On the Run

In April 1949, the poet Pablo Neruda strolled onstage at the First World Congress of Partisans for Peace, in Paris, and apologized for being late. He’d been unavoidably detained, he joked. Over the preceding months, he’d lived in hiding, shuttling between a series of safe houses in South America. He had to cross the ocean on a fake passport to arrive in Europe. A photograph from that day shows him in a pinstriped suit, embraced by Picasso, who also addressed the rapt audience at Pleyel Hall. The two men look ecstatic, perhaps because of the turnaround in Neruda’s fortunes.

Neruda had gone into hiding in his native Chile more than a year before. After he helped elect Gabriel González Videla as president on a radical left platform, González Videla launched a campaign of repression that included roundups of leftists and labor leaders, and violent repression of workers’ strikes. As copper prices plummeted after World War II, the Truman administration convinced González Videla that he would need the United States’ economic help and that war between the US and Russia was looming. This convinced González Videla to ban communism in Chile.

In addition to being a poet, Neruda was a senator and a new member of the Chilean Communist Party, and in response to the communist ban, he delivered a pair of dissident speeches from the senate floor. In his coup de grâce in January 1948, in a speech called “I Accuse,” Neruda read the names of incarcerated or missing Chileans and contrasted the repressions of González Videla and Truman with the “Four Freedoms” promoted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt: freedom of speech and of worship, and freedom from want and from fear. Despite his invocation of FDR, Neruda defied the North Americans’ man in Chile and was summarily stripped of his senatorial immunity. Fearing for his life, he went into hiding, staying in safe houses by day and making several failed attempts to leave Chile by night. The day before he appeared onstage in Paris, the Chilean police chief Luis Brum D’Avoglio gloated to reporters about the poet’s imminent capture. After the Paris appearance shattered this as fake news, González Videla retorted that it was a fake Neruda. One reporter joked that he went to the conference to see what Neruda’s alleged “twin” looked like.

But in exile in Paris and across several continents, Neruda wasn’t safe; he was surveilled wherever he went and sometimes detained. Neruda’s saga marks one of the 20th century’s greatest literary chase scenes, and the Cold War’s first global manhunt. It wasn’t a hunt for a nuclear engineer, a spy, or even a dissident journalist but for a poet—a poet!—whose love poetry had won him acclaim and book sales around the world, and later earned the 1971 Nobel Prize.

Grapes and the Wind, Neruda’s poetic account of those years, was published in 1954, but has never appeared in English. Last summer, Spuyten Duyvil, a small press in Brooklyn, brought out the first English edition, translated by Michael Strauss. The book restores a key part of Neruda’s legacy while offering insights that go beyond traditional North American simplifications of his politics. Neruda considered Grapes and the Wind his most ignored book. Along with his masterpiece Canto General (1950), the book best documents Neruda’s anti-imperialist politics, and it reveals a side of the poet—pugilistic yet graceful—many readers have rarely seen.

***

It started with Spain. Even before the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the young Neruda harbored left-wing tendencies from his youth in Chile’s rainy south. But the tendencies were subordinate to his savant-like obsession with poetry. His first book, Crepusculario (1923), appeared before he was 20; his second, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), made him famous. Landing a consular post in Buenos Aires in 1933, he befriended the Spanish leftist Federico García Lorca, whose poems and plays were rich with private symbolism but charged with a broader political consciousness. The two became so close they would finish each other’s sentences. At a PEN event in Buenos Aires, just two weeks after they met, they roused the audience with the demand that Argentina honor the legacy of the late Nicaraguan modernist poet Ruben Darío. Sitting opposite the playwright at a banquet table, Neruda stood and began, “Ladies ...” Lorca in quick succession boomed, “and gentlemen.” They sang an invitation to a dead man whose name, if spoken aloud, would spark magic: “glasses will shatter and forks will leap …” “Ruben,” said Lorca. “Darío,” said Neruda. The two poets had already bonded over politics. Less than three years later, with the Spanish Republic overtaken by fascists, Lorca was murdered. Neruda’s literary voice developed in memory of that lost friendship. Twenty-three poems collected in the third volume of Residence on Earth (1947) as “Spain in Our Hearts” emerged during the war, and Neruda’s public persona was born. In “I Explain a Few Things,” he announces the new stakes on his writing:

Traitorous
generals:
look at my dead house
look at shattered Spain
but from each doomed house comes blazing metal
in place of flowers
but from each of Spain’s craters
comes Spain
but from each dead child, comes a rifle sight with eyes
but from each crime, bullets are born
that one day will find the x
marking your heart.
 
You will ask, why do his poems
not speak to us of the soil, or the leaves,
or the great volcanoes of his homeland?
 
Come see the blood in the streets,
come see
the blood in the streets,
come see the blood
in the streets!

This didn’t read like Neruda’s earlier morose, solitary love poems, nor was it meant to. Although his alloys of unlike things—martyrs of war with acacia branches, the word melancholy with sour wine—would remain, this new poetry was for partisans and workers. Neruda’s verse was even blown up as propaganda posters to boost morale and grieve the losses of war. Anyone could read it, absorb the emotion, and—this was key—be moved to act.

When the Spanish Republic fell in 1939, a half-million refugees were displaced. In France, they were banished to concentration camps, where they faced dire illnesses and a high death rate. Neruda moved to Paris and became a refugee advocate. He arranged for 2,000 refugees to sail aboard the Winnipeg to a new home in Chile. It wasn’t an easy task; González Videla (then the Chilean ambassador to France) and other officials balked, prompting a cabinet crisis that ended with the Winnipeg reluctantly approved to sail. Years later, many of those former refugees helped harbor Neruda on his own long flight from repression.

***

It was “decided in Spain,” said Neruda, that he join the Chilean Communist Party. And it was the party that asked him to run for senate. Stalin’s onslaughts against the Nazis during World War II burnished Soviet heroism in Neruda’s mind. But not knowing how to deliver a political speech, Neruda spoke to crowds in Tarapaca and Antofagasta—a region in the north he hoped to represent—in a style of oratorio that adapted his love poetry into a show of solidarity and hope. His first stump speech, in the form of a poem titled “Greetings to the North,” began: “You will pardon me, but since I am not a speaker I have prepared a little something to read to you,” and then continued

North, I am finally here in your fierce
mineral silence full of yesterday and today,
here in search of your voice and my own,
and I don’t offer you an empty heart:
I offer you all that I am.
I come to hear also the voice of pain,
the pampa’s song that aches
like the heart of the pampa’s people,
an old refrain that fills the throat
with a knot of tears that sings
of destiny’s awful harshness.

Neruda was elected. In his second year in the Senate he honored Chilean women by pushing for full legal suffrage. Before Law 9292 passed, Chilean women could vote only in municipal elections, not presidential elections. Some recent biographers have downplayed Neruda’s role in passing the suffrage bill. He called suffrage a first step and spoke of full inclusion for women in every institution of Chilean society, pointing to the Soviet constitution as a model.

After more than a year of debate, the law passed in January 1949. By then, Truman’s emissary, Admiral William Leahy, had visited González Videla aboard a warship. The mission was to “convince the Chileans of the dangers inherent in excessive leftism,” as syndicated columnist Drew Pearson summarized it then. The effect was the suppression of leftist voices through roundups of laborers, who were exiled to concentration camps (as the Chilean left called them), and the massacre of protesters by the Chilean military and police. In his “I Accuse” speech from the senate floor, Neruda denounced the repression, and soon a warrant was issued for his arrest.

***

A photograph taken in Chile in early 1949 shows a burly, bearded “ornithologist” with two other men. The three sit on horses that lighten in complexion from left to right. Behind them is rugged mountain terrain scattered with rocks; under their horses are shards of boulder that make the trail difficult. On the far left, on a dark horse, is the communist Jorge Bellet. On the white horse to the right is Victor Bianchi, an inspector of lands for the Interior Ministry, summoned to the finca over a battle between the staff and indigenous groups who share the Andes. The man in the middle, sporting a black huaso hat with a silken band and a brim wide enough to shade his eyes, is the bearded ornithologist, who calls himself Antonio Ruiz. But Bianchi knows who the man really is: Neruda. They are friends. Bianchi knows the land intimately and joins Neruda’s escape plot.

So as not to draw attention during his flight from Chile, Neruda’s profession was recorded as office worker. He was listed as unmarried; his birth date was recorded as 1901 rather than 1904; and his birthplace was identified as the capital city rather than the southern town of Parral. Bellet wanted to avoid attention—they were part of a leftist underground that had to remain anonymous—but on their 500-mile drive south from Santiago, a soldier pulled over their car for a ride. Neruda, still disguised as the ornithologist, engaged him in conversation, and even mildly criticized the government.

Later, the men led Neruda across the border into Argentina on horseback. Various routes were closed off to them after rain and flooding, and they were forced to escape over the most dangerous, Smugglers’ Pass at Lilpela, in the Andes. The route was conceived by a man named Victor Pey, a Spaniard whom Neruda had rescued on the Winnipeg. “I passed over the tree,” Neruda writes in “Only a Man,” describing his dramatic escape from Chile, during which he “crossed all rivers, / foam carried me, / stones deceived me, / minute by minute / the green air forming / jewels / attacked my face, / burned my lashes.” This is from Grapes and the Wind’s early chapter, “Grapes of Europe,” which recounts his border crossing:

And so I crossed the high cordillera,
not alone
but with another man.
The trees didn’t come,
surging water
that would have killed me
did not come with me,
nor the thorn-filled ground.
Only a man,
a man alone was with me.
No help from the tree’s hands,
lovely as faces
nor the deep roots that know the soil.
Just him.
I don’t know his name
but he was poor like me

A clutch of smugglers and bandits helping Neruda escape engaged in a ritual of thanks to an empty cow skull, and they bathed together in thermal waters. Enthralled with Neruda’s stories, the keeper refused his pay. Neruda glimpsed a kind of solidarity in this makeshift troupe of shopworn men who protected one another; their machetes cleared a difficult path and they shared in communal stories and food. When Neruda’s horse lost its footing during the river crossing, a topic he revisits more than once in Grapes and the Wind, the leftist comrades guarded him. He describes the scene in “First Appearance of the Angel”:

And there crossing the river,
when the waters bent
the horses’ gallops,
suddenly a gust of wind struck
like an arrow in my throat,
the animal stumbled
and the waters at my side
were like a torrent of needles,
the waterfall waiting like
a lightning bolt on the rocks,
there I looked behind me,
and saw for the first time the angel,
unshaven, wrinkled,
with a pistol and a lasso.
the angel guarded me,
he walked wingless beside me,
the angel of the Central Committee.

In Argentina, Neruda traded his ornithologist’s alias for a borrowed passport, that of Guatemala’s future Nobel laureate, Miguel Angel Asturias, to whom Neruda bore a passing resemblance.

While Neruda crossed the ocean in early 1949, bound for Paris, the network that had smuggled him out of his homeland printed a limited edition of his recently finished book. They uncovered printing plates that had gone unused for 15 years (police could trace plates to the publisher who had last used them). As the first copies came off the press, a false dust jacket was affixed: Risas y Lágrimas (Laughter & Tears) by Benigno Espinosa, another alias. The book’s real title was Canto General, widely considered Neruda’s masterpiece. His most anti-imperialist and most Whitmanesque book, it is a sweeping history of Latin America in verse, told—sung really—from the point of view of the oppressed. Thanks in part to the Truman doctrine, it was printed as samizdat in Chile while its author was on the run. Aside from a partial translation by a leftist press in 1950, the book didn’t appear in English in the United States for another four decades—relatively quickly compared to the 64 years it took Grapes and the Wind, its sequel in ambition and scope.

After landing in Europe in the spring of 1949, Neruda delivered readings and met translators, toured the Soviet Union, took the Trans-Siberian Railway to China, visited Southeast Asia, lived for a time in Prague, doubled back to Mexico and Guatemala, and finally returned to Western Europe. The poetry that resulted from Neruda’s “World Voyage,” as his comrade and biographer Volodia Teitelboim described it, blended evocations of travel and landscapes with poetic incantations for friendship and history. Though not set in America (as its model, Canto General, was), the book is indebted to Whitman. Its chapters were named for the regions Neruda visited, but the book ingeniously draws on his experiences in Spain, his political campaign, and his senate speeches for women’s suffrage. The result is an epic ode to the workers and partisans of the Old World.

One of the friends Neruda celebrated in Grapes and the Wind was Picasso, another prominent leftist who mourned the Spanish dead with a public work, the monumental and harrowing painting Guernica (1937), and whose simply drawn dove became a symbol of the international leftist peace movement. Before he took the stage at the Paris Peace Conference, Neruda met with Picasso, who had secured the poet’s legal right to appear in public in France despite the arrest warrant in Chile. In “Picasso,” from Grapes and the Wind, Neruda describes the painter’s studio in the south of France and celebrates his art by personifying the smoke from Picasso’s kiln:

In Vallauris each house
holds a prisoner.
It is always the same one.
It is smoke.
At times white-eyebrowed
fathers guard him,
oat-colored girls.
When you pass by
you see the smoke-guardians
sleep
and through the roofs,
between broken pots,
a blue conversation
between Heaven and smoke.
But there where fire
freely works
and smoke is a tar rose
blackening the walls,
there Picasso
bakes potter’s clay
between the kiln’s fiery racks,
polishing it, breaking it
until clay becomes waist,
a siren’s petal,
a moistened gold guitar

Neruda, likewise, mourns friends lost in Spain, whom the angels of the Committee could not protect. In fact, as Teitelboim notes, few artists conflated the Spanish Civil War defeat with the Russian sacrifices of World War II as Neruda did. In “The Lost Goatherd,” he writes of his friend Miguel Hernandez, who was imprisoned and later freed, only to be murdered by fascists:

Miguel made all of this—
soil and bee,
bride, wind and soldier—
clay for his conquered race,
people’s poet,
and so he went, treading
upon the thorns of Spain
with a voice that
her hangmen
now must hear, they listen,
they whose hands are
spotted with his indelible blood,
they hear his song
and they think
it’s just soil
and water.
That’s not true.
It’s blood,
blood,
Spanish blood

In the Soviet Union, Neruda was asked what he most wanted to see beyond the official tour of Moscow. He said without hesitation: Stalingrad—the city where a half-million of history’s angels bled and exhaled their last breath to stop fascism.

It was June 1949, nearing the summer solstice, and the famous Russian “white nights” entranced Neruda. But the gunfire of history echoed in his mind. Though many Americans boast of the United States’ decisive entrance into World War II, historians—and statistics—tell an adjacent story: that of the Soviet contribution. Whereas Western European countries typically lost between 250,000 and 500,000 soldiers each during the war, the Soviet Union lost an estimated 11,000,000. In the Battle of Stalingrad alone, the USSR lost more troops—500,000—than the British or Americans lost during the entire war. (The number of Soviet civilian deaths during the battle is not known.) Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad denied Nazis access to a key oil field and shattered the notion of German military invincibility. Propaganda films such as Frank Capra’s Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia (1943), as well as daily newsreel and newspaper accounts, reminded audiences how crucial the battle was. Neruda knew this history.

On his visit, he broke and smelled an acacia branch, regarding its fragrance as life reborn. “Acacia branch with thorns and flowers,” he writes in “Third Love Song to Stalingrad,” “where ... / will you hold stronger perfume / than in this place / where perfume was all erased, / where all fell / except the Soviet soldier … ?” “Stalingrad taught the world / life’s lesson supreme,” he continues, “be born, be born, be born …” Wherever he traveled, but especially in Eastern Europe and the communist world, he celebrated the postwar calm, the regrowth of vegetation over battlefields.

Beside the Volga River, the poet stood on the former ruins and took in the peace. The legendary battle had inspired two previous “love songs,” but during those white nights, he admired the new life in bloom so much that he wrote the aforementioned third poem, in which he elegizes the miracles that stopped the worst of history’s murderous war machines:

Today’s bread, today’s book,
a pine tree
planted just this morning
a luminous street
newly arrived from the plans
where the engineer
traced it beneath the wind of war,
a young girl who passes, a dog
who crosses the dusty day,
oh miracles,
miracles of blood,
miracles of steel and the Party,
miracles of our new world.

Throughout the volume, Neruda depicts his love of ordinary life, which is to say peace. From the book’s title and throughout, it is the grape—in clusters, on vines, or in wine goblets—that most captures life’s return to normalcy and the pleasures that come when war ends. Moving from Europe to Russia, he adapts the image of grape clusters into roe clusters. Of the “vast Soviet Union,” he writes in “History Changes”:

Great rivers tremble and sing
over its wide skin,
there lives
the sturgeon wrapped in silver
guarding roe clusters
of freshness and delight.
The bear in the mountains
with delicate feet
moves like an ancient monk at daylight
in a green basilica.

***

From the moment Neruda set foot on Russian soil, the CIA was watching him. They traded surveillance with the FBI when he attended the World Council for Peace in Mexico in September 1949. He had planned to stay only for the conference, but after taking ill, he was nursed by Mathilde Urrutia, a fellow Chilean, to whom he was drawn for her love of folklore and music. They fell in love. But Neruda was already married. His wife, Delia del Carril, was a leftist painter, 20 years Neruda’s senior. The couple was no longer intimate. Urrutia, closer to Neruda’s age, viewed Delia’s role as maternal, and befriended her.

In the spring of 1950, with Neruda’s condition improved, the three of them traveled from Mexico to Guatemala. A CIA agent shadowed them:

Since his arrival in Guatemala City on April 15 1950, [the agent wrote] Pablo Neruda has been staying … in close contact with leaders of leftist and communist groups … His public activities … well publicized … the Guatemalan government … paying all Neruda’s expenses …

As evidenced by the ellipses (which denote redactions), Neruda’s US government surveillance file is only partially declassified. Writing to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover a year and a half later, Assistant Director of Intelligence Lyman Kirkpatrick had Neruda followed back to Russia: “In October 1951 [Neruda] reportedly attended a meeting of progressive writers from capitalist countries in Moscow. In December of that year he was reported as an important Cominform [the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties] agent, currently living in one of the satellite countries.” Beginning in the late 1940s, the surveillance lasted until Neruda’s death by cancer in 1973. (Kirkpatrick was later the Inspector General tasked with investigating the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was said to take a dissident view of that incident, but here he is an otherwise faceless memo writer surveilling a poet through book launches, peace conferences, and meetings with translators.)

In Mexico, Urrutia got pregnant with Neruda’s child, but miscarried. After a difficult separation, the couple scheduled an emotional reunion in Paris. This was delayed by Neruda’s being banned from France (most likely from a US official referring Parisian authorities to González Videla’s warrant), so they met in Italy instead. On their third day in Rome, Neruda told Urrutia that police were following them everywhere. They took turns stealing glances at the men tailing them. “Let’s make a game of it,” he said. Still new to the poet’s fame, Urrutia witnessed a crowd gather at his train, among them plainclothes police who were there to eject Neruda from the country. Neruda’s Italian supporters protested and clashed with the police. Nevertheless, Neruda was detained and ordered to leave. But in the morning, newspapers reported that authorities could find no justification to eject him.

In the Italy section of Grapes and The Wind, in a poem titled “The Police,” Neruda recounts the skirmish:

Nevertheless that day
when they took me to the Swiss border
the police quickly found
themselves faced off by
militant poetry.
I will not forget the Roman crowd
in the station who, at night,
plucked me from the hands
of the pursuing police.

In her 2004 memoir, Urrutia elaborates: “I realized now that they weren’t fighting simply for [Neruda’s] right to stay in Italy; they were fighting against the idea that the government could expel a writer who had done nothing wrong in Italy and who was persecuted by the tyrannical government in his own country. It was a battle against injustice, against tyrants all over the world.”

A historian put Neruda and Urrutia up in his home in Capri, where they were betrothed in a moonlight wedding (just betrothed since Neruda was still married), and the men pursuing them relented somewhat. The CIA had an active presence in Italy; soon after the agency was founded in 1947, it created a bribery network to pay off Italian politicians and news outlets, thereby driving a wedge between socialists and communists and preventing a leftist coalition from mounting a government. From 1948 to 1975, the CIA spent $75 million rigging Italy’s elections, penetrating its student and labor unions, as well as its police forces. In “The Fleet Arrives,” Neruda captures the gist of the relationship: “When the North American fleet / arrives / Italy’s pastoral flag / vanishes. / Did the sky disappear / and where are the guitars?”

The agency later did the same in Chile, where it spent $3 million during the 1964 election to defeat Neruda’s friend Salvador Allende. Allende went on to win the 1970 election; in one of the CIA’s most infamous coups, the agency ousted him three years later, clearing the way for Augusto Pinochet’s long dictatorship. An accomplice to the coup was the daily newspaper El Mercurio. In the early 1950s, the paper purged left-wing staff writers, including Neruda’s friend, the poet and Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral.

Neruda’s most dissonant poetry attacks “filibusterers,” “Yanqui” monopolies, and propaganda outlets that pushed anti-communist lines, often invisibly and in service of wide repressions. In “On His Death,” a poem about Stalin included in Grapes and the Wind, Neruda writes:

All the while those who own
coal,
iron,
steel,
smoke,
banks,
gas,
gold,
flour,
nitrate,
the daily El Mercurio,
brothel owners,
North American senators,
filibusterers,
laden with the gold and blood
of all nations,
they owned History too.

It isn’t a long journey, rhetorically, from Neruda’s love for the Russian struggle, the Red Army’s courage at Stalingrad, and his denunciations of “Yanquis,” to his infamous Stalinophilia. As a result of decades of US imperialism, the Communist Party of Chile was officially Stalinist. Though Stalin’s atrocities against presumed political opponents were disputed throughout the period of the Spanish Civil War, Neruda couldn’t acknowledge them, not while Stalin was alive, particularly since he saw the Soviet Union as a bulwark against the Americans. His poems and public remarks betray this moral lapse.

But the North Americans offered plenty to trigger Neruda. US atomic weapons had killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—an indisputable war crime. Moreover, the US’s anti-communist atrocities in Greece, use of napalm in China on behalf of nationalists, and further outrages in the Philippines festered in Neruda’s mind as he visited these countries. During the Korean war, which bookended Neruda’s “World Voyage,” Americans allegedly used germ warfare to help destroy the peninsula. Neruda envisioned himself bearing witness to unnecessary interventions and deaths, and celebrated the resilience of the US’s victims. If he had more to say on US atrocities than those committed by communists, and if this was a lapse (it was), should we repeat his error by ignoring the pain and blood that he did witness? In “The invaders,” he writes:

With napalm and dollars,
destruction, blood,
ashes, tears.
With death.
They came.
[…]
Seeking from the air
even the very last 
shepherd on the mountains
to kill him.
 
To lop off the breasts
of the shining guerrillera.
 
To slay prisoners in their beds […]
 
And suddenly 
there was nothing but death.

***

Neruda returned to Chile in 1952. The following March, Stalin died. A short-lived thaw with the West began, and Neruda added a poem to the Russia section of Grapes and the Wind. The poem dubs the murderous Soviet leader both “Comrade” and “Captain.” This is not Neruda at his most accurate but rather a partisan idealizing his side in a bloody and bitter fight:

Workers, fishermen, Stalinist musicians!
Steel smiths, copper father, Stalinists!
Doctors, nitrate miners, Stalinist poets!
Professors, students, Stalinist peasants!
Laborers, employees, Stalinist women,
hail to you this day!

In the volume’s closing poem, Neruda writes, “I saw in the villages war / like discarded / teeth / and I saw elsewhere / the circle of peace / growing like a goblet, / like a child in the womb.” The land is pregnant everywhere with life, and humankind now fulfills its destiny, which, again, is “be born, be born, be born.” Peace has come through solidarity. “I found in all places / bread, wine, fire, hands, / tenderness. // I slept beneath all / the flags / united / as under the branches / of a single green forest / and the stars were / my stars.” He admits his political battles were cruel and cost him much. But he gestures toward letting them go:

From my cruel battles,
from my sorrows,
I hold onto nothing
that would not serve you.
[…]
Not a single drop
of hate remains in my breast.
My hands are open
casting grapes
to the wind.
 
I returned from my journeys.
I journeyed
building joy.
 
Let love defend us […]
 
Let all song be shared
throughout the world.
 
Let the grape vines arise.
Let the wind spread them about.

In the months after his return to Chile, Neruda organized a congress of intellectuals, even as the CIA surveilled his correspondence. Neruda’s Continental Congress, which grew out of the poet’s interest in world peace and left solidarity movements, was held in late March and early April 1953. Before the conference attendees, Neruda described Grapes and the Wind as “his contribution to peace.” The book would be “a gleaning of eastern and western Europe’s best deeds,” Neruda said, just as “the meeting he was addressing was also a work of peace.” Neruda regretted that the Chilean government, allied with Cold War hawks, blocked his Russian friends from obtaining visas to attend the conference. Although these were Neruda’s high communist and anti-imperialist years—his Red Period—he used his place of honor as organizer and speaker to lavish praise not on Stalin or Stalingrad, but on Whitman.

Although “it may seem strange,” he said, “the supreme test of a people is its poetry.” Whitman, his elegy suggested, was proof positive for the North Americans. Neruda had simplified his poetry, he said, and moved out of “obscure expression into clarity,” though he allowed for the need to criticize and lambaste.

His dream, he told the Santiago crowd, was to launch a much bigger conference in Latin America, with intellectuals from the Soviet Union and the United States in attendance together. (When he attended such a conference in New York in 1966, Russian writers were again blocked; the Cubans retaliated by boycotting.) But his appearance that spring in Chile climaxed with a quote from Whitman—a quote addressed to Russians and known to few North Americans:

You Russians and we Americans, from such distant countries, with such diverse social and political situations … and nevertheless so like one another in some broad characteristics … You Russians and we Americans truly possess in common many undefined hazy things that still aren’t permanently fixed but are similar in being the groundwork for an infinitely greater future.

Peace requires acknowledgment of past wrongs. A decade later—though it’s rarely mentioned now—Neruda’s poems and public pronouncements acknowledged the wrongdoings of powerful communists. Though he saw international communism as a defense against North American imperialism, meddling, and atrocities, and communism in Chile had always been nonviolent, Neruda publicly called out China for the disappearance of his friend Ai Qing, the poet-father of artist Ai Weiwei. He also criticized Stalin in a poem titled “The Episode”:

How could it happen? But certainly
it happened, it’s very clear that it happened
 
[…]
 
That dead one administered the rule of cruelty
from his ubiquitous statue

Strauss’s translation of Grapes and the Wind offers a straightforward, legible, elegant Neruda—an achievement all the more admirable given that the book was written during tumultuous years in which the poet veered from his most pacifist to his most militant voice. Until these poems are admitted into the Neruda canon in English, and until his full range of emotions and sympathies are translated, English readers of Neruda will remain victims of a literary erasure built on Stalin’s atrocities and America’s violent reaction.