Neruda Brief Biography by Mark Eisner © 2005

Pablo Neruda was born Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto in 1904.

His mother died of tuberculosis two months after his birth. His father soon remarried and took his family to the muddy town of Temuco, where he found a job working on the railroad. As described in his memoirs, the southern rain and the gentle shadow of his angelic stepmother watched over his childhood.

At the beginning of the 1900s, Temuco was a frontier town, an outpost above Patagonia, populated by the remnants of the indigenous Mapuche people. Neruda called it Chile’s “Wild West.”

Although his father was rather rigid, young Ricardo often joined him riding the rails.

He befriended the workers, some of whom slipped off into the forest and found “fantastic treasures” for him. He became very close with Monge, who had “two huge incisions on his swarthy face,” one a knife scar, the other his charming grin. The worker brought him bright flowers, spiders, partridge eggs delighting the young boy’s insatiable curiosity.But soon after forging this new friendship, Monge fell from a train, and was crushed to death by the iron wheels. Neruda would become an unwavering voice for the world’s working class.

One day, as Ricardo was playing in his backyard, a boy’s hand suddenly appeared through a hole in the fence, and left a toy sheep with wheels. Ricardo went inside and brought out a treasure of his own, a pinecone which he adored, and placed it on the other side.

Years later, he would write, “That exchange brought home to me for the first time a precious idea: that all of humanity is somehow together. This small and mysterious exchange of gifts remained inside me, deep and indestructible, giving my poetry light.”

Neruda was a true literary prodigy and began to filling up notebooks with his young verse.

He became a voracious reader. He wrote that then “The sack of human wisdom had broken open and was being gleaned in the night.” His uncle published an essay and some early poems in his uncle’s radically progressive newspaper. In those same years, the poet Gabriela Mistral, who would win the 1945 Nobel Prize for Literature, came to Temuco to direct the girl's grammar school. Neruda knocked on her door and left some poems. "Here there is indeed a true poet," she said of Ricardo. They began a life-long friendship.

He read Victor Hugo and Maxim Gorky and translated Rimbaud and Baudelaire. At the age of 14, a popular Santiago magazine published Ricardo’s first poem. They published sixteen more in the next two years. He carried around Jean Grave’s book, “Dying Society and Anarchy.”

But his father feared poets and demanded that his son strive towards a seemingly more practical occupation. So to avoid punishment and hide his poetry, and perhaps partly for the romance of it, Ricardo Neftali Reyes took a pen name. As a grown man he said he couldn’t remember the details of its origin, but many say that he read a short story by the Czech writer Jan Neruda and liked the ring. And “Pablo” is homage to Paul Verlaine, the great 19th Century French poet.

In 1921, just out of high school, Neruda boarded a night train for the bustling capital, Santiago. He would study French at the University of Chile.

He wore a distinctive dress: the black suit of the poet to which his famous cape would be added later.

He was swallowed by the big city’s literary scene and the radical student political movement.

But despite his bohemian social activity, Neruda still hadn’t shaken the sadness of the southern rain out of himself.

Ines: Pablo en este momento era una persona bastante, por lo que me contaba Diego, bastante deprimida. El tenía, como siempre estaba como triste. Y sus amigos trataban de sacarlo de eso.

The young poet fell in love with a classmate at the University. Her name was Albertina Rosa Azócar and she had white hills, white thighs, and white hands smooth as grapes. She heard him recite a poem in his “sleepy reading voice” that she and a friend began to imitate.

"Pablo was wistful, melancholic in those student days,” she would recount later. “He was always delicate, but he told me fantastic tales."

Then Pablo wrote Albertina a poem:

I like it when you're quiet. It's as if you weren't here now,
and you heard me from a distance, and my voice couldn't reach you.
It's as if your eyes had flown away from you, and as if
your mouth were closed because I leaned to kiss you.

Albertina confessed she would have married him, but her father forced her to return home, back to the south, when the local university started offering French.

Meanwhile, Neruda was becoming the voice of the student movement. His articles and poems filled their newspaper. Young people throughout Santiago recited his words:

Now that the ripe earth shakes
in a dusty and violent quake
our young souls go forth filled
like the sails of a ship in the wind.

Just two years after arriving in the capital, in 1923 Neruda sold his possessions in order to publish his first book of poetry, Crepusculario, The Book of Twilights.

The next year, at the age of twenty, he published the work which quickly made him known throughout the Spanish-speaking world, a book which ignited my heart and millions of others, 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair. He made desire come alive and be raw on the page. It is Neruda's most popular book with perhaps his most famous poem: "Poema 20":

Neruda published another book of poetry and a novella, though neither ever garnered great critical acclaim. But with his status as poet confirmed, Neruda asked to be made a diplomat, as did many other Latin American writers of the time. Hoping for Paris, he was named consul to Burma in 1927. Over the next five years he toured South East Asia, serving in Sri Lanka, Java, and Malaysia. It was a period of tremendous loneliness and alienation. And despite all his letters to her, Albertina wasn’t coming to live with him. Her parents forbade it.

His isolation is reflected in the poetry of his landmark surrealistic book, Residencia en la Tierra, Residence on Earth. As his previous book did with the language of love, these poems would shatter then shape Spanish poetry with their hermetic objectivity. In 1930, Neruda, now the Chilean consul to Java, married a tall, beautiful Dutch woman with blue eyes. She was the daughter of a distinguished family that had settled in Batavia years before. Her name was Maria Antonieta Agenaar and he called her Maruca. Neruda would admit later that she knew nothing of the world of arts and letters. He never published a single love poem devoted to her.

Meanwhile, the great depression hit Chile, and Neruda’s job was eliminated. He and his new bride returned home. She spoke no Spanish, he spoke no Dutch, so they were forced to communicate in broken English.

In 1932 Neruda was appointed consul to Buenos Aires, where he meets the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca.

After the previous years of loneliness and heartbreak, he is re-inspired by the power and beauty of this new friendship.

Then the next year Neruda is named consul to Lorca's native Spain. Federico presented him to the young Republic as “a poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intellect, closer to blood than to ink.”

Despite the fact that his relationship with his wife Maruca was still one of indifference, in 1934 a daughter was born, Malva Marina. Though at first overjoyed, sadness and sorrow swept in as the baby's health rapidly deteriorated.

Malva was near death, suffering from hydrocephaly, the accumulation of fluid in the cranium. She could not stand light and was contained to a dark room. She had Down's syndrome, fated to be an invalid and die young, which she did, eight years later.

But life continued with his new friends and it seemed Neruda had finally shaken the sadness of the southern rain out of himself. Something has changed in Neruda, with all the new energy of the young republic and his connection to its characters. He is melancholic no longer. And then there was Delia del Carril, artist, communist political activist, a fiery but sensitive Argentine woman. They called her La Hormiguita, the little ant, because she took on and carried a social-political burden that weighed more than she did.

Delia had left her aristocratic upbringing in Argentina to live in Spain among the supports of the country’s Second Republic. She instantly fell into the circle of young intellectuals and writers, the Generation of 27, including García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Vicente Alexiandre, Luis Cernuda, and among others, the youthful shepherd Miguel Hernández. They were contemporaries of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. This was the dawning of the avant-garde, the beginning of surrealism and the birth of the modern artistic movements. For these young writers, this emerging socialistic, humanitarian, progressive culture was exhilarating. And Delia radiated in this world which Pablo joined.

She was a militant communist and became one of the political teachers of the group. She had a revolutionary ardor.

Neruda soon left his wife and child and marries Delia. Maruca returned to Holland with their sick daughter. He never speaks to them again. Neruda doesn’t even mention the child in his memoirs. How could he abandon his daughter like that?

On July 18, 1936, General Francisco Franco's fascist generals launched a coup against the Republican government of Spain starting Spanish Civil War. Two days later Neruda and Lorca were supposed to watch a wrestling match in Madrid. Federico never showed up. He was already, at that hour, on the road to his death, captured by the fascists in a hideout, dragged up a hill, and executed for being a poet, a homosexual, and a liberal political activist. His assassination, that "criminal act," was for Neruda "the most painful in the course of a long struggle." A year prior, Neruda had written his "Ode to Federico García Lorca:"

If I could weep with fear in a solitary house,
if I could take out my eyes and eat them,
I would do it for your morning orange-tree voice
and for your poetry that comes forth shouting.

Neruda's political consciousness was sharply awakened. His poetry, which Republican soldiers print and share on torn sheets of paper in the field as they fight, would never be the same:

The Republican refugees fleeing into France became a humanitarian crisis. The French wanted them out. Neruda, though, was still consul to Spain. After securing support back home from Pedro Aquirre Cerda, the liberal radical president Neruda had just worked to elect, the poet organized a monumental effort to bring thousands of refugees into Chile. He finally secured the Winnipeg to cross the Atlantic.

In 1940 Neruda is named by Cerda’s Popular Front government to be consul to Mexico, blossoming and thorny, experiencing the leftist winds of Lázaro Cárdenas. There he made new friends like painter Diego Rivera and reconnected to many of the intellectuals from Spain.

But World War II raged across the ocean, as the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Neruda joined the Committee to Aid the Russian War Effort and wrote many lines of political poetry, including his “New Love Song to Stalingrad,”:

Yo escribí sobre el tiempo y sobre el agua,
describió el luto y su metal morado,
yo escribí sobre el cielo y la manzana,
ahora escribo sobre Stalingrad

I wrote about time and water,
I described morning and its bruised-colored metal,
I wrote about the sky and the apple,
now I write of Stalingrad

Many have criticized Neruda for his continued support of Stalin.

In 1943, returning to Chile from his post as consul to Mexico, Pablo Neruda, emissary of the ancestral force of poetry, heard the call of Macchu Picchu in Peru and came with his green pen and his heart in flames to these inaccessible peaks of ancient Inkas. Neruda then wrote one of his most important works, the "Heights of Macchu Picchu,” which consists of 12 linked poems building to a monumental crescendo.

"Heights of Macchu Picchu” would be included in his great book, Canto General, an envisioned epic poem of the history of the Americas. It is a communist interpretation, a humanitarian interpretation of man's struggle for justice in the New World. It would be banned in Chile but Neruda’s friends Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueros would paint an incredible edition in Mexico.

Returning to his native land in 1945, Neruda joined the Chilean Communist Party.

The party asked Neruda to run for the Senate from the desert copper mining province of the north.

He supported the miners’ organizing efforts, and wrote about their struggles. The workers elected Neruda as their senator.

But by 1947 the chill of the cold war was already being felt in Chile, and the President, Gabriel González Videla, cracked-downed on the left, a group whose votes helped put him into office.

Neruda accused his President of selling out to the United States. Videla crushed strikes and imprisoned hundreds of labor leaders and intellectuals in what Neruda called “Nazi-style concentration camps.” One of those camps would be used by the Pinochet regime just 26 years later.

Neruda wrote a long letter describing the situation, titled “The Crisis of Democracy in Chile Is a Dramatic Warning for Our Continent.” It was published in a Venezuelan newspaper and addressed to all the people of Latin America.

As Videla tried to impeach Neruda for his statements, the poet responded on the senate floor, accusing the president of many abuses, such as his use of the military against workers.

Videla then ordered his arrest, and Neruda fled into hiding.

No longer safe in his own country, a plan was devised where Neruda would head to the South, to escape into Argentina.

Eventually the poet arrived at a remote ranch where the foreman was a member of the party. After two days on horseback, the riders successfully traversed a clandestine indigenous Mapuche pass into Argentina.

In Buenos Aires he borrowed the Guatemalan Nobel laureate poet Miguel Angel Asturias’ passport and crossed the Atlantic to France. Pablo Picasso was the first to meet him. It was late April 1949 and he arrived just in time for the Congress of Partisans of Peace in Paris. There, Picasso announced to the Congress that he had a surprise and dramatically revealed Neruda to the distinguished crowd which included Diego Rivera, Langston Hughes and Charlie Chaplin, two founding members of the surrealism movement, Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon, the great Italian writer, Italo Calvino, the famous American athlete, singer, actor, and advocate of civil rights, Paul Robeson, and the great American scholar, W.E.B. DuBois.

The Chilean government denied the news that Pablo was in Europe and said they were hot on his trail. Borrowing from Mark Twain, Neruda told the press, “Say that I am not Pablo Neruda, but another Chilean who writes poetry, fights for freedom, and is also called Neruda.”

The poet, reunited with Delia, traveled throught Europe. He came to the Soviet Union, and saw the ancient new Leningrad, where he had an appointment with a poet dead for over a hundred years, Alexander Pushkin.

On the 28th of August, 1949, the poet arrived in Mexico City with Delia and Eluard. Neruda was representing the World Council for Peace at the American Continental Peace Congress. Afterwards, though, he fell ill and was bed-ridden. Among the visitors who filled his room was a Chilean woman who nursed him. She was from the South, a guitarist. Her name is Matilde Urrutia.

In 1950 Canto General was published worldwide. Banned in Chile, the Chilean Communist Party printed a clandestine edition.

He visited Nehru in India to talk about peace.

In Warsaw Neruda was awarded the World Peace Prize along with Pablo Picasso and Paul Robeson.

In 1951 he took the Trans-Siberian railroad and saw China for the first time after the revolution.

The Italians loved him. He read to capacity crowds and was made an honorary citizen of Milan, Florence, and Genoa. Neruda loved their olive oil and vino.

The Chilean government asked for Neruda’s expulsion from the country. Italy’s conservative police force began to pressure him, until he was invited to the island of Capri by the eminent historian Edwin Cerio to escape persecution.

As the poet wrote, on the island he and Matilde took refuge in their love.

On Capri, Neruda wrote a natural book out of natural amor for Matilde. It was published anonymously in 1952, entiled The Captain’s Verses. He published it anonymously so as to not hurt Delia, who was back in Chile.

In 1952, Chile reached a political turning point, with the Left gaining great momentum. It was now safe to return home. From "somewhere on the African coast," Neruda sent out a public message: "I am returning to my homeland in answer to a call from my people... We Chileans have much to do."

When he returned he was met by a tremendous welcome and widespread homage. Neruda began his work supporting the Popular Front’s socialist presidential candidate, Salvador Allende. Though Allende was defeated in this election, Neruda continued his political commitments to the Left.

While Neruda was busy with politics, writing, and reciting his poetry around the country and the world, he began construction on La Chascona, a separate home for himself and Matilde in Santiago, for he was still married to Delia. Soon, Neruda left Delia.

In a small fishing village along the rugged coast, Neruda and Delia early on had bought a small house which with Matilde the poet would transform into a poem. He called it Isla Negra after a big mound of rocks off the beach. Isla Negra was built out of the sands of the wild Pacific. Isla Negra is, to this day, real, spiritual, and mystical. It is here that Neruda and his new wife would spend most of their time.

Neruda wrote 5 books durning the 1960s. He would become the world’s most translated poet, from Yiddish to Chinese.

He started writing his odes, which were to everything, from a chestnut fallen on the ground to poverty.

The colors of his poetry seem to become even more vivid as he relaxed his form into a more personal poetry, never forgetting the political, never forgetting love:

In 1966, Arthur Miller and the P.E.N. club invited Neruda to New York. His visa was at first denied, but through the united action of poets putting pressure on the State Department, he finally arrived. In New York, they had to spontaneously set up closed circuit tv outside the auditorium for the hundreds who had not gotten in. At Berkely, he read his Canto General poem , The United Fruit Company: “When the trumpet sounded, everything on earth was prepared and Jehovah distributed the world to Coca Cola, Inc. , Anaconda, Ford Motors and other entities: The Fruit Company Inc. reserved the juiciest for itself, the central coast of my land, the sweet waist of America.”

Neruda said that he “learned on the spot that the North American enemies of our peoples were also enemies of the North American people.”

For Chile’s 1970 election, the different parties of the left organized under the banner of the Popular Unity coalation. Hopes were high.

The marxist-socialist Salvador Allende was running once again, and as the left rallied behind him, Neruda pledged him all his votes.

Despite the CIA’s aiding of the Right, Allende was democratically elected President of Chile.

After the vote, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stated, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

Allende honored his friend Neruda by naming the poet ambassador to France.

Back in Chile, a new society was being born, especially within my generation:

We were building a better society through our volunteer work brigades, through art, through music. Those days were exhilaratingly fresh.

But the transition to socialism was arduous.

Nixon blockaded Chilean copper exports, the mainstay of the economy
And then Allende went to the Kremlin and asked for a loan but the Soviets turned him down.

In the midst of all this, in 1971 Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The presentor tried to sum up Neruda by saying “Neruda is like catching a condor with a butterfly net. Neruda, in a nutshell, is an unreasonable proposition: the kernel bursts the shell. Nevertheless, one can do something to describe this kernel. What Neruda has achieved in his writing is community with existence. In his work, a continent awakens to conciousness.”

But the ambassador was growing ill with prostate cancer, and was forced to return to Chile.

On September 11, 1973, the CIA and Augusto Pinochet launched a military coup. Allende died during the seizure of the presidential building.

The military took over. Thousands of Chileans were taken and tortured. A decade of abductions and disappearances began.

Once again, Neruda’s friends were being killed by fascists.

Neruda died on September 23rd

For the first time since the day of the coup, the Left gathered publically for his funeral