Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda (/nəˈruːdə/ nə-ROO-də;[1] Spanish pronunciation: [ˈpaβlo neˈɾuða] ⓘ; born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto; 12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973) was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature.[2] Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924).
In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Reyes and the second or maternal family name is Basoalto.
Pablo Neruda
23 September 1973 (aged 69)
- Poet
- diplomat
- politician
1
Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions in various countries during his lifetime and served a term as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President Gabriel González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the port city of Valparaíso, and in 1949, he escaped through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina; he would not return to Chile for more than three years. He was a close advisor to Chile's socialist president Salvador Allende, and when he got back to Chile after accepting his Nobel Prize in Stockholm, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.[3]
Neruda was hospitalized with cancer in September 1973, at the time of the coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet that overthrew Allende's government, but returned home after a few days when he suspected a doctor of injecting him with an unknown substance for the purpose of murdering him on Pinochet's orders.[4]
Neruda died at his home in Isla Negra on 23 September 1973, just hours after leaving the hospital. Although it was long reported that he died of heart failure, the interior ministry of the Chilean government issued a statement in 2015 acknowledging a ministry document indicating the government's official position that "it was clearly possible and highly likely" that Neruda was killed as a result of "the intervention of third parties".[5] However, an international forensic test conducted in 2013 rejected allegations that he was poisoned. It was concluded that he had been suffering from prostate cancer.[6][7] In 2023, after forensics testing, it was discovered that the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, some strains of which can produce toxins, was present in some of his body.[8][9] However, the family's claim that the forensic test proved he was poisoned was called into question, as it was not determined that the bacteria in him was even harmful.[10]
Neruda is often considered the national poet of Chile, and his works have been popular and influential worldwide. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language",[11] and the critic Harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the writers central to the Western tradition in his book The Western Canon.
Diplomatic and political career[edit]
Spanish Civil War[edit]
After returning to Chile, Neruda was given diplomatic posts in Buenos Aires and then Barcelona, Spain.[30] He later succeeded Gabriela Mistral as consul in Madrid, where he became the center of a lively literary circle, befriending such writers as Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lorca, and the Peruvian poet César Vallejo.[30] His only offspring, his daughter Malva Marina (Trinidad) Reyes, was born in Madrid in 1934, the product of his first marriage to María Antonia Hagenaar Vogelzang. The child was plagued with severe health problems, particularly suffering from hydrocephalus.[31] She died in 1943 at the age of nine, having spent most of her short life with a foster family in the Netherlands after Neruda ignored and abandoned her, forcing her mother to work solely to support her care.[32][33][34][35] Half of that time was during the Nazi occupation of Holland, when the Nazi view of birth defects was that they denoted genetic inferiority. During this period, Neruda became estranged from his wife and instead began a relationship with Delia del Carril, an aristocratic Argentine artist who was 20 years his senior. The child was repudiated, mocked, and abandoned by her father and died in utter indigence when she was 8 years old in war-devastated and Nazi-occupied Netherlands.[36]
Controversy[edit]
Rumored murder and exhumation[edit]
In June 2013, a Chilean judge ordered an investigation to be launched following suggestions that Neruda had been killed by the Pinochet regime due to his pro-Allende stance and political views. Neruda's driver, Manuel Araya, claimed that he had seen Neruda two days prior to his death and that doctors had administered poison as the poet was preparing to go into exile. Araya claimed that he was driving Neruda to buy medicine when he was suddenly stopped by military personnel who arrested him, hijacked the Fiat 125 he was driving, and took him to police headquarters where they tortured Araya. He found out Neruda had died after Santiago Archbishop Raúl Silva Henríquez informed him.[76][77][78] In December 2011, Chile's Communist Party asked Chilean Judge Mario Carroza to order the exhumation of the remains of the poet. Carroza had been conducting probes into hundreds of deaths allegedly connected to abuses of Pinochet's regime from 1973 to 1990.[75][79] Carroza's inquiry during 2011–12 uncovered enough evidence to order the exhumation in April 2013.[80] Eduardo Contreras, a Chilean lawyer who was leading the push for a full investigation, commented, "We have world-class labs from India, Switzerland, Germany, the US, Sweden; they have all offered to do the lab work for free." The Pablo Neruda Foundation fought the exhumation on the grounds that Araya's claims were unbelievable.[78]
In June 2013, a court order was issued to find the man who allegedly poisoned Neruda. Police were investigating Michael Townley, who was facing trial for the killings of General Carlos Prats (Buenos Aires, 1974) and ex-Chancellor Orlando Letelier (Washington, 1976).[81][82] The Chilean government suggested that the 2015 test showed it was "highly probable that a third party" was responsible for his death.[83]
Test results were released on 8 November 2013 of the seven-month investigation by a 15-member forensic team. Patricio Bustos, the head of Chile's medical legal service, stated, "No relevant chemical substances have been found that could be linked to Mr. Neruda's death" at the time.[84] However, Carroza said that he was waiting for the results of the last scientific tests conducted in May (2015), which found that Neruda was infected with the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, which can be highly toxic and result in death if modified.[5]
A team of 16 international experts led by Spanish forensic specialist Aurelio Luna from the University of Murcia announced on 20 October 2017 that "from analysis of the data, we cannot accept that the poet had been in an imminent situation of death at the moment of entering the hospital" and that death from prostate cancer was not likely at the moment when he died. The team also discovered something in Neruda's remains that could possibly be a laboratory-cultivated bacterium. The results of their continuing analysis were expected in 2018.[85] His cause of death was, in fact, listed as a heart attack.[86] Scientists who exhumed Neruda's body in 2013 also supported claims that he was suffering from prostate cancer when he died.[6]
In 2023, a team from McMaster University and the University of Copenhagen confirmed the presence of the Clostridium botulinum bacteria in Neruda's bloodstream, although it is not clear if this contributed to his death.[87] McMaster researcher Debi Poinar noted that if Neruda had died of botulism, he would've suffered paralysis or septicemia, a serious blood infection.[87] The bacteria was found to have been mainly concentrated in one of Neruda's molars.[8]
Some scientists involved in the testing also spoke with Deutsche Welle to deny the family's claim that the testing confirmed he was poisoned;[10] despite at times being used as a biological weapon, the bacteria also has a long history of being commonly used in food products such as fruit, vegetables, seafood and canned food and at times has been even used for medical treatment.[88][89][90] John Austin, who leads the Botulism Reference Service for Canada, also told Deutsche Welle that the mere presence of C. botulinum is not harmful to humans, and that it the harm that comes from it is the toxins it produces when it grows.[10] Austin further stated the bacteria in Neruda's mouth could've even expanded after he died, as it is common for bacteria to multiply in the body among people after they die.[10] Fabrizio Anniballi, another botulism expert who was not directly involved in the research on Neruda's remains, further noted it was too unlikely that the injection he was alleged to been given into belly gave him botulism, noting that it was also claimed he died a mere six hours it happened, which is not a feasible amount of time to trigger botulism.[10] Debi Poinar also acknowledged to Deutsche Welle that while some C. botulinum was found in Neruda's bones, it had yet to be discerned whether it was from the same source as that found in the molar.[10]
Feminist protests[edit]
In November 2018, the Cultural Committee of Chile's lower house voted in favor of renaming Santiago's main airport after Neruda. The decision sparked protests from feminist groups who highlighted a passage in Neruda's memoirs describing a sexual encounter, his description of which resembles rape, with a maid in 1929 in Ceylon (Sri Lanka).[91] Several feminist groups, bolstered by a growing #MeToo and anti-femicide movement, stated that Neruda should not be honored by his country, describing the passage as evidence of rape. Neruda remains a controversial figure for Chileans, and especially for Chilean feminists.[92]