Long poem inspired by the author's journey to a ruined Inca city, Macchu Picchu, high in the Andes, symbolic not only of his physical journey but also of his spiritual adventure.

What goes into the translating of a poem? Usually that process gets forgotten once the new poem stands intact in translation. Yet a verse translation derives from historical, biographical, and philosophical research, interpretive analysis of the original poem, and continuous linguistic and prosodic choices that parallel those the poet made. Taking as a text Pablo Neruda's brilliant prophetic sequence Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1945), the author here re-creates the entire process of translation, from his first encounter with the poem to the last shaping of a phrase that may never come right in English. This many-faceted book forms an essay on the theory and practice of literary translation, a study of Neruda's career through 1945, and an interpretation of his major poem, all of which lead to a striking new poem in English, Heights of Macchu Picchu, printed along with the original Spanish. This genesis of a verse translation also includes little-known biographical data, hitherto untranslated poems and prose from the years 1920 to 1945, and new translations of key poems from Neruda's Residence on Earth and Spain in My Heart.

Ever since 1945, when Gabriela Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Hispanic Foundation in the Library of Congress had been looking forward to an opportunity to record her voice for posterity. She graciously accepted the invitation, despite her policy of not reading her poetry in public. The Library's recording of the Chilean poet is the only one extant. The materials accumulated since 1943 were acknowledged to be unique and of the highest quality. In 1958 the Library evolved a program for a well-integrated collection of noteworthy Hispanic literature--either verse or prose--on tape. With the aid of a generous grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, a pilot project was undertaken in the same year, September to December inclusive. The salient feature of the project was that the Library commissioned the curator of the Archive, Francisco Aguilera, to visit Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay and obtain recordings on magnetic tape expressly for the Library of Congress. During September and November 1960, Panama, Guatemala, and Mexico were visited, and in April-June 1961 collecting continued in Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.

The Canto General, thought by many of Neruda’s most prominent critics to be the poet’s masterpiece, is the stunning epic of an entire continent and its people.

Pablo Neruda was without doubt one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century but his work is extremely uneven. There is a view that there are two Nerudas, an early Romantic visionary and a later Marxist populist, who denied his earlier poetic self. By focussing on the poet's apprenticeship, and by looking closely at how Neruda created his poetic persona within his poems, this Companion tries to establish what should survive of his massive output. By seeing his early work as self exploration through metaphor and sound, as well as through varieties of love and direct experience, the Companion outlines a unity behind all the work, based on voice and a public self. Neruda's debt to reading and books is studied in depth and the change in poetics re-examined by concentrating on the early work up to Residencia en la tierra I and II and why he wanted to become a poet. Debate about quality and representativity is grounded in his Romantic thinking, sensibility and sincerity. Unlike a Borges or a Paz who accompanied their creative work with analytical essays, Neruda distilled all his experiences into his poems, which remainhis true biography. Jason Wilson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies, University College London.

Neruda's masterpiece epic poem about the history of a continent and its people.

The most comprehensive English-language collection of work ever by "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language" (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) "In his work a continent awakens to consciousness." So wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet." This selection of Neruda's poetry, the most comprehensive single volume available in English, presents nearly six hundred poems, scores of them in new and sometimes multiple translations, and many accompanied by the Spanish original. In his introduction, Ilan Stavans situates Neruda in his native milieu as well as in a contemporary English-language one, and a group of new translations by leading poets testifies to Neruda's enduring, vibrant legacy among English-speaking writers and readers today.

Verses Against the Darkness: offers a new assessment of Pablo Neruda's poetry by looking at the intersection of his aesthetic method and political radicalism from 1925 to 1954. It challenges the canonical view that Neruda was a gifted verse maker who, in 1936, let himself be carried away by the excesses of communist politics. Instead, by focusing primarily on Tercera residencia (1935-1945), Greg Dawes argues for an uneven yet steady evolution and continuity in Neruda's work, politics, and morality. Dawes relies on historical accounts, biographies, literary history, and criticism - and on Neruda's political and aesthetic theory - to prove that his poetry became, contrary to received critical opinion, more sophisticated literarily and politically as he became more radicalized during the Spanish Civil War and World War II and as he developed his dialectical realism or guided spontaneity. Greg Dawes is Associate Professor of Latin American and World Literatures at North Carolina State University and is the editor of the on-line journal A contracorriente.

Post-Petrarchism offers a theoretical study of lyric poetry through one of its most long-lived and widely practiced models: the lyric sequence, originated by Francis Petrarch in his Canzoniere of the late fourteenth century. A framework in which poems are suspended according to some organizing or unifying principle, the lyric sequence emerges from European humanist culture as a poetic discourse that represents personal experience and operates as a kind of fiction. Here Roland Greene proposes that since Petrarch the lyric sequence has survived in European and American literatures--from Shakespeare's Sonnets to The Waste Land to Trilce--as a complex in which formal, generic, and cultural designs intersect, and as an embodiment of lyric discourse at its most extensive, inclusive, and ambitious. Enabled by a theoretical introduction to the genre at large, the book treats the founding and elaboration of the vernacular sequence in six major texts by Petrarch, Philip Sidney, Edward Taylor, Walt Whitman, W. B. Yeats, Pablo Neruda, and Martin Adan. Throughout Greene shows how Petrarchism has evolved as lyric discourse through its exposure to such events as the Reformation and Puritanism, the settlement of the New World, and the various modernisms of Europe and the Americas. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.