Product Description

In his long life as a poet, Pablo Neruda succeeded in becoming what many poets have aspired to but never achieved: a public voice, a voice not just for the people of his country but for his entire continent. Widely translated, he probably reached more readers than any poet in history; justly so, for, as he often said, his "poet's obligation" was to become a voice for all those who had no voice, an aspiration that stemmed from his long-time commitment to the communist faith. Born in 1904 in the rainy south of Chile, he enjoyed from an early age the luck of attention. One of his first books, Twenty Love Poems, became a bible for lovers in the Spanish language, and confirmed him in his poet's vocation. At the same time he pursued a lifelong career as a diplomat, serving in a series of consular posts in the Far East and Europe. In 1971, while serving as Chilean ambassador to France, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. In a famous essay, "On Impure Poetry," Neruda calls for "a poetry as impure as old clothes, as a body with its foodstains and its shame, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, wakefulness, prophesies, declarations of love and hate, stupidities, shocks, idylls, political beliefs, negations, doubts, affirmations, and taxes."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #72405 in Books
• Published on: 1992-03-26
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Customer Reviews

A fine introduction to Neruda's work
A girlfriend handed me this book while she went upstairs to change for our date. She came down ready 20 minutes later but we never actually left the house, as we spent the evening reading Neruda's poems to each other. Neruda writes with such imagination, conjouring delicate and emotive images that sometimes require several readings to appreciate. Delightful, intelligent and more, it has been very sympathetically translated, though some of his rhyming works lose their rhyme in translation.

The most touching poems ever
This book is filled with some of the best works of Pablo Neruda. Reading it brought back memories of people I know and have met. The poem Escribir, Por ejemplo:'la noche...., this poem was the first given to me by a very good spanish friend.

Poor layout
This is a surprisingly poorly-produced edition. The bilingual layout has the Spanish text nicely laid out on the left pages, and the English on the right, but the gutter chosen for the English is wrong so that the text is practically in the spine and the book has to be forced right open for comfortable reading. The paper is also poor. Nothing can spoil the poems themselves, of course.