Pablo Neruda
His father, José del Carmen Reyes Morales, was a railway employee; his mother, Rosa Basoalto, was a school teacher who died two months after he was born. Neruda and his father soon moved to Temuco, where his father married Trinidad Candia Marverde, a woman with whom he had had a child nine years earlier, a boy named Rodolfo.
Neruda also grew up with his half-sister Laura, one of his father's children by another woman.
The young Neruda was christened "Neftalí", his late mother's middle name. His father was opposed to Neruda's interest in writing and literature, but Neruda received encouragement from others, including future Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, who headed the local girls' school.
His first published work was an essay he wrote for the local daily newspaper, La Mañana, at the age of thirteen: Entusiasmo y perseverancia ("Enthusiasm and Perseverance"). By 1920, when he adopted the pseudonym of Pablo Neruda, he was a published author of poetry, prose, and journalism.
Veinte poemas
In the following year (1921), he moved to Santiago to study French at the Universidad de Chile with the intention of becoming a teacher, but soon Neruda was devoting himself full time to poetry.
In 1923 his first volume of verse, Crepusculario ("Book of Twilights"), was published, 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. In 1927, out of desperation, he took an honorary consulship in Rangoon, then a part of colonial Burma and a place of which he had never heard before.
In Java he met and married his first wife, a tall Dutch bank employee named Maryka Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang. While on diplomatic service, Neruda read large amounts of poetry and experimented with many different poetic forms.
He later replaced 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. During this period, Neruda became slowly estranged from his wife and took up with Delia del Carril, an Argentine woman who was twenty years his senior and who would eventually become his second wife.
His experiences of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath moved him away from distinctive, privately focused labor in the direction of collective obligation and better cohesion. Neruda became an ardent communist, and remained so for the rest of his life.
After leaving his wife, he took up full time with del Carril in France.
Following the election in 1938 of President Pedro Aguirre Cerda, whom Neruda supported, he was appointed special consul for Spanish emigration in Paris. Neruda is sometimes charged with only selecting Communists for emigration while excluding others who had fought on the side of the Republic; 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.
Mexico
Neruda's next diplomatic post was as Consul General in Mexico City, where he spent the years 1940 to 1943.
He also became a friend of the Stalinist assassin Vittorio Vidali.
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. This enabled Siqueiros, then jailed, to leave Mexico for Chile, where he stayed at Neruda's private residence.
In this work, Neruda celebrated the achievement of Machu Picchu, but also condemned the slavery which had made it possible. Martin Espada, poet and professor of creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, has hailed the work as a masterpiece, declaring that "there is no greater political poem".
Neruda and Stalinism
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 Joseph Stalin, partly for the role it played in defeating Nazi Germany (poems Canto a Stalingrado (1942) and Nuevo canto de amor a Stalingrado (1943)).
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.
Neruda called Lenin the "great genius of this century". 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 to my share to the personality cult," explaining that "in those days, Stalin seemed to us the conqueror who had crushed Hitler's armies".
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.
Senator
On March 4, 1945 Neruda was elected a Communist party senator for the northern provinces of Antofagasta and Tarapacá in the arid and inhospitable Atacama Desert. The breaking point for Senator Neruda was the violent repression of a Communist-led miners' strike in Lota in October 1947, where striking workers were herded into island military prisons and a concentration camp in the town of Pisagua.
Neruda's life underground ended in March 1949 when he fled over the Lilpela Pass on the Andes Mountains to Argentina on horseback. A Chilean singer named Matilde Urrutia was hired to care for him and they began an affair that would, years later, culminate in marriage.
Matilde Urrutia was the muse for "Los versos del Capitán", which he later published anonymously in 1952.
While in Mexico, Neruda also published his lengthy epic poem Canto General, a Whitmanesque catalog of the history, geography, and flora and fauna of South America, accompanied by Neruda's observations and experiences. A month later, a different edition of five thousand copies was boldly published in Chile by the outlawed Communist Party based on a manuscript Neruda had left behind.
Del Carril eventually learned of his torrid affair with Matilde Urrutia and left him in 1955, moving back to Europe. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, an anti-communist organization covertly established and funded by the U.S.
Neruda gave readings to packed halls, and even recorded some poems for the Library of Congress. The affair was particularly painful for Neruda because of his previous outspoken support for the Cuban revolution, and he never visited the island again, even after an invitation in 1968.
After the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967, Neruda wrote several articles regretting the loss of a "great hero". At the same time, he told his friend Aida Figueroa not to cry for Che, but for Luis Emilio Recabarren, the father of the Chilean communist movement, who preached a pacifist revolution over Che's violent ways.
La Chascona, Neruda's house in Santiago.
Final years
In 1970, Neruda was nominated as a candidate for the Chilean presidency, but ended up giving his support to Salvador Allende, who later won the election and was inaugurated in 1970 as the first democratically elected socialist head of state.
The military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet on 11 September saw Neruda's hopes for a marxist Chile destroyed. Urrutia's own memoir, My Life with Pablo Neruda, was published posthumously in 1986.
Neruda owned three houses in Chile; today they are all open to the public as museums: La Chascona in Santiago, La Sebastiana in Valparaíso, and Casa de Isla Negra in Isla Negra, where he and Matilde Urrutia are buried.
Legacy
An edition of Neruda's On the Blue Shore of Silence was printed in honor of the poet's 100th birthday in 2004.
This is taken from Neruda's work The Book of Questions.
Neruda always wrote in green ink because it was the color of Esperanza (hope).
In The Simpsons, Neruda is referenced in an argument between Bart and Lisa over the nature of the soul: (Lisa: "Hmm. Pablo Neruda said 'Laughter is the language of the soul.'" Bart: "I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda.")
Neruda's verse is quoted on the back of Jackson Browne's album The Pretender
Pablo Neruda is mentioned in How I Met Your Mother in the episode "The Naked Man" and in "The Three Days Rule" in the quote: (Stan: "I wait for it and it envelops me, and so you, bread and light and shadow are." Marshall: "I do not know what bread was doing in there, but that touched me, here and here.")
Neruda is one of the people toasted to in the song "La Vie Boheme" from the Tony-winning rock opera Rent.
Neruda was good friends with Venezuelan intellectuals and diplomats, such as Arturo Uslar Pietri, Juan Oropeza and Miguel Otero Silva.
In the Italian film Il Postino, Pablo Neruda, portrayed by Philippe Noiret, befriends a postman and inspires in him a love of poetry.
Neruda is mentioned briefly in "En El Ultimo Lugar Del Mundo," a song by Ricardo Montaner.
A bust of Neruda stands on the south side of the Organization of American States building in Washington D.C.
The South African musician Johnny Clegg drew heavily on Neruda in his early work with the band Juluka.
Neruda is referred to frequently as "The Poet" in the novel The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende.
One character, Clara "the Clarivoyant" Trueba, is said to have helped him in his rise to fame and another member of the Trueba family later attends his funeral.
Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis set to music the famous "Canto General" (one of the most famous poems by Neruda) when he was exiled from his homeland by the dictatorship in Greece (1967-1974).
Neruda Songs, a classical and operatic cycle based on five of Neruda's love poems, received the $200,000 University of Louisville's Grawemeyer Award for Musical Composition. The composer, Peter Lieberson, dedicated the music to his wife, mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who performed the music exemplifying what Neruda referred to as "the arc of love" at its world premiere.
A documentary film is in production on Neruda's life, times, and poetry, Pablo Neruda: The Poet's Calling'', directed by Mexican director Carlos Bolado and Mark Eisner.
In 2008 the writer Roberto Ampuero published a fictional novel El caso Neruda, about his private eye Cayetano Brulé, where Pablo Neruda is one of the protagonists.
In the movie Patch Adams, a portion of Neruda's Love Sonnet 17 is read as a remembrance of the character's dead lover.
In 2009 the Chilean Google homepage displayed a logo commemorating his birthday on July 12.