Includes index.

"Perhaps no other poet received in his lifetime the international recognition and honors that Pablo Neruda received, was so widely translated, or exerted such far-reaching influence. His name has long been a byword in the Spanish-speaking world (in his own country, he tells us, even the stones know his voice), and over the past decade he has been increasingly read and admired in the United States and England. Neruda's long-awaited memoirs begin with a lyrical evocation of his childhood in the south of Chile - then a frontier wilderness - where he was born, the son of a railwayman, in 1904. He retraces, with numerous anecdotes and loving recollections of people and places, his Bohemian student years in Santiago; his sojourns as Chilean consul in Burma, Ceylon, and Java, in Spain during the civil war, and finally in Mexico; and his service as a senator of the people of Chile. 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 following year he was awarded the Stalin (now Lenin) Prize, the highest literary honor of the U.S.S.R. In 1969, Chile's Communist Party chose Neruda as its candidate in the presidential election, but he soon withdrew in favor of Salvador Allende. In 1971, while ambassador to France, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Failing health led to his return to Chile in November 1972, where he died less than a year later, twelve days after the coup that overthrew Allende. The final section of these memoirs was written after the coup, and Spanish editions were published in Argentina and Spain several months after Neruda's death. In these pages we meet many of the century's most important literary and artistic figures, who were Neruda's friends - García Lorca, Vallejo, Alberti, Eluard, Aragon, Ehrenburg, Picasso, Siqueiros, and Rivera, among them - and also such political leaders as Gandhi, Nehru, Mao Tse-tung, Casto, Che Guevara, and of course Neruda's good friend Allende. Neruda not only explains his views on poetry and describes the circumstances that inspired many of his poems, but he speaks out in defense of the causes he considered just and vigorously supported. This intimate and revealing record of the poet's life, written in his unmistakable style, is a significant part of the history of our time." --,Dust Jacket.

English translation of: Confieso que he vivido.

SACFinal081324