Pablo Neruda ( ;"Neruda". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. ; born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto; 12 July 190423 September 1973) was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924).
Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions in various countries during his lifetime and served a term as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President Gabriel González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months, and in 1949 he escaped through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina; he would not return to Chile for more than three years. He was a close advisor to Chile's socialist president Salvador Allende; Neruda served as Chile's ambassador to France under his presidency. When he went back to Chile after accepting his Nobel Prize in Stockholm, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people. In Spanish and English.
In September 1973, Neruda was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The same month, after the coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet overthrew Allende's government and resulted in Allende's suicide, Neruda made plans to flee to Mexico in exile. On 23 September, the day before he was to leave the country, Neruda died at the Santa María medical clinic in Santiago, where he had been receiving cancer treatment. While the official cause of death was listed as complications from prostate cancer, the cause and circumstances of his death have been a subject of intense debate, controversy, and investigation ever since.
In 2011, an investigation was opened after Manuel Araya, Neruda's former personal assistant and driver, came forward with claims that Neruda had been murdered at the direction of Pinochet. According to Araya Neruda called him from the clinic hours before he died and said that a doctor had injected him in the stomach with an unknown substance. In 2013, Judge Mario Carroza ordered Neruda's remains exhumed for forensic testing. Initial results did not find any evidence to indicate Neruda had been poisoned. However, the Chilean government issued a statement in 2015 acknowledging that "it was clearly possible and highly likely" that Neruda was killed as a result of "the intervention of third parties". In 2017, it was reported that an international panel of 13 forensic experts had determined that there was no indication Neruda had died of cancer, and that they had identified evidence of a potentially "laboratory cultivated bacteria". In 2023, a toxicology report confirmed the presence of Clostridium botulinum in Neruda's teeth, indicating that he had in fact been poisoned. A court of appeals ruling reopened the official inquiry into his death in February 2024.
Neruda is often considered the national poet of Chile, and his works have been popular and influential worldwide. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language", and the critic Harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the writers central to the Western tradition in his book The Western Canon.
Early life
Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto was born on 12 July 1904, in Parral, Chile, a city in Linares Province, now part of the greater Maule Region, some 350 km south of Santiago.Tarn (1975) p. 13 His father, José del Carmen Reyes Morales, was a railway employee, and his mother Rosa Neftalí Basoalto Opazo was a school teacher who died on 14 September two months after he was born. On 26 September, he was baptized in the parish of San Jose de Parral. Neruda grew up in Temuco with Rodolfo, a half-brother born after his father remarried, and a half-sister, Laura Herminia "Laurita," from one of his father's extramarital affairs (her mother was Aurelia Tolrà, a Catalan woman). He composed his first poems in the winter of 1914. Neruda was an atheist.Adam Feinstein (2005). Pablo Neruda: A Passion For Life. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. p. 97. . Despite their political differences, Pablo had far more in common with Bombal than with Maruca.
Literary career
Neruda's father opposed his son's interest in writing and literature, but he received encouragement from others, including the future Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, who headed the local school. On 18 July 1917, at the age of 13, he published his first work, an essay titled "Entusiasmo y perseverancia" ("Enthusiasm and Perseverance") in the local daily newspaper La Mañana, and signed it Neftalí Reyes.Feinstein (2005) p. 19 From 1918 to mid-1920, he published numerous poems, such as "Mis ojos" ("My eyes"), and essays in local magazines as Neftalí Reyes. In 1919, he participated in the literary contest Juegos Florales del Maule and won third place for his poem "Comunión ideal" or "Nocturno ideal." By mid-1920, when he adopted the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, he was a published author of poems, prose, and journalism. He is thought to have derived his pen name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda,Pablo Neruda. Biography.com. though other sources say the true inspiration was Moravian violinist Wilma Neruda, whose name appears in Arthur Conan Doyle's novel A Study in Scarlet.
In 1921, at the age of 16, Neruda moved to Santiago to study French at the Universidad de Chile with the intention of becoming a teacher. However, he soon devoted all his time to writing poems, and with the help of well-known writer Eduardo Barrios, he managed to meet and impress Don Carlos George Nascimento, the most important publisher in Chile at the time. In 1923, his first volume of verse, Crepusculario (Book of Twilights), was published by Editorial Nascimento, followed the next year by Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a song of despair), a collection of love poems that was controversial for its eroticism, especially considering its author's young age. Both works were critically acclaimed and have been translated into many languages. A second edition of Veinte poemas appeared in 1932. In the years since its publication, millions of copies have been sold, and it became Neruda's best-known work. Almost 100 years later, Veinte Poemas is still the best-selling poetry book in the Spanish language. By the age of 20, Neruda had established an international reputation as a poet but faced poverty.
In 1926, Neruda published the collection tentativa del hombre infinito (venture of the infinite man) and the novel El habitante y su esperanza (The Inhabitant and His Hope).Tarn (1975) p. 15 In 1927, out of financial desperation, he took an honorary consulship in Rangoon, the capital of British-ruled Burma, then administered from New Delhi as a province of British India. Later, mired in isolation and loneliness, he worked in Colombo, Batavia and Singapore. In Batavia the following year, he met and married his first wife, a Dutch bank employee known as Maruca.Mark Eisner: Pablo Neruda – The Poet's Calling [The Biography of a Poet], New York, Ecco/Harper Collins 2018; page 190 While he was in the diplomatic service, Neruda read large amounts of verse, experimented with many different poetic forms, and wrote the first two volumes of Residencia en la Tierra, which include many surrealist poems.
Diplomatic and political career
Spanish Civil War
After returning to Chile, Neruda was given diplomatic posts in Buenos Aires and, later, Barcelona, Spain.Tarn (1975) p. 16 He succeeded Gabriela Mistral as consul in Madrid, where he became the center of a lively literary circle, befriending such writers as Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. His only offspring, his daughter Malva Marina (Trinidad) Reyes, was born in Madrid in 1934, the product of his first marriage to María Antonia Hagenaar Vogelzang. Reyes was plagued with severe health problems, particularly suffering from hydrocephalus.Feinstein (2005) p. 109 She died in 1943 at the age of eight, having spent most of her short life with a foster family in the Netherlands after Neruda ignored and abandoned her, forcing her mother to work to support her care. Half of that time was during the occupation of Holland by the Nazis, who viewed birth defects as denoting genetic inferiority. Reyes was repudiated, mocked, and abandoned by her father and died in utter indigence in war-devastated and Nazi-occupied Netherlands.
During this period, Neruda became estranged from his wife and instead began a relationship with , an aristocratic Argentine artist who was 20 years his senior. As Spain became engulfed in civil war, Neruda became intensely politicized for the first time. His experiences during the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath moved him away from privately focused work in the direction of collective obligation. Neruda became an ardent Communist for the rest of his life. The radical leftist politics of his literary friends, as well as that of del Carril, were contributing factors, but the most important catalyst was the execution of García Lorca by forces loyal to the dictator Francisco Franco. Through his speeches and writings, Neruda threw his support behind the Spanish Republic, publishing the collection España en el corazón (Spain in Our Hearts, 1938). He lost his post as consul due to his political militancy. In July 1937, he attended the Second International Writers' Congress, the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals toward the war in Spain, held in Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid and attended by many writers including André Malraux, Ernest Hemingway, and Stephen Spender.
Neruda's marriage to Vogelzang broke down, and he eventually obtained a divorce in Mexico in 1943. His estranged wife moved to Monte Carlo to escape the hostilities in Spain and then to the Netherlands with their very ill only child, and he never saw either of them again.Feinstein (2005) p. 434 After leaving his wife, Neruda lived with Delia del Carril in France, eventually marrying her (shortly after his divorce) in Tetecala in 1943; however, his new marriage was not recognized by Chilean authorities as his divorce from Vogelzang was deemed illegal.Mark Eisner: Pablo Neruda – The Poet's Calling [The Biography of a Poet], New York, Ecco/Harper Collins 2018; page 306
Following the election of Pedro Aguirre Cerda (whom Neruda supported) as President of Chile in 1938, Neruda was appointed special Consul for Spanish emigrants in Paris. There he was responsible for what he called "the noblest mission I have ever undertaken": transporting 2,000 Spanish refugees who had been housed by the French in squalid camps to Chile on an old ship called the Winnipeg.Feinstein (2005) p. 141 Neruda is sometimes charged with having selected only fellow Communists for emigration, to the exclusion of others who had fought on the side of the Republic.Feinstein (2005) p. 145 Many Republicans and Anarchists were killed during the German invasion and occupation. Others deny these accusations, pointing out that Neruda chose only a few hundred of the 2,000 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.
Mexican appointment