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“... younger generation, the Chilean writer and diplomat Jorge Edwards, the most enigmatic thing about Pablo Neruda was the way he could switch in one bound, so to speak, from solitude to sociability. This poet of the sea and of lonely places was also one of the most gregarious people Edwards has ever known. ...”

“... Ilya Ehrenburg had a complaint about his friend Pablo Neruda’s work. ‘Too much root,’ he said. ‘Too many roots in your poems. Why so many?’ Neruda, reporting this remark in his memoirs, took it as a joke, which it probably was, and as a compliment, which it probably wasn’t ...”

“... a form of extreme integrity. Lowell’s visit was partly intended to counter the influence of Pablo Neruda, and although Neruda was a brave and fearless figure it is sometimes hard to discern his integrity. He revered Lenin, thought that the Soviet Union could do no wrong and sounds at times like a champagne ...”

“... John Felstiner’s Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu is an unusual, honest and enterprising book, but ultimately something of a disappointment. Its title suggests a book-lover’s pilgrimage, an intellectual adventure of the order of, say, The Quest for Corvo or The Road to Xanadu. A great deal of the pleasure it offers derives from the openness – rare in the academic field, where positions tend to be held with entrenched fervour – that the author permits in telling of his unique journey ...”

“... work of Pinochet’s troops. Both exhumations failed to prove murder. Last year Chile also exhumed Pablo Neruda, to determine whether his apparent death from cancer in 1973, shortly after he published an article denouncing Pinochet, was actually the result of poisoning. No signs of poison were found, but the Chilean Communist Party complained that the ...”

“... one uncompromisingly at every turn – by the Palais des Sports Maurice Thorez, in the Parc Pablo-Néruda, around the corner from the Supermarché Yuri Gagarine. Blocks of flats stand in serried ranks, and it is unblinkingly ugly. Vitry is twinned with Burnley, Lancs, and seems nearer to it than to Notre-Dame. It is all the more of a pleasure to ...”

“... the anti-rhetorical Chilean poet whose work Bolaño preferred to that of the more celebrated Pablo Neruda – a preference, it seems clear, for Parra’s plain-spokenness over Neruda’s florid multiplication of metaphor – and, in his telling, this was practically all the work towards socialism Bolaño ...”

“... served nearly four years in jail for his trouble. In Chile he was taken up by Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda. Ten years later he became an adviser at the Elysée to François Mitterrand, his country’s only postwar socialist president. He is a revolutionary Third Worldist turned revisionist, turned Gaullist – his Gaullism a lament for the absence of ...”

“... exiled: he simply chose to remain in Europe. Edwards had been chargé d’affaires in Paris after Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet and Allende’s ambassador there, had fallen ill and returned to Chile, and he stayed on in Spain until the situation in Chile improved sufficiently for him to feel he could return. Before coming back for good the ...”

“... finally that he writes in a ‘stately old-world register’ because ‘unlike his contemporaries Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo … Borges in his poetry … has little interest in “making it new”.’ This story gets sadder with every assertion. Admirers of Borges’s fictions will expect to be delighted to meet almost any version of him. But this ...”

“... Americans) by preferring to visit a zoo rather than an art gallery. Franqui wanted guests like Pablo Neruda in Cuba, but Fidel’s choice to sit at his table at the first New Year ball of the revolution was the old black boxer Joe Louis. Fidel, so Franqui now accuses, wanted to impose on Cuba the punishments and deprivations he had undergone at his ...”

“... as a politicised musician, singing his own songs in folk clubs and at political rallies. Like Pablo Neruda and several other stars of the Chilean cultural world, he was a member of the Communist Party. He had travelled widely in Latin America and in Eastern and Western Europe, and had even spent time with theatre groups in Britain, courtesy of the ...”

“... with Communist and Socialist votes, set about repressing the left and the trade unions. His friend Pablo Neruda fled the country. Allende stayed, denouncing the crackdown but working to get national healthcare enacted in 1952, 13 years after first proposing the idea. Allende won his first Congress seat with a total of 2021 votes, barely 3 per cent of his ...”

“... Spain, the eternal Spain that all of us carry in our hearts’. When a ship chartered by Pablo Neruda brought thousands of Spanish Republican exiles to Valparaíso in 1939, Allende, still Chile’s minister of health, was there to welcome them. Four decades later, Augusto Pinochet, having dispatched Allende, told Henry Kissinger that his country ...”

“... class who wanted some say in how the country’s natural resources were exploited, and by whom. Pablo Neruda may have been a dank Stalinist in his politics, and have allowed this to infect his poetry, but he was writing as a patriot when he composed the potent verses entitled ‘They Receive Instructions against Chile’ (translated here by Robert ...”