Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904–September 23, 1973) was the pen name of the Chilean poet and diplomat 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 the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
Life
Neruda was born in Parral, a city some 300 km to the south of Santiago, where his father was a railway employee. His mother died soon after he was born, and Neruda and his father soon moved to Temuco, where his father remarried Doña Trinidad Candia Malverde. At thirteen, he submitted a few of his poems to the local daily newspaper, La Mañana. His first poem was titled "Entusiasmo y perseverancia", or "Enthusiasm and Perseverance". In 1920 he sent more poems to the literary journal Selva Austral under the pen name Pablo Neruda.
Neruda published his first collection of poems, La Canción de la fiesta in 1920. He had knocked on the door of Gabriela Mistral, the headmistress of his school (and another Nobel Prize winner), and asked her if his poems were worth publishing. She agreed they were. In 1923 he released the critically acclaimed Crepusculario, and the following year he published Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, or Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, one of his best-known works. The Heights of Machu Picchu.
Neruda studied French and education at the University of Chile. In 1927 the government gave him honorary consulships to many countries. These jobs let him travel to seven different countries, including Spain and Burma. 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 joined the Republican movements in Spain and France in 1937 after the Spanish Civil War. He was instrumental in evacuating two thousand Spanish Republicans to Chile in 1939 after their defeat by Franco. His experience of the civil war and its aftermath were a major factor in moving him away from an inward focused Romanticism and towards a more political perspective.
Although he was an anarchist for a while, on March 4, 1945 he was elected a Communist senator for Antofagasta and Tarapacá. He officially joined the Communist Party of Chile four months later. After the violent repression of a miner's strike in Lota by the Chilean government in October 1947, he became an outspoken critic of President Gabriel González Videla (president from 1948-1952) and his policies. His opposition culminated in a dramatic speech in the Chilean senate, "Yo acuso" ("I accuse" in Spanish), in which he read the names of the miners (and their families) who were imprisoned at a concentration camp in Pisagua.
After his speech to the senate, Videla banned the Communist Party and Neruda was forced underground. In March 1949 he fled over the mountains to Argentina on horse back. From there he went to Europe where he spent three years in exile. While in exile, he wrote Canto General, an extensive work about the Americas, considered one of his finest works. (Part of this period of his life was later dramatized in the 1994 film Il Postino) He returned to Chile in 1952.1
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 the Chile's new military ruler, General Augusto Pinochet, who served as president until 1990.
Neruda and Stalin
Like many left-leaning intellectuals of his generation, Neruda came to admire the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin. Records show he collaborated with International Comitern's NKVD program from 1932 or 1934 onwards. [1].
At the tail end of the Spanish Civil War, at the behest of Stalin, Neruda is said to have helped screen Republican refugees to prevent anarchists and anti-communists from gaining refuge in Chile. It is also claimed that Neruda, while working in Mexico, helped organize the first assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky in 1940 and arranged for false Chilean passports to be given to the Soviet assassins. Although the assassination attempt was foiled by Trotsky's guards, one guard was shot to death and another mortally wounded. He was also said to have arranged for a Chilean passport for Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros so he could flee the country while on bail after taking part in the attack on Trotsky's residence. In his memoirs, however, Neruda dismissed the allegations he helped Trotsky's assassins as "sensationalist politico-literary harassment".
On Stalin's death in 1953, Neruda wrote an ode to him, which is now considered one of his least effective works. That year, Neruda was also awarded the Stalin Peace Prize.
Private life
Neruda had three wives, María Antonieta Hagenaar, Delia de Carril, and Matilde Urrutia. He married María in 1930, but they divorced in 1936. He lived with Delia from the 1930s until they were divorced in 1955. They were married in 1943. In 1966, he married Matilde Urrutia, who was later thought to have served as the inspiration for many of Neruda's love poems.
Homes
Neruda owned three houses in Chile; today they are open as museums:
Notes
1 Information on Neruda's political involvement from 1939 to 1952 from "More blood than ink: Edited extracts from Pablo Neruda: A Biography, by Adam Feinstein" in The Guardian, Saturday July 3, 2004
See also
External links
- The poet conqueror - A review of Neruda: A Passion for Life by Adam Feinstein in The Guardian
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