Pablo Neruda

He was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in Parral, in the south of Chile; his mother, a schoolteacher, died two months after his birth, and he grew up in the rain-soaked frontier town of Temuco, where his railwayman father looked on his literary ambitions with distrust. Encouraged instead by Gabriela Mistral, then head of the local girls’ school, he was publishing poems while still a boy, and by 1920 had taken the name Pablo Neruda. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), written in his student years in Santiago, made him famous before he was twenty-one.

Honorary consulships in Rangoon, Colombo and Batavia gave him isolation and the dense, nocturnal poems of Residence on Earth. Posted to Spain in the 1930s, he came to know Lorca and Alberti, and the Civil War turned his work decisively toward politics. Elected a Communist senator in Chile, he was forced into hiding when the party was outlawed in 1948 and crossed the Andes on horseback into exile the following year. Canto General (1950), completed abroad, set out to sing the geology, flora, peoples and struggles of the Americas in a single sweeping cycle; the Elemental Odes that followed turned the same attention to onions, socks and salt.

When the Nobel Prize came in 1971 he was serving as Salvador Allende’s ambassador in Paris. He returned home ill, and died in a Santiago clinic on 23 September 1973, twelve days after the military coup; the circumstances of his death remain the subject of judicial inquiry. His houses at Isla Negra, Valparaíso and Santiago are now museums, and he is read throughout the Spanish-speaking world as something close to a national voice for an entire continent.