The Unknown Neruda - Tapa blanda

Referred to as `the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language', the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda has been published in the original Spanish and in translation throughout the world. So it is remarkable that some of this Nobel Prize-winner's verse has never been published in English and this book goes a long way to filling this extraordinary gap. Edited and translated by Neruda's acclaimed biographer, Adam Feinstein, these brand-new versions begin in 1919, when the fifteen-year-old boy, still called Neftali Reyes, was feeling his literary way in Temuco, in southern Chile. The book follows him to the capital, Santiago, and to his first published collection, Crepusculario, in 1923, then on through many of his further collections up to his final works in the early 1970s. Neruda's poetry is a fusion of beautiful love poetry and politically engaged verse, lyrical and apocalyptic by turns, and in few poets can life and work be so intimately interwoven: Adam Feinstein provides an illuminating introduction which puts these poems in the context of a man of memorable actions as well as words.

Numerous critics have praised Neruda as the greatest poet writing in the Spanish language during his lifetime. Born Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes y Basoalto, Neruda grew up in Temuco in the backwoods of southern Chile. Among his early teachers was the poet Gabriela Mistral, who would be a Nobel laureate years before Neruda. While in Santiago attending college, Neruda completed one of his most critically acclaimed and original works, `Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair'. Neruda's professional career as Chilean consul, first in the Far East and then in Spain, involved him in the international republican and Communist movements, which led to a marked and enduring politicization of his poetics. After the election of the Socialist President of Chile, Salvador Allende, Neruda was dispatched as ambassador to France, and it was during this posting that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.