Word: chiles
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...poet could attract 5,000 or more working people on a rainy night to hear him recite the verses of "Canto General," his paean to them, or "Spain in Our Hearts." During the Popular Unity government of Salvadore Allende, his verses were painted on thousands of walls throughout Chile. A spokesman for the left, Neruda always wrote for, and to, the people, all people. His poetry, and more recently his Memoirs, are Neruda's attempt to detail his apprenticeship to become the poet of his people...
Neruda grew up as Neftali Ricard Reyes Basaolto, just after the turn of the century, on Chile's frontier. His first poems were imbued with the wilderness, the beauty he saw more than the harshness that was a way of life. A father unsympathetic to his creative urges led Neruda to change his name. He unknowingly adopted that of a famous Czechoslovakian poet, Jan Neruda...
...flight from Chile, through the harsh Southern Andes into Argentina and eventually over to Paris, left an impression on him perhaps as great as the events of a decade before. It was this journey, among mountain peasants who had never heard the name or the poetry of Pablo Neruda, that he recounts in his Nobel Lecture and repeats in the Memoirs. The trip across the Andes contained a simple lesson for Neruda: the poet must identify with mankind because "there is no such thing as a lone struggle...
Most of Neruda's time until his return to Chile in 1952 was spent writing, living in Europe and traveling in Asia and the Soviet Union, which he loved oblivious to the imminence of what he would later call "Stalin's dark night." The revelations of the Twentieth Congress came as a grave shock to Neruda, one which the Memoirs show he could only hesitatingly accept. He refutes accusations in the Memoirs that he remained a die-hard Stalinist, even after the Congress, yet he writes that he can never forget that Stalin had appeared to the world...
Kissinger, who has never forgotten that 13 members of his family died in Nazi concentration camps, stressed the importance of human rights in Chile, as if to compensate for his earlier role in the "destabilization" of Salvador Allende. Those who sat with him in closed staff meetings describe "an intellectualized approach to moral values." The Secretary would argue, "Why berate our friends? We cannot choose our allies, we must make the best of them." He justified the use of secret means for what he believed to be higher moral ends, "not abstract principles but elements of national survival...