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Surrealism, a movement that emerged in the early 20th century, sought to explore the realm of the unconscious and the irrational. It aimed to challenge conventional ways of thinking and to liberate the imagination. Neruda, captivated by the surrealist philosophy, incorporated elements of this movement into his poetry.
There may be no more beloved poem in all of Latin America than Pablo Neruda’s beguiling poem “Tonight I Can Write.”. Written when Neruda was in his very early twenties, the poem perfectly ...
- Overview
- Early life and love poetry
- The experimental poet as diplomat
- Communism and poetry
Pablo Neruda (born July 12, 1904, Parral, Chile—died September 23, 1973, Santiago) Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He is perhaps the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century.
Neruda was the son of José del Carmen Reyes, a railway worker, and Rosa Basoalto. His mother died within a month of his birth, and two years later the family moved to Temuco, a small town farther south in Chile, where his father remarried. Neruda was a precocious boy who began to write poetry at age 10. His father tried to discourage him from writing and never cared for his poems, which was probably why the young poet began to publish under the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, which he was legally to adopt in 1946. He entered the Temuco Boys’ School in 1910 and finished his secondary schooling there in 1920. Tall, shy, and lonely, Neruda read voraciously and was encouraged by the principal of the Temuco Girls’ School, Gabriela Mistral, a gifted poet who would herself later become a Nobel laureate.
Neruda first published his poems in the local newspapers and later in magazines published in the Chilean capital, Santiago. In 1921 he moved to Santiago to continue his studies and become a French teacher. There he experienced loneliness and hunger and took up a bohemian lifestyle. His first book of poems, Crepusculario, was published in 1923. The poems, subtle and elegant, were in the tradition of Symbolist poetry, or rather its Hispanic version, Modernismo. His second book, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924; Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), was inspired by an unhappy love affair. It became an instant success and is still one of Neruda’s most popular books. The verse in Twenty Love Poems is vigorous, poignant, and direct, yet subtle and very original in its imagery and metaphors. The poems express young, passionate, unhappy love perhaps better than any book of poetry in the long Romantic tradition.
At age 20, with two books published, Neruda had already become one of the best-known Chilean poets. He abandoned his French studies and began to devote himself entirely to poetry. Three more books appeared in quick succession: Tentativa del hombre infinito (1926; “Attempt of the Infinite Man”); Anillos (1926; “Rings”), in collaboration with Tomás Lago; and El hondero entusiasta (1933; “The Enthusiastic Slingshooter”). Yet his poetry was not a steady source of income, so he translated hastily from several languages and published magazine and newspaper articles. Neruda’s future looked uncertain without a steady job, so he managed to get himself appointed honorary consul to Rangoon in Burma (now Yangôn, Myanmar). For the next five years he represented his country in Asia. He continued to live in abject poverty, however, since as honorary consul he received no salary, and he was tormented by loneliness.
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Poetry: First Lines
From Rangoon Neruda moved to Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He increasingly came to identify with the South Asian masses, who were heirs to ancient cultures but were downtrodden by poverty, colonial rule, and political oppression. It was during these years in Asia that he wrote Residencia en la tierra, 1925–1931 (1933; Residence on Earth). In this book Neruda moves beyond the lucid, conventional lyricism of Twenty Love Poems, abandoning normal syntax, rhyme, and stanzaic organization to create a highly personalized poetic technique. His personal and collective anguish gives rise to nightmarish visions of disintegration, chaos, decay, and death that he recorded in a cryptic, difficult style inspired by Surrealism. These puzzling and mysterious poems both attract and repel the reader with the powerful and awe-inspiring vision they present of a modern descent into hell.
In 1930 Neruda was named consul in Batavia (modern Jakarta), which was then the capital of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). There he fell in love with a Dutch woman, Maria Antonieta Hagenaar, and married her. In 1932 Neruda returned to Chile, but he still could not earn a living from his poetry. In 1933 he was appointed Chilean consul in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There he met the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who at that time was traveling in Argentina and who was to become a close friend and an enthusiastic defender of Neruda’s poetry.
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In 1934 Neruda took up an appointment as consul in Barcelona, Spain, and soon he was transferred to the consulate in Madrid. His success there was instantaneous after García Lorca introduced him. Neruda’s new friends, especially Rafael Alberti and Miguel Hernández, were involved in radical politics and the Communist Party. Neruda shared their political beliefs and moved ever closer to communism. In the meantime, his marriage was foundering. He and his wife separated in 1936, and Neruda met a young Argentine woman, Delia del Carril, who would be his second wife until their divorce in the early 1950s.
A second, enlarged edition of the Residencia poems entitled Residencia en la tierra, 1925–35 was published in two volumes in 1935. In this edition, Neruda begins to move away from the highly personal, often hermetic poetry of the first Residencia volume, adopting a more extroverted outlook and a clearer, more accessible style in order to better communicate his new social concerns to the reader. This line of poetic development was interrupted suddenly by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, however. While García Lorca was executed by the Nationalists and Alberti and Hernández fought at the front, Neruda traveled in and out of Spain to gather money and mobilize support for the Republicans. He wrote España en el corazón (1937; Spain in My Heart) to express his feelings of solidarity with them. The book was printed by Republican troops working with improvised presses near the front lines.
In 1937 Neruda returned to Chile and entered his country’s political life, giving lectures and poetry readings while also defending Republican Spain and Chile’s new centre-left government. In 1939 he was appointed special consul in Paris, where he supervised the migration to Chile of many defeated Spanish Republicans who had escaped to France. In 1940 he took up a post as Chile’s consul general in Mexico. He also began work on a long poem, Canto general (1950; “General Song,” Eng. trans. Canto general), resonant with historical and epic overtones, that would become one of his key works. In 1943, during a trip to Peru, Neruda climbed to the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu. The strong emotions aroused by the sight of this spectacular ruin inspired one of his finest poems, Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1943; Heights of Macchu Picchu). This powerful celebration of pre-Columbian civilization would become the centrepiece of Canto general.
In the meantime, Neruda suffered a stunning reversal in his native country. He had returned to Chile in 1943, was elected a senator in 1945, and also joined the Communist Party. He campaigned for the leftist candidate Gabriel González Videla in the elections of 1946, only to see President Videla turn to the right two years later. Feeling betrayed, Neruda published an open letter critical of Videla; as a consequence, he was expelled from the Senate and went into hiding to avoid arrest. In February 1948 he left Chile, crossing the Andes Mountains on horseback by night with the manuscript of Canto general in his saddlebag.
This poem, originally published in Spanish, is part of his 1964 collection 'Memorial de Isla Negra' or 'Isla Negra: A Notebook,' which is like an autobiography of Neruda as a poet. Significantly, Isla Negra is a coastal area in central Chile. Neruda has often mentioned the impact of his Chilean roots and life in Chile in his poetry.
2004, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems (Introduction and Excerpt) Introduction by Lawrence Ferlinghetti Edited by Mark Eisner Translated by Mark Eisner, John Felstiner, Forrest Gander, Robert Hass, Jack Hirschman, Stephen Kessler, Stephen Mitchell, Alastair Reid "If the notion had struck Pablo Neruda, I am quite sure that like Fernando Pessoa and Antonio Machado he would have given birth ...
- Mark Eisner
Sep 9, 2011 · By Myranda Grecinger. In his 1964 poem entitled “Poetry”, Pablo Neruda vividly captured the very essence of what it is to be so intently captivated by something and inspired that it almost becomes your very soul. Unlike many well known poems this was not a tragic account of unrequited or lost love or a joyous verse regarding the beauty of ...
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Biography. Article abstract: Neruda is the greatest modern poet to have combined a personal and lyrical mode with a political voice in a way that spoke to and for a popular mass readership. Rooted ...
