Pablo Neruda

Former Senator of the Republic of Chile

Date of Birth	:	12 Jul, 1904
Date of Death	:	23 Sep, 1973
Place of Birth	:	Parral, Chile
Profession	:	Former Senator Of The Republic Of Chile
Nationality	:	Chilean

Pablo Neruda 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 in the basement of a house in the port city of Valparaíso, 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, and when he got back to Chile after accepting his Nobel Prize in Stockholm, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.

Neruda was hospitalized with cancer in September 1973, at the time of the coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet that overthrew Allende's government, but returned home after a few days when he suspected a doctor of injecting him with an unknown substance for the purpose of murdering him on Pinochet's orders.

Neruda died at his home in Isla Negra on 23 September 1973, just hours after leaving the hospital. Although it was long reported that he died of heart failure, the interior ministry of the Chilean government issued a statement in 2015 acknowledging a ministry document indicating the government's official position that "it was clearly possible and highly likely" that Neruda was killed as a result of "the intervention of third parties". However, an international forensic test conducted in 2013 rejected allegations that he was poisoned. It was concluded that he had been suffering from prostate cancer. In 2023, after forensics testing, it was discovered that the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, some strains of which can produce toxins, was present in some of his body. However, the family's claim that the forensic test proved he was poisoned was called into question, as it was not determined that the bacteria in him was even harmful.

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. His father, José del Carmen Reyes Morales, was a railway employee, and his mother Rosa Neftalí Basoalto Opazo was a school teacher who died two months after he was born on 14 September. On 26 September, he was baptized in the parish of San Jose de Parral. Neruda grew up in Temuco with Rodolfo 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.

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 July 18, 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. 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, 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 Desperate Song), 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, he 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). In 1927, out of financial desperation, he took an honorary consulship in Rangoon, the capital of the British colony of Burma, then administered from New Delhi as a province of British India. Later, mired in isolation and loneliness, he worked in Colombo (Ceylon), Batavia (Java), and Singapore. In Batavia the following year, he met and married (December 6, 1930) his first wife, a Dutch bank employee named Marijke Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang (born as Marietje Antonia Hagenaar), known as Maruca. 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.

In 1950, Neruda wrote a famous poem, “United Fruit Company,” referencing The United Fruit Company, founded in 1899, that controlled many territories and transportation networks in Latin America. He was a communist who believed corporations such as this were exploiting Latin America and hurting them. The corporation was corrupt and had a quest for wealth, and throughout his poem, he speaks of how the innocent citizens of Latin America suffered when companies destroyed their land and lifestyles and brought cruelty and injustices to their land. He points out ways that companies manipulate governments and workers in attempts to be greedy towards impoverished countries.

As a political activist, his stance as a communist comes out in his poem as he calls the wealthy corporations “bloodthirsty flies” and resembles a “dictatorship.” He compares United Fruit Inc. to big-name companies such as Coca-Cola and Ford Motors to emphasize their strength and power over the little countries residing in Latin America.

In addition, his writing skills truly came out in this poem, solidifying his worthiness of being named the National Poet of Chile. In this poem, he used tons of imagery, metaphors, irony, symbolism, and an overall witty tone to get his point of dislike towards big corrupt corporations and promotion of communism.

Diplomatic and Political Career

Spanish Civil War

After returning to Chile, Neruda was given diplomatic posts in Buenos Aires and then Barcelona, Spain. He later succeeded Gabriela Mistral as consul in Madrid, where he became the center of a lively literary circle, befriending writers such as Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, and the Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo. His only child, his daughter Malva Marina (Trinidad) Reyes, was born in Madrid in 1934, the product of his first marriage to Maria Antonia Hagener Vogelzang. The child was plagued with serious health problems, particularly hydrocephalus. She died in 1943 at the age of nine, having spent most of her young life with a foster family in the Netherlands after Neruda neglected and abandoned her, forcing her mother to work alone to care for her. Half of that time was during the Nazi occupation of Holland, when the Nazi view of birth defects was that they indicated genetic inferiority. During this period, Neruda became estranged from his wife and instead began a relationship with Delia del Carril, an elite Argentine artist who was 20 years his senior. The child was rejected, ridiculed and abandoned by his father and died completely helpless when he was 8 years old in the war-torn and Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

Mexican appointment

Neruda's next diplomatic post was as Consul General in Mexico City from 1940 to 1943. While there, she married Del Carril and learned that her daughter Malva had died in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands at the age of eight.

In 1940, after a failed assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky, Neruda arranged a Chilean visa for the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, who was accused of involvement in a plot to assassinate Trotsky. Neruda later said he did this at the request of Mexican President Manuel Avila Camacho. This allowed Siqueiros, then a prisoner, to leave Mexico for Chile, where he lived in Neruda's private residence. In exchange for Neruda's help, Siqueiros spent over a year painting a mural at a school in Chillán. While Neruda's relationship with Siqueiros drew criticism, he dismissed the accusation that he intended to aid an assassin as "sensational politico-literary harassment".

Return to Chile

In 1943, after returning to Chile, Neruda began a tour of Peru, where he visited Machu Picchu. This experience later inspired Alturas de Macchu Picchu, a book-length poem in 12 parts that he completed in 1945. The poem expressed his growing awareness and interest in the ancient civilizations of the Americas. He further explored this theme in Canto General (1950). In Alturas, Neruda celebrated Machu Picchu's achievements but also condemned the slavery that made it possible. In Canto XII, he invokes centuries of the dead to be reborn and speak through him. Martin Espada, a poet and professor of creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, hailed the work as a masterpiece, declaring that "there is no greater political poem".

Communism

Encouraged by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Neruda, like many left-leaning intellectuals of his generation, came to admire Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. He did this partly because of his role in defeating Nazi Germany and partly because of an idealistic interpretation of Marxist doctrine. This sentiment is echoed in the poems Canto a Stalingrado ("Song of Stalingrad") (1942) and Nuevo canto de amor a Stalingrado ("Song of Stalingrad's New Love") (1943). In 1953, Neruda was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. After Stalin's death that same year, Neruda wrote a eulogy to him, as he wrote poems in praise of Fulgencio Batista, Saludo a Batista ("Salute to Batista"), and later Fidel Castro. His radical Stalinism eventually caused a rift between Neruda and his longtime friend, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who remarked that "Neruda became more and more Stalinist, while I became less and less enchanted with Stalin. Their differences appear After the Nazi-Soviet Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939, when they almost came to blows over Stalin. Although Paz still considered Neruda "the greatest poet of his generation", in an essay on Alexander Solzhenitsyn, he wrote that when he "thinks of Neruda and other famous Stalinist writers and poets, I get goosebumps as I read some passages. Undoubtedly the Inferno they began in good faith but sensibly, with promises, they found themselves caught in a web of lies, lies, deceit and lies, until they lost their souls."July 15, 1945, São Paulo, Brazil At Paulo's Pacembu Stadium, Neruda read to 100,000 people in honor of the communist revolutionary leader Luis Carlos Prestes.

Neruda also praised Vladimir Lenin as "the great genius of this century", and on 5 June 1946 he paid tribute to the late Soviet leader Mikhail Kalinin, whom Neruda considered "a man of high life", in a speech. the great builder of the future,” and “a comrade in arms of Lenin and Stalin.