Pablo Neruda is the greatest Chilean poet, a Nobel Prize laureate for Literature, and "One Hundred Love Sonnets" is one of the most important books in his work. The sonnets are dedicated to the poet's third wife and his greatest love – Matilde Urrutia. In his dedication the poet writes: "Together with you I walked through forests and sands, through lost lakes and ash-grey spaces, and gathered fragments of pure wood, from stems that had felt the swaying of the water and the inconstancy of time. From such tender signs I built with axe and knife these wooden storehouses of love, I raised these small houses of fourteen beams, so that your eyes, which I adore and sing, might live in them. Thus I built my love, and now I offer you this hundred: sonnets of wood, made only because you gave them life."
There are poets who conceal the poverty of their inner world behind lavish and convoluted phrases. Pablo Neruda is the complete antipode of such poets. The more complex, polyphonic and boundless his poetic world is, the more astonishingly simple, clear and transparent his word becomes. This is a model of mastery in the art, a measure of true poetry. "One Hundred Love Sonnets" reveal a strange world of light and wisdom – the breath of a great love!
Nikolay Hristozov
In true poetry there is a scent, an accent, a spark that everyone can sense. And let this nourish the little grain of madness that each of us carries... And to live without that grain is truly reckless.
Federico García Lorca
Pablo Neruda (Ricardo Reyes Basoalto) was born on 12 July 1904 in Chile. He adopted the pseudonym Neruda, influenced by the Czech poet Jan Neruda. His first poetry collection, "Crepuscular" (Dusk), was published in 1923. From 1927 his diplomatic career began. He visited almost all European countries and a number of states in Asia and Latin America. He was in Bulgaria twice (1960 and 1962). Neruda had left-wing convictions. He had three marriages – the last one to Matilde Urrutia, the woman of his life. In 1971 Pablo Neruda received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died on 23 September 1973.
