Pablo Neruda

Temuco, and a name borrowed from a Czech

His mother died a month after he was born. His father, a railway worker, moved the family north to Temuco, a frontier town in the rainy forest country of southern Chile, where the boy entered the Liceo de Hombres — the boys' secondary school — in 1910 and began publishing poems in local papers as a teenager. His father disapproved of poetry, so he signed himself Pablo Neruda, after the nineteenth-century Czech poet and storyteller Jan Neruda, and kept the invention for life. It became his legal name later.

He went to Santiago to study French, and instead wrote Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada — Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair — published in 1924, weeks before his twentieth birthday. The poems are frank about sex in a way Spanish-language verse had not been, and plain enough that people who never read poetry read these. He was famous in Chile at twenty and had almost no money, which is how the diplomatic service acquired him: in April 1927 the government made him honorary consul in Rangoon, in British Burma, a post whose salary was whatever fees the consulate collected.

Twenty July 1927: Paris for three days

He left Santiago on 14 June 1927 for a post on the other side of the world, and took the long way — by sea via Buenos Aires and across the Atlantic. He reached Madrid on 16 July and Paris on 20 July, then went down to Marseille to pick up the boat east. The University of Chile's chronology of his life gives the stop three lines. He was twenty-three, had a famous book behind him, spoke almost no French, and was passing through the literary capital of the world on his way to a job he had taken because it paid at all.

The Asian years that followed — Rangoon, then Colombo in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, then Batavia in Java, now Jakarta in Indonesia, where he married a Dutch bank employee, María Antonieta Hagenaar, in 1930 — were the loneliest of his life and produced Residencia en la tierra, 'Residence on Earth', the dense, hallucinatory book that made his reputation among other poets. He came home in 1932, was posted to Buenos Aires in 1933, and there, at a party on 13 October, met the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. The friendship redirected everything that came next.

The war in Spain, organised from Paris

Neruda was consul in Barcelona in 1934 and then in Madrid, at the centre of the Spanish poetic generation around Lorca, when the Spanish Civil War began on 18 July 1936 — the military rising against Spain's elected Republic that would kill some half a million people in three years. Lorca was murdered within weeks by the Nationalists, the rebel side under General Francisco Franco. Neruda, who had been a resolutely private poet of love and dread, turned political in a single season and lost his consular post for it.

He moved to Paris and worked the war from there. In November 1936, with the British writer and publisher Nancy Cunard — the shipping heiress who ran her own press and printed for the Republic — he edited a review with a title that was a programme in itself: Los poetas del mundo defienden al pueblo español, 'The poets of the world defend the Spanish people'. In February 1937 he gave a Paris lecture on the murdered Lorca. In April he founded the Hispano-American Group for Aid to Spain with the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, and on 2 July he addressed the Congress of American Nations in Paris. His book of war poems, España en el corazón — 'Spain in Our Hearts' — appeared in French in July 1938 with a preface by the French poet Louis Aragon.

Then came the piece of work he was proudest of. With the Republic defeated and half a million Spaniards penned in camps on the French side of the Pyrenees, Chile named him special consul for Spanish emigration, based in Paris. From April to July 1939 he selected families, argued with officials, and chartered a cargo ship. The Winnipeg sailed from Pauillac, the port on the Gironde estuary below Bordeaux, in August with close to two thousand refugees aboard and reached Chile at the end of the year. He called it his finest poem, and said that if anyone tried to erase his poetry he would like that line to stay.

Senator, fugitive, exile

Back in Chile he was elected senator for the northern mining provinces of Tarapacá and Antofagasta on 4 March 1945 and joined the Communist Party. Three years later the president he had helped elect, Gabriel González Videla, outlawed the party and turned on its members. On 6 January 1948 Neruda answered from the Senate floor with a speech he published as Yo acuso — 'I accuse'. On 3 February the Supreme Court stripped him of his parliamentary immunity, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

He spent more than a year hidden in friends' houses, writing the enormous poem of the Americas he had begun, Canto General ('General Song'), and on 24 February 1949 crossed the Andes on horseback into Argentina. Two months later, on 25 April, he walked onto the platform of the First World Congress of Partisans of Peace in Paris — the Communist-backed international peace rally for which Picasso drew the dove that became the world's peace emblem — as a poet the Chilean police were still looking for. Canto General was printed in Mexico in 1950 with illustrations by the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The arrest order lapsed, and he went home to Santiago on 12 August 1952.

Ambassador in Paris, and the telephone call from Stockholm

In 1970 Chile elected Salvador Allende, a socialist doctor who had run for president three times before, at the head of a left coalition. Neruda had briefly been a candidate himself and stood aside for him. On 21 January 1971 the Chilean Senate confirmed the poet as his country's ambassador to France, and at sixty-six he came back to Paris to run an embassy — receiving visitors, defending Chile's nationalisation of its copper mines to French bankers, and writing in the mornings while ill with the cancer that would kill him.

On 21 October 1971 the Swedish Academy announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature was his. He was in Paris, in office, and the news reached the ambassador before it reached the poet: the residence filled with reporters and the embassy staff answered the telephones. It is a rare sequence in the history of the prize — a serving ambassador in Paris receiving the world's principal literary honour for the poems he had written in Rangoon, Madrid, hiding, and exile.

He resigned the embassy on 5 February 1973, too ill to continue, and went home to the house at Isla Negra on the Chilean coast. On 11 September 1973 the armed forces, under General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew Allende, who died in the presidential palace as it was attacked. Neruda died twelve days later, on 23 September, at the Santa María clinic in Santiago. His house in Santiago had been ransacked; mourners walked behind his coffin through streets under military curfew anyway, reciting Canto General aloud, and the funeral became the first public protest against the new regime.