The classic and deeply moving memoir by Pablo Neruda, the most widely read political poet of our time and winner of the Nobel Prize

The south of Chile was a frontier wilderness when Pablo Neruda was born in 1904. In these memoirs he retraces his bohemian student years in Santiago; his sojourns as Chilean consul in Burma, Ceylon, and Java, in Spain during the civil war, and in Mexico; and his service as a Chilean senator. Neruda, a Communist, was driven from his senate seat in 1948, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. After a year in hiding, he escaped on horseback over the Andes and then to Europe; his travels took him to Russia, Eastern Europe, and China before he was finally able to return home in 1952. The final section of the memoirs was written after the coup in 1972 that overthrew Neruda's friend Salvador Allende.

Many of the century's most important literary and artistic figures were Neruda's friends, and figure in his memoirs--Garcia Lorca, Aragon, Picasso, and Rivera, among them--and also such political leaders as Gandhi, Nehru, Mao, Castro, and Che Guevara. In his uniquely expressive prose, Neruda not only explains his views on poetry and describes the circumstances that inspired many of his poems, but he creates a revealing record of his life as a poet, a patriot, and one of the twentieth century's true men of conscience.

This bilingual landmark anthology contains the work of 30 of the major Spanish poets of the twentieth century translated by some of the major poets of the United States and reappears in print for the first time in two decades. The poets include Machado, Jimenez, Guillen, Lorca, Alberti, Cernuda, Hernandez, Aleixandre, de Otero, Salinas, Unamuno and others. The translations are by Bly, Haines, Hall, Ignatow, Kinnell, Levine, Merwin, St. Martin, Stafford, Strand and Wright, among the most important poets of their generation. Contributors include: Miguel de Unamuno, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramon Jimenez, Federico Garcia Lorca, Vincente Aleixandre, Rafael Alberti, Leon Felipe, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillen, Gerardo Diego, Emilio Prados, Luis Cernuda, Miguel Hernandez, Luis Rosales, Gabriel Celaya, Blas de Otero, Gloria Fuertes, Jose Luis Hidalgo, Jose Hierro, Carlos Bousono, Angel Gonzalez, Jose Angel Valente, Jaime Gil de Biedma, Claudio Rodriguez, Francisco Brines, Carlos Sahagun and Manuel Vazquez Montalban.