Neruda Esencial

Recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the International Peace Prize "The call for a more accessible collection of Neruda's important poems is answered with City Lights' The Essential Neruda, a 200-page edition that offers 50 of Neruda's key poems."-- The Bloomsbury Review This bilingual collection of Neruda's most essential poems is indispensable. Selected by a team of poets and prominent Neruda scholars in both Chile and the U.S., this is a definitive selection that draws from the entire breadth and width of Neruda's various styles and themes. An impressive group of translators that includes Alistair Reid, Stephen Mitchell, Robert Hass, Stephen Kessler and Jack Hirschman, have come together to revisit or completely retranslate the poems; and a handful of previously untranslated works are included as well. This selection sets the standard for a general, high--quality introduction to Neruda's complete oeuvre. " ...The Essential Neruda will prove to be, for most readers, the best introduction to Neruda available in English. In fact, I can think of few other books that have given me so much delight so easily. At only 234 pages (bilingual), it somehow manages to convey the fullness of Neruda's poetic arc: Reading it is like reading the autobiography of a poetic sensibility (granted, the abridged version)."--The Austin Chronicle "This book is a must-have for any reader interested in a definitive sampling of the most essential poems by one whom many consider one of the best poets of the 20th century."--Mike Nobles, Tulsa World "What better way to celebrate the hundred years of Neruda's glorious residence on our earth than this selection of crucial works-- in both languages -- by one of the greatest poets of all time. A splendid way to begin a love affair with our Pablo or, having already succumbed to his infinite charms, revisit him passionately again and again and yet again."--Ariel Dorfman, author of Konfidenz and The Nanny and the Iceberg "If the notion had struck Pablo Neruda, I am quite sure that like Fernando Pessoa and Antonio Machado he would have given birth to what the former called heteronyms. Like Pessoa especially, Neruda can be several poets according to where he is and when and what his mood might be. It is quite fitting therefore that his work in this anthology be shared by various translators, for, ideally, a translator is but another heteronym speaking in a different tongue and at a different time. Neruda is well served here by these other voices of his."--Gregory Rabassa "The editors and translators know how to extract gold from a lifetime of prolific writing. If you want a handy Neruda companion and don't know where to begin, this is it."--The Bloomsbury Review

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was the greatest Latin American poet of the 20th century. A prolific, inspirational poet, he wrote many different kinds of poems covering a wide range of themes, notably love, death, grief and despair.

The polemics Pablo Neruda was involved in from the 1930s on are legendary, but not even the ferocity of those attacks would lead one to believe that today, a half a century after his death, he would still be on trial. In this consistent and emphatic book, the great Nerudian critic Hernan Loyola addresses Neruda's sins: the machista, the fableteller, the rapist, the bad husband, the bad father, the plagiarist, the insolent one, the abandoner, the Stalinist and the bourgeois. Loyola's objective is to review and discuss with the greatest amount of intellectual honesty that he can humanly muster as an admiring literary critic and with deep sympathy for his unforgettable friend the most tenacious and disseminated accusations attributed to Pablo Neruda. All told, this book is an impressive biographical and poetic interpretation of the most salient aspects of the Nobel Laureate's life.

Pablo Neruda was without doubt one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century but his work is extremely uneven. There is a view that there are two Nerudas, an early Romantic visionary and a later Marxist populist, who denied his earlier poetic self. By focussing on the poet's apprenticeship, and by looking closely at how Neruda created his poetic persona within his poems, this Companion tries to establish what should survive of his massive output. By seeing his early work as self exploration through metaphor and sound, as well as through varieties of love and direct experience, the Companion outlines a unity behind all the work, based on voice and a public self. Neruda's debt to reading and books is studied in depth and the change in poetics re-examined by concentrating on the early work up to Residencia en la tierra I and II and why he wanted to become a poet. Debate about quality and representativity is grounded in his Romantic thinking, sensibility and sincerity. Unlike a Borges or a Paz who accompanied their creative work with analytical essays, Neruda distilled all his experiences into his poems, which remainhis true biography. Jason Wilson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies, University College London.

In this compelling collection, Teresa Longo gathers a diverse group of critical and poetic voices to analyze the politics of packaging and marketing Neruda and Latin American poetry in general in the United States.

Verses Against the Darkness: offers a new assessment of Pablo Neruda's poetry by looking at the intersection of his aesthetic method and political radicalism from 1925 to 1954. It challenges the canonical view that Neruda was a gifted verse maker who, in 1936, let himself be carried away by the excesses of communist politics. Instead, by focusing primarily on Tercera residencia (1935-1945), Greg Dawes argues for an uneven yet steady evolution and continuity in Neruda's work, politics, and morality. Dawes relies on historical accounts, biographies, literary history, and criticism - and on Neruda's political and aesthetic theory - to prove that his poetry became, contrary to received critical opinion, more sophisticated literarily and politically as he became more radicalized during the Spanish Civil War and World War II and as he developed his dialectical realism or guided spontaneity. Greg Dawes is Associate Professor of Latin American and World Literatures at North Carolina State University and is the editor of the on-line journal A contracorriente.

"Chilean Pablo Neruda is Latin America's greatest poet and one of the finest ever to have written in the Spanish language. The Peruvian poet, Cesar Vallejo, part Indian and born in a mining village, ranks not far below Neruda. Robert Bly is one of America's foremost poets, and a translator of uncommon brilliance. The combination makes for a priceless volume."—Long Beach Press Telegram