Pablo Neruda

Just a few months before Neruda's untimely death in September 1973, Losada, South America's largest publishing house, had thoroughly updated its standard edition of the poet's complete works. In three weighty tomes, on thin bible paper, this, the fourth edition of the Obras completas de Pablo Neruda) com- prising more than 3,500 pages and some thirty-four books of poetry, drama, and essays, will not be the last, for at this writing an additional nine volumes of verse and a book of memoirs have appeared posthumously. A veritable river of print, which pre- sents, and represents, an entire life in literature-fifty years, to be exact, since it was in 1923 that the young Neruda, a nineteen- year-old dropout in French literature at the University of Chile, published his first book) Crepusculario. Since then his output has been truly phenomenal-not merely because of its almost torrential quantity, but mostly because of its regularly out-

standing quality.

Today, in retrospect, certain volumes stand out above the

rest and seem to mark off more than a few high points in the overall evolution of twentieth-century poetry in Spanish: Veinte poemas de amor y una canci6n desesperada) Residencia en la tierra) Canto general) and Odas elementales) to name only.

...