BiblioVault - Books about Neruda, Pablo

The Latin American Ecocultural Reader

Edited by Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes

Northwestern University Press, 2021

The Latin American Ecocultural Reader is a comprehensive anthology of literary and cultural texts about the natural world. The selections, drawn from throughout the Spanish-speaking countries and Brazil, span from the early colonial period to the present. Editors Jennifer French and Gisela Heffes present work by canonical figures, including José Martí, Bartolomé de las Casas, Rubén Darío, and Alfonsina Storni, in the context of our current state of environmental crisis, prompting new interpretations of their celebrated writings. They also present contemporary work that illuminates the marginalized environmental cultures of women, indigenous, and Afro-Latin American populations. Each selection is introduced with a short essay on the author and the salience of their work; the selections are arranged into eight parts, each of which begins with an introductory essay that speaks to the political, economic, and environmental history of the time and provides interpretative cues for the selections that follow.

The editors also include a general introduction with a concise overview of the field of ecocriticism as it has developed since the 1990s. They argue that various strands of environmental thought—recognizable today as extractivism, eco-feminism, Amerindian ontologies, and so forth—can be traced back through the centuries to the earliest colonial period, when Europeans first described the Americas as an edenic “New World” and appropriated the bodies of enslaved Indians and Africans to exploit its natural bounty.

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Neruda

An Intimate Biography

By Volodia Teitelboim

University of Texas Press, 1992

A biography of the noted Chilean poet.

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The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

René de Costa

Harvard University Press, 1979

“I undertook the greatest departure from myself: creation, wanting to illuminate words.” So wrote Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in 1924 at the start of a long and brilliant career that was to bring him international renown—and, in 1971, two years before his death, the Nobel Prize in Literature. This work, intended for the general reader as well as the specialist, explores the sensitive complexities of the varied, sometimes contradictory, and always exciting writings produced during fifty years. Neruda’s output throughout his long literary life was phenomenal, and certain volumes have already become modern-day classics; it is these that René de Costa concentrates on. After describing the reception of each book at the time of publication, he evaluates its importance among Neruda’s oeuvre and, through the use of carefully selected Spanish verses, all translated into English, makes the reader aware of the range and aesthetic significance of the poet’s work.

Midway through his career as poet-diplomat, Neruda joined the Communist Party and became a poet-politician, a fact that far too often has colored the reception of his literary efforts. Here, for perhaps the first time, is a book that rises above such tendentious criticism to give an impartial view of the poet’s political and nonpolitical writings. The discerning reader is left with a heightened respect for and appreciation of the man who believed that “Poetry is like bread, and it must be shared…by everyone in our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of man.”

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