A Poet of Multitudes

Pablo Neruda is often compared to Walt Whitman. In fact, the Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner outdid Whitman in some respects. His poems have been memorized and recited by ordinary people across his vast continent. He is perhaps the most widely translated poet in the world. Even in English, his poems have been translated by numerous hands in scattered editions. The major accomplishment of this new collection, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, is that it brings together a capacious sampling of his work, ranging from the classic Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) to several elegiac volumes published posthumously in 1974. There is also an informative, lively commentary by its editor, Ilan Stavans.

This is not a fully bilingual edition; only a sampling of the poems appear in Spanish. The 1973 Complete Works in Spanish amounts to 3,522 pages of poetry, so it would have been impossible to include everything in either English or Spanish. But Stavans has assembled the most complete anthology of Neruda yet available in English, drawing evenhandedly from the various stages of the poet's long and complex career. Neruda was, it seems, at least half a dozen poets, many of them in competition with the others. Needless to say, there are wonders in these pages that will delight readers unfamiliar with the tumultuously varied planet known as Neruda.

Neruda died of cancer in September of 1973, less than two weeks after the tragic overthrow of the Allende government by Augusto Pinochet, the US-supported dictator. Neruda had served Allende and his party in various ways, including as ambassador to France during his last years. The symbolic (and widely reported) ransacking of his houses shortly after his death must remain one of the sadder moments in the violent political chronicle of Chile.

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