Pablo Neruda was the pen name of Chilean poet Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. Pablo Neruda was born in Chile in 1904 in a small town called Parral some 350 km south of the capital Santiago. His mother died shortly after his birth and his father remarried and moved the family.
Neruda composed his first poems at age 10. Although his father was not supportive, he received encouragement from others and published his first work at the age of 13. It was an essay entitled Entusiasmo y perseverancia under his own name. It was not until the mid-1920s that Neruda began to use his pen name which was inspired by the Czech poet Jan Neruda.
At the age of 16, Neruda moved to Santiago to pursue further studies but found himself focusing more on poems that his French studies. At 18, Neruda published his collection titled Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. This collection is still popular today. Unfortunately, his success on the international level did not guarantee him money and he lived a life of poverty for many years. To enable himself to survive he took on government jobs in far-off posts such as Burma and India.
In his government post, Neruda moved to Spain just in time to experience the Spanish Civil War. These experiences converted Neruda into an ardent communist for the rest of his life. The majority of his works in the 1930s and 40s reflect his passion for this cause. Pablo Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971 two years before his death from prostate cancer.
Click here to find a link to some of Neruda’s love poems in both Spanish and English.
