Poetry of Pablo Neruda

"In his work a continent awakens to consciousness." So wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet." Born Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, Neruda adopted his pen name (in homage to the Czech poet Jan Neruda) to shield himself from family disapproval; by the age of twenty-five he was famous for the romantic verses-Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair-that remain his most beloved. Neruda was appointed an honorary consul abroad, serving in Burma, Spain, and France, where his moral and political convictions began to shape his art. Residence on Earth, written in the early nineteen-thirties, represented a stylistic breakthrough, which in turn gave way to an ideological one. In the forties, the sprawling historical chronicle Canto General cemented Neruda's role as a dissident man of letters. He was persecuted for his Communist beliefs when he returned to Chile in 1943, serving some of the years of a single senatorial term in hiding, then in exile, and he carried on his fight for the dignity of ordinary men and women into his last days, finally against the dictator Augusto Pinochet. This selection of Neruda's poetry, the most comprehensive single volume available in English, presents nearly six hundred poems, scores of them in new and sometimes multiple translations, and many accompanied by the Spanish original. In his introduction, Ilan Stavans situates Neruda in his native milieu as well as in a contemporary English-language one, and a group of new translations by leading contemporary poets testifies to Neruda's enduring, vibrant legacy among English-speaking writers and readers today.Neruda, Pablo is the author of 'Poetry of Pablo Neruda', published 0000 under ISBN 9780374299958 and ISBN 0374299951.