49 Fun Facts About Pablo Neruda

Neruda died in 1973, twelve days after a military coup led by which general?

Augusto Pinochet's coup overthrew the government of Salvador Allende, Neruda's friend, and began 17 years of military rule.

Neruda's Nobel Prize citation praised poetry that brings alive the destiny and dreams of what?

Continent: Canto General had grown from a poem about Chile alone into an epic of the whole South American continent.

Neruda's 1924 collection of love poems is titled Twenty Love Poems and a Song of what?

Despair: the book's frank eroticism brought him notoriety, and publishing it at 19 made his name in Chile.

Neruda's surname at birth was what?

Reyes: he stayed legally Reyes until 1946, when a judge ruled he could take his pen name, Pablo Neruda, as his legal name.

Neruda is thought to have taken his pen name from a poet of which nationality?

Czech: Jan Neruda is the usual candidate, and the teenager probably took a pen name because his father disapproved of his poetry.

In which southern Chilean town did Neruda grow up?

Temuco: his father moved there and remarried, and Neruda went to school in the town until 1920.

What was the occupation of Neruda's father?

Railway employee: a railway museum in southern Chile is now named after his son, the poet.

Which future Nobel laureate headed the local school and encouraged the young Neruda?

Gabriela Mistral gave the boy books to read and the encouragement he lacked at home.

What was the title of Neruda's first volume of verse, published in 1923?

Crepusculario gathered poems he wrote as a teenager, and the critic Raúl Silva Castro praised it on release.

Neruda moved to the capital in 1921 intending to become a teacher of which language?

French: he was an indifferent student, and he soon abandoned his French studies to devote himself entirely to poetry.

Neruda's first diplomatic post in 1927 was an honorary consulship in which city?

Rangoon: with no steady job at home, he got himself this honorary Burma posting, and later served in Colombo, Batavia and Singapore.

Neruda's first wife, known as Maruca, was of which nationality?

Dutch: he met María Antonia Hagenaar in Batavia, then capital of the Dutch East Indies, where he was serving as consul.

Which Spanish poet's execution in 1936 helped draw Neruda into the Republican cause?

Federico García Lorca had met Neruda in Buenos Aires in 1933 and became a close friend and enthusiastic champion of his poetry.

Neruda's collection supporting the Spanish Republic during the civil war was titled what in English?

Spain in Our Hearts was printed by Republican soldiers on the front lines, in the middle of the war.

What was the name of the ship Neruda used to carry Spanish refugees to Chile in 1939?

Winnipeg: Neruda gathered Spanish Republicans from internment camps, and about 2,000 sailed on it.

Which Chilean port did Neruda's refugee ship reach on 3 September 1939?

Valparaíso: some of the refugees went on to shape Chilean art and culture, among them the painters José Balmes and Roser Bru.

Neruda was serving as Chile's consul in which city when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936?

Madrid: when the war came, he openly took up the Republican cause, travelling in and out of Spain to rally support.

A 1943 visit to which ancient site inspired a long Neruda poem later included in Canto General?

Machu Picchu: Neruda's poem gives voice to the nameless workers who built the Inca city and the slavery behind it.

In 1945 Neruda was elected senator for Antofagasta and Tarapacá, provinces in which desert?

Atacama: he won the seat as the Communist Party's candidate and formally joined the party four months later.

Which Chilean president, elected in 1946 with Communist support, later outlawed the party and drove Neruda into hiding?

Gabriel González Videla had Neruda as his campaign's propaganda chief, and the poet's open letter attacking him later cost Neruda his Senate seat.

What title did Neruda's dramatic 6 January 1948 Senate speech become known by?

Yo acuso: within a month a court had ordered Neruda's arrest, sending him into hiding.

Neruda was already ill with which disease when he won the 1971 Nobel Prize?

Prostate cancer: his death certificate blamed the disease, but later studies of his remains largely rejected that cause.

After more than a year in hiding, Neruda escaped Chile over the Andes by what means?

On horseback: his horse nearly drowned fording a river, a moment he later retold in his Nobel lecture.

To reach Europe in 1949, Neruda travelled on the borrowed passport of which fellow writer, a future Nobel laureate?

Miguel Ángel Asturias was then a Guatemalan diplomat in Buenos Aires, and the two writers looked vaguely alike.

Which artist was among the friends who protected the fugitive Neruda when he reached Paris in 1949?

Pablo Picasso helped him settle his papers, and Neruda soon made a surprise appearance at the World Peace Congress in Paris.

In 1965 Neruda received an honorary doctorate from which English university?

Oxford: Neruda had just translated Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into Spanish, and a Chilean university theatre had staged it.

Critics liken Canto General to the work of which American poet?

Whitman: like Leaves of Grass, Canto General catalogues a vast land's history, geography, plants, animals and people.

Which Greek composer set Neruda's Canto General as an oratorio for soloists, choir and orchestra?

Mikis Theodorakis was inspired after hearing young Chilean musicians perform the poems, and Neruda attended rehearsals.

Which book inspired by Matilde Urrutia did Neruda first publish anonymously?

The Captain's Verses first appeared in a small private edition in Naples, while Neruda's affair with Matilde was still a secret.

Neruda built La Chascona for Urrutia; the house's name refers to her what?

Curly red hair: the house was damaged amid the 1973 coup, and Matilde later took charge of restoring it.

Which Mexican artist painted the two-faced portrait of Urrutia that hangs in La Chascona?

Diego Rivera was one of the friends in on the couple's secret, and he hid a faint profile of Neruda inside the portrait.

Neruda's second wife, Delia del Carril, was an artist of which nationality?

Argentine: the painter was with Neruda for almost twenty years before he left her in 1955 to live with Matilde Urrutia.

Il Postino was adapted from a 1985 novel by which Chilean writer?

Antonio Skármeta had already filmed the story himself in 1983, two years before the novel was published.

In the 1994 film Il Postino, which actor played Pablo Neruda?

Philippe Noiret played the poet opposite Massimo Troisi, and the film moved the story from Chile to a small Italian island.

Massimo Troisi put off what so he could finish shooting Il Postino?

A heart operation: Troisi died of a heart attack soon after filming ended, and he later earned a posthumous Best Actor nomination.

Who directed the 2016 biographical drama Neruda?

Pablo Larraín premiered it at Cannes, mixing history and fiction as a policeman hunts the fugitive poet through 1948 Chile.

Which Mexican poet, once encouraged by Neruda, later fell out with him?

Octavio Paz had been championed by Neruda, who praised his early poems and urged him to attend an anti-fascist writers' congress in Valencia.

On a 1966 visit to the United States, Neruda recorded his poems for which institution?

Library of Congress: a group of Cuban writers then published an open letter attacking Neruda for making the trip at all.

Late in life, Neruda served as Chile's ambassador to which country?

France: he was serving in Paris when news of his Nobel Prize arrived, and a mass rally in Chile's national stadium welcomed him home.

In 1954 Neruda gave the University of Chile his personal library and his collection of what?

Seashells: he kept on collecting, and his houses, now museums, still display shells beside old ships' figureheads.

Neruda died on 23 September 1973 at a clinic in which city?

Santiago: a day before he was due to leave for exile, he was rushed by ambulance to the city's Santa María Clinic.

Which bacterium did a 2023 toxicology report find in Neruda's teeth?

Clostridium botulinum: the researchers could say it was in his body when he died, but not for certain that it killed him.

Neruda's former driver claimed in 2011 that the poet had been killed with what?

An injection: Manuel Araya said it was given at the clinic, and his claim led to Neruda's remains being exhumed in 2013.

Neruda's 1974 memoirs have a Spanish title that translates as what?

I Confess I Have Lived: Neruda worked on it until his final days, and its last pages condemn the coup that had just toppled his friend Allende.

Neruda and Matilde Urrutia are buried at which of his houses?

Casa de Isla Negra: they were moved there in December 1992, once democracy had returned, fulfilling Neruda's last wish.

In 1969 Chile's Communists named Neruda their candidate for which office?

President: he withdrew in favour of his friend Salvador Allende and campaigned for him, and Allende won the 1970 election.

Which novelist called Neruda the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language?

Gabriel García Márquez later wrote Neruda into a short story, I Sell My Dreams, recalling a day the two men spent together.

Residence on Earth first appeared in 1933 in what form?

Luxury edition: the poems grew out of the loneliness and anguish of his years as a consul in Asia.

In 1953 Neruda received a Soviet peace prize named after whom?

Joseph Stalin: Neruda wrote a poem mourning him, yet in his memoirs he later came to regret that admiration.