The Complete Memoirs

by Pablo Neruda

  1949 APRIL 25: Neruda makes a surprise appearance at the closing ceremony of the First World Congress of the Partisans for Peace in Paris.

  9. BEGINNING AND END OF EXILE

  1949 APRIL–MAY: Neruda takes up residence in Paris with Delia del Carril.

  1949 JUNE 6: Neruda and Delia travel to the Soviet Union. In Moscow and Leningrad he participates in the activities commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the poet Alexander Pushkin.

  1949 JULY–AUGUST: Neruda travels through Eastern Europe, participating in conferences, events, and meetings in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

  1949 AUGUST–SEPTEMBER: Neruda and Delia travel to Mexico to the Latin American Congress of the Partisans of Peace, which takes place between September 3 and 10. He again meets Matilde Urrutia, whom he first knew in 1946 in Santiago.

  1949 SEPTEMBER: The poet is ill with thrombophlebitis. Matilde comes to care for him. This is a new beginning of a love affair that will remain a constant throughout the rest of the poet’s life.

  1950 APRIL: The first edition of Canto general is published in Mexico. The flyleaves are illustrated by the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. In Chile, a clandestine edition is published with engravings by José Venturelli. Canto general will become a worldwide classic. A monumental, incomparable work, it is a grandiose poetic vision of the Americas’ nature, history, and culture.

  1950 JUNE 24: Neruda and Delia leave for Europe.

  1950 JULY: Again, he and Delia move to Paris, traveling from there to Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, and the Soviet Union.

  1950 OCTOBER: The physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie, President of the World Peace Council, arranges for Neruda to visit New Delhi to interview Indian Prime Minister Pandit Nehru, who gives him a cold reception and places him under police observation. The causes of Nehru’s attitudes are not clear from the poet’s memoirs, but the Telangana Rebellion (1946–1951), a peasant movement supported by the Indian Communist Party and suppressed by the government, offers a possible explanation.

  1950 NOVEMBER 16–22: Neruda participates in the Second World Congress of the Partisans for Peace in Warsaw. Among the winners of the International Peace Prize are two Pablos and one Paul: Picasso, Neruda, and Robeson.

  1950 DECEMBER: Neruda is named a member of the International Committee of the jury for the Stalin Prize for the Strengthening of Peace Between Nations.

  1951 EARLY AUGUST: Matilde Urrutia arrives in Paris. From now until his return to Chile, the poet will brave countless difficulties to be with his beloved. He travels to East Berlin to participate in the third World Festival of Youth and Students, and manages to get Matilde to accompany him and to sing there.

  1951 LATE AUGUST: The poet visits Bucharest. He stays in the same house as Matilde, where he writes the first poems of what will eventually become the book The Captain’s Verses.

  1951 SEPTEMBER: Neruda travels to China on the Trans-Siberian Railroad as part of the delegation attending the World Peace Council to award the Stalin Prize to Soong Ch’ing-ling, widow of Sun Yat-sen, a fighter for democracy and the first President of the People’s Republic of China, who died in 1925.

  1951 LATE NOVEMBER: Neruda travels privately to Nyon, a small city on the banks of Lake Geneva, where he will spend several days with Matilde.

  1951 MID-DECEMBER: Neruda travels to Prague and later to the U.S.S.R., where he will participate in meetings of the jury for the Stalin Prize.

  1951 LATE DECEMBER: Neruda sees Matilde in Rome, which the two of them will leave, along with Delia and a group of friends, to go to Naples to celebrate the New Year.

  1952 JANUARY 11: The Ministry of the Interior notifies Neruda that he must leave Italy. The police escort him by train to Rome, where a large group of protesters who are waiting for him get permission to take the poet to a hotel to await the results of the petitions filed on his behalf. On January 15, the deportation order is revoked.

  1952 MID-JANUARY: Historian and naturalist Edwin Cerio gives the poet use of a villa in Capri. On the twenty-third, Matilde and Neruda leave to spend a long period on the island. There he will finish his book The Captain’s Verses and move forward with the writing of Las uvas y el viento (The Grapes and the Wind).

  1952 JANUARY 30: Delia del Carril leaves for Chile to help Neruda return to his country.

  1952 JULY 8: In Naples, The Captain’s Verses is printed in an edition of forty-four signed and numbered copies, not for sale. The book continues to be published anonymously until 1962.

  1952 LATE JULY: Neruda travels to Cannes with Matilde to return to America. Before he ships out, he is notified of his expulsion from France. During the crossing he meets the Uruguayan architect Alberto Mántaras and his wife, Olga, who will become close friends.

  1952 AUGUST 10: Neruda arrives in Montevideo and takes leave of Matilde, who travels on to Buenos Aires. The poet takes a plane to Santiago. He arrives on the twelfth and is greeted with a large event in the Plaza Bulnes.

  10. VOYAGE AND HOMECOMING

  1952 OCTOBER 27: At midday, Neruda and Delia have a serious accident, crashing into a truck. The poet is released with his arm in a brace. Delia has to remain on bedrest in the hospital.

  1952 NOVEMBER: Neruda and Matilde buy a piece of property at the foot of San Cristóbal Hill in Santiago, where they will later build La Chascona, a house named in honor of Matilde’s abundant flowing hair. In the interim, Matilde moves into an apartment in the Providencia Commune, while Neruda continues to live with Delia in the Casa Michoacán.

  1952 EARLY DECEMBER: Neruda travels to Europe to participate in the World Peace Council in Vienna. Later, he attends the celebrations of the thirty-eighth anniversary of the U.S.S.R. and the deliberations for the Stalin Prize.

  1953 MARCH 5: During the preparations for the Continental Congress of Culture, which will be celebrated in April in Santiago, Stalin dies in the U.S.S.R. On Isla Negra, Neruda writes the poem “En su muerte” (At His Death) as an homage.

  1953 APRIL: Todo el amor (All the Love), an anthology of Neruda’s love poetry chosen by the poet himself, is published in Santiago.

  1953 APRIL 26–MAY 3: The Continental Congress of Culture takes place in Santiago. Nearly two hundred delegates from various Latin American countries attend.

  1953 EARLY MAY: The Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who has traveled to Chile to participate in the Continental Congress of Culture, paints a portrait of Matilde, in front and in profile, and Neruda’s features are evident in her reddish hair.

  1953 AUGUST: Neruda travels through the pampa salitrera (the saltpeter pampa) with the Communist leaders Elías Lafertte and Salvador Ocampo.

  1953 DECEMBER 21: The news arrives that Neruda is one of the winners of the Stalin Prize for the Strengthening of Peace Between Nations.

  1953 DECEMBER 29: The poet composes a document donating his library and his collection of seashells to the University of Chile to create a foundation for the study of poetry that will bear his name. This is one of the ways Neruda will commemorate turning fifty.

  1954 JANUARY 20–24: Neruda delivers a series of five lectures entitled “Mi poesía” (My Poetry) at the summer school of the University of Chile.

  1954 MID-FEBRUARY: Neruda travels to Goiânia, Brazil, where he takes part in the First National Congress of Brazilian Intellectuals.

  1954 FEBRUARY 27: Nascimento publishes the first edition of Las uvas y el viento in Santiago.

  1954 JUNE–JULY: Neruda stays busy with the very full program of cultural activities that will celebrate his fiftieth birthday. On July 12, the festivities begin at the Honor Hall of the University of Chile.

  1954 JULY 14: Losada, in Buenos Aires, publishes the first edition of Elemental Odes, the beginning of an ambitious literary project in which, as Saúl Yurkievich has stated, Neruda aims for a poetry “that broadens its domain to take in the entirety of the world” and “fully grasps every dimension of the real in its inexhaustible variations.” Three more boo
ks will follow: New Elemental Odes (1956), Third Book of Odes (1957), and Navigations and Returns (1959).

  1954 AUGUST 10: Neruda’s friend Ilya Ehrenburg presents him with the Stalin Prize for the Strengthening of Peace Between Nations.

  1954 MID-DECEMBER: Neruda, Delia del Carril, and Volodia Teitelboim travel to the Second Congress of Soviet Writers. On April 17, 1955, in Chile, Neruda will deliver an extensive lecture on this congress, which hints at a new cultural openness in the U.S.S.R.

  1954 DECEMBER: Neruda participates in the meetings of the jury of the Stalin Prize in Moscow. Afterward, he travels to Stockholm for the World Peace Council. He returns to Chile on the thirtieth.

  1955 FEBRUARY: Neruda breaks definitively with Delia del Carril. The poet takes up residence in the still-unfinished La Chascona, where he will live with Matilde Urrutia.

  1955 NOVEMBER: Invited to the centennial of the death of the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz, Neruda travels with Matilde to Warsaw, Kraków, and Poznan.

  1956 FEBRUARY 14–25: The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union takes place, and the crimes of the Stalin years are revealed for the first time. Henceforward, in assorted writings and poems, Neruda will critically revise his opinion of Stalin. His poetry will change as well.

  1957 LATE JANUARY: Losada, in Buenos Aires, publishes the first edition of the Obras completas (Complete Works) of Neruda.

  1957 EARLY APRIL: Neruda travels with Matilde to Buenos Aires. The Argen-tine government has begun persecuting communists. On April 11, they arrest Neruda in a morning raid. He is freed the next day. They travel on to Montevideo.

  1957 APRIL: Still in the Uruguayan capital, Neruda is elected President of the Chilean Writers’ Society. He and Matilde continue to Brazil, where they will spend time with Jorge Amado and his wife, Zelia Gattai.

  1957 JULY: Neruda and Matilde travel to Colombo, Ceylon, to the World Peace Council, where they again meet Jorge Amado and Zelia. The poet returns to the streets and the home where he lived thirty years before.

  1957 JULY: Together with Jorge and Zelia, they travel to India, then to Rangoon. They fly to China and explore the Yangtze River in celebration of the poet’s fifty-third birthday.

  1957 SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER: Neruda and Matilde travel through several countries in Eastern Europe before arriving in Paris, where, on October 4, they will receive news of the feats of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth, and of the Soviets’ entry into the space era. This chapter of contemporary history will interest Neruda greatly and will also be echoed in his poetry.

  11. POETRY IS AN OCCUPATION

  1958 JUNE: Neruda travels through Chile, participating in the events surrounding the announcement of Salvador Allende’s presidential candidacy.

  1958 AUGUST 18: Losada, in Buenos Aires, publishes the first edition of Extravagaria, which will inaugurate a new stage in Neruda’s work, in which he leaves behind utopian certainties and opts for an ambivalent and antidogmatic vision of life.

  1959 JANUARY 3: Neruda and Matilde travel by ship to Venezuela. On January 18, they reach the port of La Guaira.

  1959 JANUARY 26: At the Cuban Embassy in Caracas, he meets with Fidel Castro.

  1959 NOVEMBER: The University of Santiago Press publishes a private edition of One Hundred Love Sonnets, dedicated to Matilde Urrutia.

  1960 MARCH: Neruda and Matilde depart from Montevideo for Europe on the Louis Lumière. Vinícius de Moraes is on the same ship. The two poets will write sonnets dedicated to each other.

  1960 MAY 21 AND 22: Two successive earthquakes destroy part of the central and southern regions of Chile. In Europe, Neruda writes “Cataclismo” (Cataclysm) and plans a deluxe edition illustrated by well-known painters to raise funds for the victims in his country. He writes “Pequeña historia de los Veinte poemas de amor” (A Brief History of Twenty Love Poems) as a prologue for a special edition that Losada will publish to celebrate the book’s selling a million copies.

  1960 MID-NOVEMBER–DECEMBER: Neruda and Matilde leave Marseilles for Cuba, arriving on December 5. Neruda gives lectures and recitals. Casa de las Américas publishes his book Canción de gesta (Chanson de geste), dedicated to the Cuban Revolution, in an edition of twenty-five thousand copies. Ernesto “Che” Guevara receives the poet in the middle of the night in his office in the Central Bank.

  1961 JUNE 26: Losada, in Buenos Aires, publishes Las piedras de Chile (The Stones of Chile), a book of poems illustrated with photos by Antonio Quintana.

  1961 SEPTEMBER: On Chilean Independence Day, Neruda inaugurates “La Sebastiana,” his house in Valparaíso.

  1961 OCTOBER 31: Losada in Buenos Aires publishes Cantos ceremoniales (Ceremonial Songs).

  1962 JANUARY 16: The journal O Cruzeiro Internacional begins publishing the series “Las vidas del poeta. Memorias y recuerdos de Pablo Neruda” (The Lives of the Poet: Memoirs and Recollections of Pablo Neruda).

  1962 MARCH 30: A ceremony inducts Neruda into the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Chile. The poet Nicanor Parra gives the welcoming address.

  1962 EARLY APRIL: Neruda travels with Matilde to Uruguay, then on to Italy, where he will meet Alberto Tallone, a master typesetter, who will produce various editions of Neruda’s work.

  1963 Neruda receives the San Valentino Prize for the Italian version of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.

  1963 SEPTEMBER 29: Neruda speaks at a meeting of some three thousand people in Santiago’s Bustamante Park, harshly criticizing the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

  1964 FEBRUARY: Neruda concludes his translation of Romeo and Juliet for the commemoration of the fourth centenary of Shakespeare’s birth at the University of Chile’s theater.

  1964 JULY: The poet’s sixtieth birthday is celebrated with a great number of events.

  1964 JUNE 2–JULY 12: Losada, in Buenos Aires, publishes Memorial de Isla Negra (Isla Negra Memorial), Neruda’s poetic autobiography, in five separate volumes.

  1964 OCTOBER 10: The Theater Institute of the University of Chile debuts Neruda’s translation and adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, directed by Eugenio Guzmán with music by Sergio Ortega.

  1964 DECEMBER: Eudeba, a university press in Buenos Aires, publishes Genio y figura de Pablo Neruda (Pablo Neruda, the Man and the Legend) by Margarita Aguirre. This is the first biographical book about the poet.

  1965 MARCH 27: María Antonieta Hagenaar, Neruda’s first wife, dies in The Hague.

  1965 MARCH–APRIL: Neruda leaves for Europe with Matilde. On April 16 they arrive in Paris, traveling on to Moscow and then to Budapest at the government’s invitation. There, Neruda meets Miguel Ángel Asturias again. Both have accepted assignments to write about their impressions of the country. This is the origin of the book Comiendo en Hungría (Eating in Hungary).

  1965 MAY 19: Neruda participates in the International Writers’ Conference, organized by East Germany on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazism.

  1965 JUNE 1: Neruda receives a doctor honoris causa in philosophy and letters from Oxford University. He is the first Latin American poet to receive this distinction.

  1966 MARCH 21: The playwright Arthur Miller invites Neruda to participate as a guest of honor at the P.E.N. club conference in New York, which will be held from June 12 to 18. At the beginning of June, Neruda departs for the U.S.A. with Matilde. He will become one of the stars of the event, which hosts delegates from fifty-six countries.

  1966 JUNE 18: Neruda gives a recital at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C., and records several of his poems for the Library of Congress.

  1966 JULY 4: Neruda and Matilde arrive in Peru. Neruda gives lectures in Lima and Arequipa to raise money for the victims of the recent earthquake. He has lunch with President Fernando Belaúnde and receives Peru’s highest honor: the Order of the Sun.

  1966 JULY 12: On his sixty-second birthday, Neruda returns to Chile with Matilde.

  1966 JULY 31: An open
letter to Pablo Neruda, signed by more than a hundred Cuban artists and intellectuals, is publicized worldwide. The letter criticizes Neruda’s participation in the P.E.N. club congress, his lunch with the President of Peru, and his acceptance of the Order of the Sun. Professor Hernán Loyola notes that Neruda saw these as “gratuitous aggression” and “a grave offense to his revolutionary trajectory and dignity…” On August 1, the poet publishes a telegram responding to the Cubans.

  1966 Losada, in Buenos Aires, publishes Neruda: El viajero inmóvil (Neruda: The Immobile Voyager) by Emir Rodríguez Monegal, a biography of the poet that includes an analysis of some of his works.

  1966 SEPTEMBER: Lumen, in Barcelona, publishes Una casa en la arena (A House in the Sand), a book of texts and prose poems by Neruda about his home in Isla Negra, with photos by Sergio Larraín.

  1966 OCTOBER 28: Neruda and Matilde are married in a civil ceremony in Isla Negra.

  1966 NOVEMBER 1: Arte de pájaros (Art of Birds) appears in an edition published by the Society of Friends of Contemporary Art, illustrated by the painters Nemesio Antúnez, Mario Carreño, Héctor Herrera, and Mario Toral.

  1967 OCTOBER 14: The Theater Institute of the University of Chile debuts Neruda’s only dramatic work in Santiago: Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta: Bandido chileno injusticiado en California el 23 de July de 1853 (Glory and Death of Joaquín Murieta: A Chilean Bandit Murdered Unjustly in California on July 23, 1853). The music is by Sergio Ortega, Pedro Orthous directs, and the choreography is by Patricio Bunster.

  1967 NOVEMBER 24: Neruda travels to Parral, the city where he was born, to receive the title of Hijo ilustre (Distinguished Son), awarded by the local government.

  1967 DECEMBER 4: Losada, in Buenos Aires, publishes La barcarola (The Barcarole).

  1968 JANUARY: Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko visits Chile. He gives a recital with Neruda in Russian and Spanish at the National Stadium in Santiago. Some seven thousand people attend.

  1968 APRIL 24: With “Escarabagia dispersa” (Random Beetling), Neruda begins a series of articles he will publish fortnightly for two years in the journal Ercilla in Santiago under the general title “Reflexiones desde Isla Negra” (Reflections from Isla Negra).