Reading Olympics

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Reading a book from every country of the world: Chile

Photo by AROMATEEC on Unsplash

Confession time, fellow bibliophiles: poetry isn’t exactly my forte.

Give me a captivating narrative or a well-developed character arc, and I’m content. Deciphering flowery language and wrestling with metaphors? Not so much.

However, Reading Olympics is all about expanding literary horizons, so with a healthy dose of curiosity (and perhaps a touch of nervousness), I embarked on a journey with the most well known author from Chile, Pablo Neruda. His collection, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, was my companion the past week.

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Spanish and English Edition)

Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean writer and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. Neruda assumed his pen name as a teenager, partly because it was in vogue, partly to hide his poetry from his father, a rigid man who wanted his son to have a “practical” occupation.