Pablo Neruda (Spanish: [ˈpaβ̞lo̞ ne̞ˈɾuð̞a]; July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after the Czech poet Jan Neruda. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Neruda became known as a poet while still a teenager. He wrote in a variety of styles including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and erotically-charged love poems such as the ones in his 1924 collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. He often wrote in green ink, which was his personal symbol for desire and hope.
The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language."[1]
On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people in honor of the Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes.[2] During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions and served a term as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close advisor to Chile's socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.[3]
Neruda was hospitalised with cancer at the time of the Chilean coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet. On 23 September 1973, Neruda died of heart failure; however, there are doubts as to whether or not the junta had a hand in his death. Neruda's death reverberated around the world. Pinochet denied permission to make Neruda's funeral a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets.
Spanish Civil War
After returning to Chile, Neruda was given diplomatic posts in Buenos Aires and then Barcelona, Spain.[9] He later 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.[9] A daughter, Malva Marina Trinidad, was born in Madrid in 1934; she was to be plagued with health problems, especially hydrocephalus, during her short life.[10] During this period, Neruda slowly became estranged from his wife and began a relationship with Delia del Carril, an Argentine twenty years his senior.
As Spain became engulfed in civil war, Neruda became intensely politicised for the first time. His experiences of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath moved him away from distinctive, privately focused work in the direction of collective obligation. Neruda became an ardent communist, and remained so 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 Spanish dictator Franco.[9] By means of his speeches and writings, Neruda threw his support behind the Republican side, publishing the collection España en el corazón (Spain in My Heart, 1938). He lost his post as consul due to his political militancy.[9] Neruda's marriage broke down and the couple divorced in 1936. His ex-wife moved to Monte Carlo and then to the Netherlands with their only child, and he would never see either of them again.[11] After leaving his wife, Neruda lived with Delia del Carril in France.
After the 1938 election of President Pedro Aguirre Cerda, whom Neruda supported, the poet was appointed special consul for Spanish emigration 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.[12] Neruda is sometimes charged with selecting only communists for emigration, to the exclusion of others who had fought on the side of the Republic.[13] Others deny these accusations, pointing out that 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.
Mexican appointment
Neruda's next diplomatic post was as Consul General in Mexico City, where he spent the years 1940 to 1943.[14] While in Mexico, he married del Carril, and learned that his daughter Malva had died from various health problems, aged eight, in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.[14]After the failed 1940 assassination attempt against Leon Trotsky, Neruda arranged a Chilean visa for the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, who was accused of having been one of the conspirators in the assassination.[15] Neruda later said he did it at the request of the Mexican president, Manuel Ávila Camacho. This enabled Siqueiros, then jailed, to leave Mexico for Chile, where he stayed at Neruda's private residence. In exchange for Neruda's assistance, Siqueiros spent over a year painting a mural in a school in Chillán. Neruda's relationship with Siqueiros attracted criticism and Neruda dismissed the allegations that his intent had been to help an assassin as "sensationalist politico-literary harassment". In Mexico, Pablo Neruda met the famous Mexican writer Octavio Paz, with whom he nearly came to blows in 1942.[16]
Return to Chile
In 1943, after his return to Chile, Neruda made a tour of Peru, where he visited Machu Picchu.[17] The austere beauty of the Inca citadel later inspired Alturas de Macchu Picchu, a book-length poem in twelve parts which he completed in 1945 and which marked a growing awareness and interest in the ancient civilizations of the Americas, themes he was to explore further in Canto General. In Alturas, Neruda celebrated the achievement of Machu Picchu, but also condemned the slavery which had made it possible. In Canto XII, he called upon the dead of many centuries to be born again and to speak through him. Martín Espada, poet and professor of creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has hailed the work as a masterpiece, declaring that "there is no greater political poem".
Communism
Bolstered by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Neruda, like many left-leaning intellectuals of his generation, came to admire the Soviet Union of communist dictator Joseph Stalin, partly for the role it played in defeating Nazi Germany and idealist views of theoretical Marxist doctrine.[18] This is echoed in poems such as "Canto a Stalingrado" (1942) and "Nuevo canto de amor a Stalingrado" (1943). In 1953 Neruda was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. On Stalin's death that same year, Neruda wrote an ode to him, as he also (during World War II) wrote poetry in praise of Fulgencio Batista "Saludo a Batista", ("Salute to Batista") and later to Fidel Castro. His fervent Stalinism eventually drove a wedge between Neruda and longtime friend Octavio Paz who commented that "Neruda became more and more Stalinist, while I became less and less enchanted with Stalin".[19] Their differences came to a head after the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact when they almost came to blows in an argument over Stalin. Although Paz still considered Neruda "The greatest poet of his generation", in an essay on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn he wrote that when he thinks of "Neruda and other famous Stalinist writers and poets, I feel the gooseflesh that I get from reading certain passages of the Inferno. No doubt they began in good faith [...] but insensibly, commitment by commitment, they saw themselves becoming entangled in a mesh of lies, falsehoods, deceits and perjuries, until they lost their souls".[20] Neruda called Lenin the "great genius of this century". His speech of June 5, 1946) gives a tribute to the late Soviet leader Mikhail Kalinin, who for Neruda was "man of noble life", "the great constructor of the future", and "a comrade of arms of Lenin and Stalin".[21]
Neruda later came to rue his support of the Soviet leader; after Nikita Khrushchev's famous Secret Speech at the Soviet 20th Party Congress in 1956, which denounced the "cult of personality" that surrounded Stalin and accused him of committing crimes during the Great Purges, Neruda wrote in his memoirs "I had contributed my share to the personality cult," explaining that "in those days, Stalin seemed to us the conqueror who had crushed Hitler's armies".[18] Of a subsequent visit to China in 1957, Neruda would write: "What has estranged me from the Chinese revolutionary process has not been Mao Tse-tung but Mao Tse-tungism." He dubbed this Mao Tse-Stalinism: "the repetition of a cult of a Socialist deity".[18] Despite his disillusionment with Stalin, Neruda never lost his essential faith in communist theory and remained loyal to "the Party". Anxious not to give ammunition to his ideological enemies, he would later refuse publicly to condemn the Soviet repression of dissident writers like Boris Pasternak and Joseph Brodsky, an attitude with which even some of his staunchest admirers disagreed.[22]
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