This week saw the 40th anniversary of the death of Pablo Neruda – so let us pay tribute to the famous poet through a musical version of his famous “Canto General”, recorded by Grupo Tolderia.
Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean writer and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. Neruda assumed his pen name as a teenager, partly because it was in vogue, partly to hide his poetry from his father, a rigid man who wanted his son to have a “practical” occupation. Neruda’s pen name was derived from Czech writer and poet Jan Neruda; Pablo is thought to be from Paul Verlaine. With his works translated into many languages, Pablo Neruda is considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century.
Neruda was accomplished in a variety of styles ranging from erotically charged love poems like his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a controversial award because of his political activism. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.”
On July 15, 1945, at Pacaembu Stadium in São Paulo, Brazil, he read to 100,000 people in honor of Communist revolutionary leader Luís Carlos Prestes. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Salvador Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.
During his lifetime, Neruda occupied many diplomatic posts and served a stint as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When Conservative Chilean President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile, a warrant was issued for Neruda’s arrest. Friends hid him for months in a house basement in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Later, Neruda escaped into exile through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close collaborator to socialist President Salvador Allende.
Neruda was hospitalized with cancer at the time of the Chilean coup d’état led by Augusto Pinochet. Three days after being hospitalized, Neruda died of heart failure – this is what the official documents are saying. Already a legend in life, Neruda’s death reverberated around the world. Pinochet had denied permission to transform Neruda’s funeral into a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets. Neruda’s funeral became the first public protest against the Chilean military dictatorship.
Although official documents say Neruda died from complications relating to his prostate cancer, the timing of his death just days after the coup that deposed and killed his friend President Salvador Allende has led many to question the authenticity of these documents.
In 2011, Manuel Araya, a friend and former driver for the late poet, came forward claiming that Neruda was murdered. He said he believes Neruda was poisoned while being treated at the Clinica Santa María and that he was not in grave health at the time. Former President Eduardo Frei Montalva also died under suspicious circumstances at that Santiago hospital in 1982. He is believed to have been poisoned by the dictatorship’s forces during a routine surgery.
Araya’s statements led to an investigation instigated by Eduardo Contreras, a lawyer for the PC, and the exhumation of the poet’s remains from his Isla Negra home in April. So far, the only results released by the investigative team indicate that the poet did indeed have prostate cancer, but they have not yet ruled out poisoning as a possible cause of death.
On the anniversary of his death the nobel prize winning poet is anything but forgotten as the investigation into his possible murder continues.
Grupo Tolderia – Canto General
(128 kbps, cover art included)
Zupfgeigenhansel was a German folk duo founded by Thomas Friz and Erich Schmeckenbecher. They were activ during the 1970s and 1980s. The group took its name from the famous Wandervogel Songbook “Der Zupfgeigenhansl” that appeared in 1909, although the group’s repertoire overlaps only partially with the contents of the songbook.
Zero G Sound 