Of all the dead spots on the bookworm’s radar, the most unjust is probably South American literature. The Motorcycle Diaries probably forms the limits of many people’s awareness of South American literature, unless you include backpackers, who can often be spotted disembarking the plane with a dog-eared copy of García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude. In any case, mention the names of the great South American authors to most people and you are unlikely to get a response; Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa are probably dead names to them. In ignoring this literature, however, people miss a great deal of subtle, beautiful writing, exemplified particularly by the work of Pablo Neruda.
Born in 1904 as Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile, he published his first collection La canción de la fiesta (The Song of the Festival), when he was only 17. He took on his pseudonym (and later, legal name) around the same time, in homage to the nineteenth-century Czech Realist writer and poet, Jan Neruda. However, the collection that brought him his first burst of popularity was Veinte poemas del amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) in 1924, a lyrical and vital account of an adolescent’s discovery of the power of love. It brought recognition both for the mysterious, ambivalent women to whom the poetry is addressed, and for its treatment of nature and the universe. This is the first of Neruda’s poetry to have become absorbed into the South American mind, its tags recalled unconsciously in the same way that Shakespeare’s are in Britain, and much of his later style may be traced beneath these youthful fragments of emotion. There is an orality in this poetry, as in his later works, which attempts to transmute writing into song; a beguiling musicality pervades each poem, drawing the reader’s mind effortlessly through a cycle of thought. The collection also has a playful lightness to it:

I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells
dark hazels and rustic baskets of kisses
(”Juegas todos los dias” / “Every Day You Play…”).

However, Veinte Poemas contains a sense of incredible isolation; of the overwhelming distances between person and person, typified by lines such as “To hear the immense night, still more immense without her” from “Puedo Escribir los Versos…” (”Tonight I Can Write…”). It is a world away from his mature attempts to encompass the whole of South American suffering through his own experience of it, in 1950’s Canto general (General Song). Neruda gradually became aware of this isolation; the poetry written immediately after it, when he was serving as a diplomat away from Chile, such as Residencia en la Tierra I-II (Residence on Earth, 1933-35), confronts, in a considerably darker tone, an empty and desolate universe:

the rain falls on me and it is like me
it is like me in its raving, alone in the dead world
repulsed as it falls and with no persistent form
(”Debil de Alba”/ “Weak with the Dawn”).

However, the Residencias are still highly personal and apolitical. It was not until the horrors of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 had provided a catalyst for his poetry and for his joining of the Communist party that Neruda’s mature voice emerged. After this traumatic experience his universe expanded; where people had previously seemed remote, they now became painfully close and there was a sense that their suffering subsumed his own. If this change in tone, this emerging political voice, was dramatic, Neruda was well aware of it. Seeking to convey his own shock at the change in himself and in the world he represented in his poetry, he bitterly rejected the expectations of his readers in self-mocking poetry such as “Explico algunas cosas” (”I’m Explaining Some Things”):

And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets.

By the time he began writing his South American epic, Canto general, he had become a Communist activist, reading his poetry aloud at trade union meetings and political rallies. Naturally, the experience influenced this ambitious poem, creating a distinctly oratorical tone. The heightened, rhetorical tone and mixture of poetic genres, including descriptive poetry, polemic and lament, allowed Neruda to widen his audience, transcending an entirely elite readership, without compromising on complexity. By aiming in the Canto to trace the history and geography of the whole of South America, Neruda deliberately sought this wider audience. He elevated the ordinary people to a level where they could be seen as fit subjects for poetry and received them into a unity with the continent, exemplified by lines such as:

I see the ancient being, the slave, the sleeping one
blanket his fields - a body, a thousand bodies, a man, a thousand
(XI, “Alturas de Macchu Picchu”/ “The Heights of Macchu Picchu”)

Far from the silence and isolation that characterised his youthful verse, here even inanimate objects and landscapes are given a voice; the voice of the poet becomes the voice of the continent as a whole. This epic poem, arguably the first of its kind, is perhaps Neruda’s crowning achievement.
In the fifties and sixties Neruda continued to write political poetry and even stood as the Chilean Communist Party Candidate for the presidency in 1969, before stepping down in favour of Salvador Allende. However, he also stepped away a little from polemic in his later years, partially turning his focus back towards the natural world and man’s relationship with it, whilst also confronting his awareness of mortality. In 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Poetry; he died in 1973, shortly after the coup which ousted Allende.
Neruda’s legacy is one which deserves appreciation, not just among Spanish speakers or even academics and students of literature, but also among general readers. There are many good translations and, since Neruda aimed to take poetry to the people, even readers entirely new to South American poetry will find the simple beauty of his poetry accessible.