Pablo Neruda

Neruda died 12 days after Augusto Pinochet's military coup toppled the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende. In 2013, Chilean judge Mario Carroza ordered the exhumation of Neruda's remains after his chauffeur, Manuel Araya, told the Mexican magazine Proceso that the poet had called him in desperation from the hospital to say that he had been injected in the stomach while he was asleep. Samples of Neruda's remains were sent to forensic genetics laboratories in four countries for analysis and in 2015 the Chilean government said that it was "highly probable that a third party" was responsible for his death. 16 scientists unanimously rejected the cause of death noted on Neruda's death certificate, cancer cachexia, which involves significant weight loss. "That cannot be correct," said Dr Niels Morling of the University of Copenhagen's department of forensic medicine, who took part in the analysis. "There was no indication of cachexia. He was an obese man at the time of death. All other circumstances in his last phase of life pointed to some kind of infection." The day before the poet's death, the then Mexican ambassador to Chile, Gonzalo Martínez Corbalá, visited the poet in hospital and told him there was a plane waiting on the runway at Santiago airport to fly him to safety in Mexico, where he would receive the best available treatment for his cancer. Neruda hesitated, saying he would prefer to wait two days, but died the next day. Proponents of the poisoning hypothesis maintain that, as a prominent communist, Neruda would have been an influential voice of opposition to the military junta from exile and that he was murdered to prevent him from leaving Chile. The tests on the samples continued. [The Guardian, Oct. 2017].

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 131, pages 321-330. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.

The love poetry Patch Adams (Robin Williams) reads to Corinne Fisher (Monica Potter) in Patch Adams (1998) was from Neruda's "100 Love Sonnets : Cien sonetos de amor".

Was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

Kenneth Rexroth's translation of Neruda's 1955 poem "Brown and Agile Child" is shown on the back cover of Jackson Browne's 1976 album "The Pretender".

Pablo Neruda was the pseudonym of Chilean poet Ricardo Neftali Reyes Basualto. He was born in Parral, a little town in central Chile, but his family moved to Temuco City when he was just a few months old. It was there he showed interest in poetry and made his early works, and where he picked "Pablo Neruda" as a pseudonym because his father did not approve of his writing. Neruda He is considered one of the greatest Spanish-language poets of the 20th century. He is called "The Poet of Love" because his poetry is sensual and sometimes very erotic. He was the honorary Chilean consul in Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona and Madrid. In 1943 he returned to Chile but left in 1949 because Chilean President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla was after him for political reasons.

Adopted the pen name Pablo Neruda as a tribute to Czech writer and poet Jan Neruda (1834-1891).