It may come as no surprise that a country as deeply polarized by its recent history as Chile is also at war over the relevance of its preëminent poet, Pablo Neruda. In December, fifty years after the coup d’état that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, Chileans rejected an attempt to write a new constitution to replace the heavily amended one adopted by the dictator’s regime. It was the second plebiscite aimed at doing so in two years. The first time, in September, 2022, voters rejected a left-wing reform in a landslide. In December, a right-wing alternative was also soundly rejected, underscoring the extent to which, as the writer and political commentator Patricio Fernández told me, “building agreements” has become “extremely difficult” in Chile.
Neruda was arguably the most important Spanish-language poet of the twentieth century, and a symbol of the Chile that succumbed to Pinochet. He died in September, 1973, twelve days after the coup overthrew the government of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist President and a friend of Neruda’s. For generations, Neruda’s prestige seemed beyond reproach. In recent years, however, his life and death have been subjected to new scrutiny—and the interpretation and legitimacy of his work along with them. But the difficulty in reaching a consensus about the poet is the result of efforts coming not from opposing political camps but from within the left, to which he historically belonged. One side seeks to portray him as a perpetrator, the other as a victim. The former is Chile’s formidable feminist movement; the latter is led by the Communist Party—which Neruda was a longtime member of and which is now part of the governing coalition—and by some of his nephews and nieces, who are determined to prove that the poet was assassinated by the dictatorship.
Neruda’s life traversed a good part of the twentieth century, and from early on he knew what he was meant to do. He was born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto on July 12, 1904, and grew up in Temuco, in the southern Araucanía region, which was known for its magnificent virgin forests and the relentless rainfall that he called, in the first pages of his “Memoirs,” the “one unforgettable presence” of his childhood. His father, a train driver, opposed his desire to become a poet and, according to Adam Feinstein, Neruda’s biographer, took him on long train rides through the forests, in an effort to distract his son from writing. Those rides, however, only fuelled a love of nature, which shaped much of Neruda’s work. He became a published writer at thirteen, when a local newspaper printed a short essay in which he argued that “enthusiasm and perseverance” are the engines of progress. At the age of sixteen, to hide his identity from his father—and possibly in homage to the Czech realist writer and poet Jan Neruda—he adopted the pen name Pablo Neruda. His first book of poems, “Crepusculario” (“Book of Twilight”), was published three years later. A month shy of turning twenty, he released “Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada” (“Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”), about the heartbreak of falling in love, which remains one of the most iconic books of poems in Spanish.
“The naturalness of these lines, their exuberant and youthful melancholy, their casual repetitions, their over-all simplicity mark Neruda’s early style and account in some measure for the continued popularity of the book,” Mark Strand, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, wrote in this magazine, in 2003. The twentieth poem in the collection, which is perhaps the most famous, begins:
Neruda studied French and pedagogy at the University of Chile, in Santiago, but soon devoted himself to writing. His initial literary success brought him “a small aura of respectability,” he later wrote in “Memoirs,” and in 1927 he used it to get an appointment, through a well-connected friend, with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who offered him a position as consul in colonial Burma.
In 1933, Neruda published a very different kind of book, “Residencia en la Tierra” (“Residence on Earth”), a collection of Surrealist poems, some about the Chilean landscape, that he wrote, in part, during his years spent abroad as consul. After Burma, he was sent to Colombo, then to Java—where, in 1930, at the age of twenty-six, he married María Antonia Hagenaar, known as Maruca, with whom he had his only child, Malva Marina—and later to Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. Feinstein described the collection as “hard to understand because of its obscure imagery, its hermetic richness,” but noted that it contains “some of the most beautiful poetry ever written in Spanish.” From “Walking Around”:
Neruda was living in Madrid when the Spanish Civil War broke out, in July, 1936. A month later, his friend Federico García Lorca was executed by a Nationalist firing squad. For the first time, Neruda’s work became politically engaged, and in 1937 he published “España en el Corazón” (“Spain in Our Hearts”), an antifascist hymn. He returned to Santiago, but when the republic fell, in 1939, he was sent to Paris, where he led the evacuation of more than two thousand Spanish refugees to Chile on the Winnipeg, a French cargo ship that had to be refitted; he later called the mission his most enduring poem. After a stint as consul in Mexico, he returned to Chile, where, in 1945, he was elected to the Senate and officially joined the Communist Party. A couple of years later, at the onset of the Cold War, the government of President Gabriel González Videla, which had been elected with Communist support, shifted to the right and initiated a crackdown on workers and Party members. After Neruda condemned González Videla on the Senate floor, he was accused of treason and an order was issued for his arrest. Neruda went into hiding until, a year later, he left the country, crossing the Andes on horseback to Argentina, and then went into exile in Europe.
In 1950, a collection that was widely regarded as his masterpiece, “Canto General,” was published in Mexico. More than five hundred pages long, it contains, in three hundred and forty poems, a history of the New World and its Indigenous peoples. The writer and literary critic Diamela Eltit noted, in 2004, that parts of “Canto General” try to “break with white history.” Strand described it as Whitmanesque. From the collection’s first canto, “A Lamp on Earth”:
Neruda returned to Chile in 1952, when the González Videla government, mired in scandal, was coming to an end. Apart from the two years Neruda served as Allende’s Ambassador to France, he remained in Chile and kept writing for the rest of his life; he wrote more than fifty books, most of which were poetry, and received the Stalin Peace Prize, in 1953, and the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1971. He came to the United States in 1966 and, according to the Times, was “received ecstatically at poetry readings in New York.” In 1972, seventy thousand people filled Chile’s national football stadium to hear him. “He was one of the last rock-star poets,” Feinstein told me.
Neruda continued to be celebrated and widely read long after his death. The poet and novelist Alejandro Zambra recalled that in 2004, the centenary of Neruda’s birth, dozens of new books about him were published. “The climate was hagiographic: he was practically a saint,” Zambra said, adding that Chile is “a country of poets. It’s kind of our national pride.” Gabriel Boric, Chile’s youngest-ever President, reportedly recites obscure Chilean poetry at social gatherings. Yet a 2022 poll found that just seventeen per cent of readers in Chile read poetry. So, Zambra said, “Neruda is, possibly, the only poet a good part of Chile has actually read.” Neruda stood thus as a national monument, an iconic figure both ubiquitous and distant. His verses adorned subway cars and posters sold in street fairs. The Pablo Neruda Foundation manages museums in the three main homes he lived in—in Santiago, Valparaíso, and Isla Negra—which are visited by more than three hundred thousand people every year.
Things started to change in 2011, when students demanding higher-education reform sparked some of the largest mass demonstrations in Chile since the end of the Pinochet era. The political upheaval ushered in a new generation of left-wing politicians, many of whom now serve in the Boric administration, and a transformational feminist movement, which in the following years called for an accounting of Chile’s institutional violence against women. People took to the streets to demand nonsexist education in schools and to protest the sexual harassment of women. As part of that process, personal information about Neruda that had been in the public domain for decades was recast in a different, more critical light—including his relationship to his daughter, Malva Marina, who was born with hydrocephalus, an excess of fluid in the brain that can be fatal. In a letter to a friend, Neruda described her as “a perfectly ridiculous being, a kind of semicolon, a three-kilogram vampire.” Then, the year the Spanish Civil War broke out, he left his wife, Maruca, for Delia del Carril, an Argentinean artist twenty years his senior who was active in intellectual and left-wing political circles in Europe. Maruca bitterly demanded money in writing, and a narrative emerged of Neruda as a cruel man who abandoned his wife and his daughter. (Malva Marina died at the age of eight.)
Neruda was also denounced as a womanizer. He married del Carril in 1943 in Mexico, later living with her in Chile and in exile, but after nearly twenty years he left her for Matilde Urrutia, a singer and writer who eventually became his third wife. He was often infatuated with other women, too; toward the end of his life, he fell in love with Matilde’s niece. Worse, he was accused of rape. The Spanish title of “Memoirs” is “Confieso Que He Vivido” (“I Confess That I’ve Lived”). The book, which was published posthumously, in 1974, was a critical success—a Times reviewer called it “marvelous, exasperating”—but a brief passage that had elicited little condemnation was now being highlighted. In it, Neruda describes an encounter, when he was in his late twenties and serving as consul in Colombo, with a Tamil maid. One morning, he wrote:
The last two sentences in the passage are the only indication that Neruda regretted his actions. (There is no other mention or evidence of rape in his life or work.) “It is clearly a confession, in a book titled ‘I Confess,’ ” Feinstein told me.
An illustration of Neruda with the caption “Confieso Que He Violado” (“I Confess That I Have Raped”), posted online by the artist Carla Moreno Saldías, went viral. A legislative project to rename the Santiago airport after Neruda was protested until Congress dropped it. Pamela Jiles, a member of Congress, said, “These are not the times to pay homage to an abuser of women who abandoned his sick child and confessed a rape, much less as the face of our country.” Karen Vergara Sánchez, a student activist, told the Guardian, “We have started to demystify Neruda now, because we have only recently begun to question rape culture.” This demystification has extended to Neruda’s work, some of which is now seen as sexist. In “Me Gusta Cuando Callas” (“I Like You When You’re Silent”), one of the “Twenty Love Poems,” he writes:
María Rosa Olivera-Williams, a professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Notre Dame and the author of a forthcoming essay on the women in Neruda’s life, interprets the work differently. She points to the final verses, which she recited in Spanish:
“His work has been read as sexist because we know of all the broken relationships in his life,” Olivera-Williams told me. “But in reality, he maintained very long-lasting friendships with most of his lovers, except the mother of his daughter. The women in his poetry almost always have agency.” Nevertheless, Chilean women marched with placards that read “Neruda, Cállate Tú” (“Neruda, You Shut Up”). And they proposed that, instead of Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, an extraordinary writer from a generation earlier who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945, should be recognized as Chile’s foremost poet.
As a counterpoint to the critical scrutiny of Neruda’s life and work, a very different type of revision was litigated in court, this time focussed on his death. Neruda was diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent treatment before the coup. While convalescing at home, he learned of Allende’s death during the military assault on the Presidential palace. Neruda, who was still a member of the Communist Party, was an obvious target for the regime. “He was in shock. He started receiving detailed information about how people were being detained, how his friends had to hide or flee. His world crumbled. His homes were raided by the military,” Mónica González, a reporter known for her investigative work on the Pinochet era, told me. Neruda wasn’t feeling well and was taken to a clinic in Santiago. The Mexican government dispatched a plane to get Neruda out of the country, but this never came to be. Four days later, he was pronounced dead. His death certificate listed cancer as the cause. A spontaneous crowd marched behind Neruda’s coffin at his funeral, in what has been described as the first public act of defiance against the dictatorship. In the years that followed, a narrative developed that the poet had succumbed to grief over the fate of his country.
Then, in 2011, an alternative story began to emerge: Neruda had been murdered. The allegation started with Manuel Araya, Neruda’s driver and a member of the Communist Party. On the day of Neruda’s death, Araya told the Mexican magazine Proceso, he and Matilde drove home from the clinic to pick up some personal items. While they were at the house, Neruda called and urged them to come back immediately, because a doctor had injected a substance into his stomach as he slept. When they arrived, Araya said, they saw a red spot on his belly. Another doctor then asked Araya to drive to a pharmacy to pick up some medicine. On the way, he was kidnapped by military forces, tortured, and detained for weeks. Neruda died hours after Araya left the clinic.
Based on Araya’s testimony, the Communist Party and four of Neruda’s nephews and nieces requested an investigation. It was led by a judge, Mario Carroza Espinosa, in secret proceedings, according to the old Chilean criminal procedural code, which was still being applied to human-rights cases from the period. In April, 2013, at Carroza’s request, Neruda’s remains were exhumed to be tested for poison. Since then, three panels of forensic experts have offered different conclusions. The first exam was conducted by experts from Chile, the United States, and Spain, who concluded in November, 2013, that no forensic evidence pointed to a cause of death other than metastatic cancer. The second was also performed by international experts, including in Denmark and Canada, who found traces of Clostridium botulinum, a potentially deadly bacterium, in one of Neruda’s molars. The exam was not able to establish, though, how and when it had got there; it could have occurred posthumously. The same panel established that his death certificate wrongly stated that he had suffered from cancer cachexia, which manifests as a severe decline in fat and muscle mass; the conclusion was reached after analyzing, among other things, the size of the belt that he was wearing at the time of his death, which showed that he was still a corpulent man. In early 2023, the third international panel reportedly agreed that the bacterium had been present in Neruda’s body when he died. But they couldn’t determine whether it had been injected or if it had caused his death.
The rest of the evidence collected during the twelve-year investigation is circumstantial. A now deceased doctor testified that, at the clinic, he had handed over care of Neruda to a “Dr. Prize” or “Dr. Price,” whom he described as blond, tall, and white-skinned. But there are no records or any additional testimony about him. Those who support the poisoning theory cite the case of the former President Eduardo Frei, who had become an opponent of Pinochet and died in 1982, in the same clinic. Frei’s death was attributed to complications from a medical procedure, until, in 2019, a judge ruled that he had been poisoned. Yet both a Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court subsequently rejected the ruling, concluding that the death had been caused by medical complications.
In 2013, Mónica González reported that the Pinochet regime did use toxic substances, including Clostridium botulinum, against its opponents, but not until 1975. She also mentioned that, immediately after the coup, the regime had hospitals in Santiago searched for left-wing militants who had been injured in confrontations with the military—many of whom were kidnapped and killed—and that this could explain the presence of unidentified people, such as the doctor who allegedly assumed care of Neruda. The fiftieth anniversary of the coup brought with it an avalanche of declassified documents and revelations, González added, “but nothing new surfaced about Neruda.”
Judge Paola Plaza, who took over the case a few years ago, has investigated human-rights violations from the Pinochet era, and she sat on the Court of Appeals that overturned the Frei verdict. Last September, she closed the Neruda investigation, but Neruda’s relatives and the Communist Party petitioned that the case be reopened. “Many proceedings are still pending,” Rodolfo Reyes, one of the nephews, told me. But Plaza rejected the petition on the ground that the lines of investigation had been “exhausted” and given “all available resources.” The case is currently with the Court of Appeals. Many in Chile think that the court will consider the evidence inconclusive. “Neruda loved detective novels,” Feinstein told me. “He would have loved to have been at the center of this mystery.” But for many the truth about his death does not depend on a judicial verdict. “Neruda was a martyr of the dictatorship whether he was poisoned or not,” Raúl Zurita, another major Chilean poet, said.
The same meaning can’t be said, though, of Neruda’s legacy and his reputation. His love poems are still assigned reading in Chilean schools, and his work is regularly included in Latin American literature programs around the world. His books are available in forty-two languages, according to Fernando Sáez, the executive director of the Pablo Neruda Foundation, which manages his estate. New editions of his works were recently published in Spain and France, Sáez said, and an illustrated edition of “Twenty Love Poems” was just released in China.
But the way Neruda’s work is read has fundamentally changed. His life is now “like a black thread flowing alongside the brightness of his work,” Zurita said. Ignacio López-Calvo, a professor at the University of California, Merced, and the editor of an upcoming volume of essays contextualizing Neruda’s writing, told me that his students confront him about teaching the poet’s work. How does he feel about Neruda’s behavior toward women and his daughter? “I answer that I found it horrific, but that we need to read his work,” he told me. The author Isabel Allende, a relative of the late President and a champion of women’s rights, agreed. “Like many young feminists in Chile I am disgusted by some aspects of Neruda’s life and personality,” she told the Guardian, a few years ago. “However, we cannot dismiss his writing.”
Zambra is hopeful that the revisionism will bring people closer to Neruda’s poems. (“To read him out of his own myth is to read him better,” he said.) For Zurita, “Neruda is one of the greatest poets in Spanish. If we take him out, we are left with a void bigger than the Pacific Basin.” He is convinced that Neruda’s “word will emerge again.” And if it doesn’t, he said, “it will be because the world is over.” ♦
