Historical Figure
Pablo Neruda
1904–1973
Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician (1904–1973)
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Biography
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).
In Their Own Words (5)
If you should ask me where I've been all this timeI have to say "Things happen."I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth,on the river ruined in its own duration:I know nothing save things the birds have lost,the sea I left behind, or my sister crying.Why this abundance of places? Why does day lockwith day? Why the dark night swilling roundin our mouths? And why the dead?
No Hay Olvido (Sonata) (There's No Forgetting (Sonata) or There is No Oblivion (Sonata)), Residencia II (Residence II), VI, stanza 1. , 1933
I am alone with rickety materials,the rain falls on me, and it is like me,it is like me in its raving, alone in the dead world,repulsed as it falls, and with no persistent form.
Débil del Alba (Weak with the Dawn or The Dawn's Debility), Residencia I (Residence I), I, stanza 5. , 1933
I do not want to be the inheritor of so many misfortunes. I do not want to continue as a root and as a tomb,as a solitary tunnel, as a cellar full of corpses,stiff with cold, dying with pain.
Walking Around, Residencia II (Residence II), II, stanza 4-5. , 1933
Mi amor se nutre de tu amor, amada
My love feeds on your love, beloved , 1958
Later on you will find buried near the coconut treethe knife which I hid there for fear you would kill me,and now suddenly I would be glad to smell its kitchen steelused to the weight of your hand, the shine of your foot:under the dampness of the ground, among the deaf roots,in all the languages of the men only the poor will know your name,and the dense earth does not understand your namemade of impenetrable divine substances.
Tango del Viudo (The Widower's Tango), Residencia I (Residence I), III, stanza 3. , 1933
Timeline
The story of Pablo Neruda, told in moments.
Born Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile. His mother, a schoolteacher, dies of tuberculosis one month after his birth. His father, a railway worker, forbids him from writing poetry.
Adopts the pen name Pablo Neruda at 16, partly to hide his writing from his father. Takes it from Czech poet Jan Neruda. He'll legally change his name to it in 1946.
Publishes Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair). He's 19. The book sells over a million copies during his lifetime. Decades later it remains the best-selling poetry book in the Spanish language.
Denounces Chilean President Videla on the Senate floor and is charged with treason. He goes into hiding, then crosses the Andes on horseback through a mountain pass to escape to Argentina. He's smuggled out by friends.
Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature. The citation calls him "a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams." He's serving as Chile's ambassador to France at the time.
Dies in a Santiago clinic twelve days after Pinochet's military coup overthrows Salvador Allende. Official cause: prostate cancer. His driver later testifies he was injected with an unknown substance. His Santiago home has been ransacked by soldiers. Thousands attend his funeral in open defiance of the junta.
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