celebrating her hands in many sonnets. Finally,
in the ‘‘Night’’ sonnets that anticipate death
(including ‘‘Sonnet LXXXIX’’), the speaker
asks his beloved to use her hands to comfort
him and to carry on their legacy.
In his article, ‘‘Loving Neruda’’ inPablo Ner-
uda and the U.S. Culture Industry,BruceDean
Willis discusses the American pop culture response
to Neruda’s love poetry following the filmIl Post-
ino(1994). The public did not seem to find Neruda
too macho or his women too passive. ‘‘Sonnet
XVII’’ from One Hundred Love Sonnets,for
instance, was read in the movie Patch Adams
(1998) and generated enthusiastic Internet com-
ments and reviews on Neruda’s love poems. Willis
asks why Americans like Neruda’s brand of love
and decides that readers ‘‘fall in love with Neruda’s
love because he has anchored it to nature, a Nature
that evokes, for many, a Golden Age before urban
sprawl.’’
One Hundred Love Sonnetsis first of all
about the poet’s personal love for Matilde. Mar-
jorie Agosin inPablo Nerudaquotes Ben Belitt
who characterizes the sonnets as ‘‘a husband’s
book of hours, grievances, privacies, troubled
meditations.’’ Agosin adds that ‘‘Optimism and
vitality are the central characteristics’’ of the
sonnets. They are divided into four seasons of
love: ‘‘Morning,’’ ‘‘Afternoon,’’ ‘‘Evening,’’ and
‘‘Night.’’ The morning poems record the couple’s
youthful joy together in the paradise of their
home at Isla Negra on the ocean. The poet’sWHAT
DO I READ
NEXT? The House of the Spirits(1982), by Isabel
Allende, and translated by Magda Bogin for
a Bantam paperback edition in 1986, includes
scenes of the violent political atmosphere of
the Pinochet coup in 1973. It tells the story of
three generations of the Trueba family of
Chile in the style of magical realism that
blends realism and myth. The book was
made into a 1993 film with Meryl Streep and
Jeremy Irons.
Miriam Bat-Ami’sTwo Suns in the Sky(Puf-
fin, 2001) is a young adult love story that
presents the Jewish experience of World War
II. Neruda saw love and politics as inseparable,
and this story involves two fifteen-year-olds,
Christine Cook, a Catholic American, and
Adam Bornstein, a Jewish Holocaust survivor
from Yugoslavia, who fall in love at a refugee
shelter in New York.
InThe Nixon Administration and the Death
of Allende’s Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide
(Norton, 2005), Jonathan Haslam, profes-
sor of the history of international relations
at University of Cambridge, explains the
U.S. involvement in Chile that helped bringdown Allende’s socialist government. The
thesis is that Allende’s government was
already crumbling from within; the book
brings to light new facts and documents.
I Explain a Few Things: Selected Poems of
Pablo Neruda(2007), edited by Ilan Stavans,
is a bilingual edition with facing Spanish
text. Stavans has picked and translated
famous poems from each of Neruda’s great
collections from the 1920s to his death in- It is a good overview of his vast work.
The New Penguin Book of Love Poetry
(2003), edited and with an introduction by
Jon Stallworthy, includes famous poets in
English and some love poems from around
the world.
Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry:
A Bilingual Anthology(1996) was translated
and edited by Stephen Tapscott, a literature
professor at MIT. The anthology highlights
seventy-five poets, including Neruda, Dario,
Reyes, Vallejo, Borges, and Paz with origi-
nal language versions and translations set
side by side.
Sonnet LXXXIX