Narrative
Memoirs
Confieso que he vivido
Pablo Neruda · 1974
Synopsis
Twelve roughly chronological chapters, a series of anecdotes linked by poetic prose according to Ebsco. The son of a railwayman tells of his childhood in Temuco, in southern Chile, then the journey to Santiago and his student years. There follow the consulates in Asia, in Burma, Ceylon and Java, then the Spanish Civil War, where the murder of his friend García Lorca pushes him towards communism according to Book Excerptise, and, still according to that site, after a year in hiding, the escape on horseback across the Andes.
Context
The poet was still putting the finishing touches to this book when he died, in September 1973. His widow, Matilde Urrutia, completed the first edition in Caracas with the Venezuelan writer Miguel Otero Silva, and the work appeared in 1974; it runs to more than five hundred pages according to La Tercera. Claude Couffon translated it into French for Gallimard in 1975, Hardie St. Martin into English. In 2017, Seix Barral issued an expanded edition with more than twenty unpublished texts, many found in the archives of the Neruda Foundation.
Who it is for
Memoirs in chapters of anecdotes, chronicles and letters, which can be read in one sitting or in fragments.
Prizes and reception
For the publisher Juan Manuel Silva, cited by La Tercera, hyperbole and comparison are the favourite figures of this prose.
Sources for this page 7
The pages consulted to check this page.