pablo neruda

Pablo Neruda whose real name is Neftalí Basoalto, was born on 12 July 1904, in the town of Parral in Chile.His father was a railway employee and his mother, who died shortly after his birth was a teacher. Some years later his father, who had then moved to Temuco, remarried dona Malverde. The poet spent his childhood and youth in Temuco, where he also got to know Gabriela Mistral, head of the girls' secondary school, who took a liking to him. At the early age of thirteen he began to contribute some articles to the daily news papaer among them, Entusiasmo y Perseverancia - his first publication - and his first poem. In 1920, he became a contributor to the literary journal Selva Austral under the name of Pablo Neruda, Some of the poems Neruda wrote at that time are to be found in his first published book Crepusculario. The following year we saw the publication of Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada, one of his best-known and most translated works. Also , Neruda studied French and pedagogy at the University of Chile. .(stavans 1)

Between 1927 and 1935, the government put him in charge of a number of honorary consulships, which took him to Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. His poetic production during that difficult period included, among other works, the collection poems, Residencia en la tierra , which marked his literary breakthrough.

The Spanish Civil War and the murder of García Lorca, whom Neruda knew, affected him strongly and made him join the Republican movement, first in Spain, and later in France, where he started working on his collection of poems . The same year he returned to his native country, to which he had been recalled, and his poetry during the following period was characterised by an orientation towards political and social matters. España en el Corazón had a great impact by virtue of its being printed in the middle of the front during the civil war. (Echevarría, Roberto González 3)

In 1939,