The Unknown Neruda

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 Neftalí 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.