A career-spanning volume, charting the Nobel laureate’s work in the ode form Pablo Neruda was a master of the ode, which he conceived as an homage to just about everything that surrounded him, from an artichoke to the clouds in the sky, from the moon to his own friendship with Federico García Lorca and his favorite places in Chile. He was in his late forties when he committed himself to writing an ode a week and in the end produced a total of 225, which are dispersed throughout his varied oeuvre. This bilingual volume, edited by Ilan Stavans, a distinguished translator and scholar of Latin American literature, gathers all the odes together for the first time in any language. Rendered into English by an assortment of accomplished translators that include Philip Levine, Paul Muldoon, Mark Strand, and Margaret Sayers Peden, collectively they read like the personal diary of a man in search of meaning, who sings to life itself, to our connection to one another, and to the place we have in nature and the cosmos. The odes are also a lasting statement on the role of poetry as a lighting-rod during tumultuous times.
Author
Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean writer and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. Neruda assumed his pen name as a teenager, partly because it was in vogue, partly to hide his poetry from his father, a rigid man who wanted his son to have a "practical" occupation. Neruda's pen name was derived from Czech writer and poet Jan Neruda; Pablo is thought to be from Paul Verlaine. With his works translated into many languages, Pablo Neruda is considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century. Neruda was accomplished in a variety of styles, ranging from erotically charged love poems like his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a controversial award because of his political activism. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language." On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people in honor of Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Salvador Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people. During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic posts and served a stint as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When Conservative Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in a house basement in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende. Neruda was hospitalized with cancer at the time of the Chilean coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet. Three days after being hospitalized, Neruda died of heart failure. Already a legend in life, Neruda's death reverberated around the world. Pinochet had denied permission to transform Neruda's funeral into a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets to pay their respects. Neruda's funeral became the first public protest against the Chilean military dictatorship.
