 26 thousand people from the electoral registers, thus stripping them of the right to vote. Neruda's life underground ended in March 1949 when he fled over the Andes Mountains to Argentina on horseback, nearly drowning while crossing the Curringue River. He would dramatically recount his escape from Chile in his Nobel Prize lecture.

Once out of Chile, he would spend the next three years in exile. In Buenos Aires, an friend of Neruda, the future Nobel winner and novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias, was cultural attaché to the Guatemalan embassy. There was some slight resemblance between the two men, so Neruda went to Europe with Asturias' passport. Pablo Picasso arranged his entrance into Paris and Neruda made a surprise appearance to a stunned World Congress of Peace Forces while the Chilean government denied that the poet could have escape the country.

Neruda spent those three years travelling extensively throughout Europe as well as taking trips to India, China, and the USSR. His trip to Mexico in late 1949 was lengthened due to a serious bout of phlebitis. A Chilean singer named Matilde Urrutia was hired to care for him and they began an affair that would years later culminate in marriage. During his exile, she would travel from country to country shadowing him and they would arrange meetings when they could.

While in Mexico he also published his lengthy epic poem Canto General, a Whitmanesque catalog of the history, geography, and flora and fauna of South America, along with Neruda's observations and experiences. Many of them dealt with his time underground in Chile, which is when he composed much of the poem. In fact, he carried the manuscript with him on his escape on horseback. The next month, a different edition of 5000 copies was boldly published in Chile by the outlawed Communist Party based on a manuscript Neruda had left behind.

His 1952 stay in a villa owned by Italian historian Edwin Cerio on the island of Capri was fictionalized in the popular film Il Postino ("The Postman", 1994).

Like many left-leaning intellectuals of his generation, Neruda came to admire the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin. On Stalin's death in 1953, Neruda wrote an ode to him, which is now considered one of his least effective works and is the only one of Neruda's many poems that is about the Soviet leader. That year, Neruda was also awarded the Stalin Peace Prize.

He nearly ran for president of Chile, but ended up giving his support to Salvador Allende who was inaugurated in 1970 as the first democratically elected Marxist head of state.

Neruda died of prostate cancer in the evening of September 23, 1973, at Santiago's Santa María Clinic. His funeral occurred not long after the Allende regime was toppled and was conducted with considerable protection by the police who protected those attending from crowds who disliked the dead poet. Some mourners exploited this to use the opportunity to complain against General Augusto Pinochet, who served as president of Chile until 1990.

Homes

Neruda owned three houses in Chile; today they are open as museums:

• La Chascona in Santiago.
• La Sebastiana in Valparaíso.
• Casa de Isla Negra in Isla Negra, where he and his third wife Matilde Urrutia are buried.

References

• Adam Feinstein, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life, Bloomsbury, 2004. (ISBN 1582344108)
• Pablo Neruda, Confieso que he vivido: Memorias, translated by Hardie St. Martin, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977. (ISBN 9374206600)

External links

• Nobel Prize bio page
• Neruda Foundation
• Universidad de Chile: Neruda
• Nobel Prize Internet Archive: Neruda
• Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda
• A&E life story of Neruda
• Works of Neruda (some translated into English)
• "True Stone and Epitaph: the Poetry of Pablo Neruda" by Gilbert Wesley Purdy. A full length book review/essay which includes a critical biography of Pablo Neruda.
• La Sebastiana – one of the homes of Neruda.
• Celebrating Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda – Democracy Now! interviews Martin Espada, poet and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

• The poet conqueror – A review of Neruda: A Passion for Life by Adam Feinstein in The Guardian