Alturas de Macchu Picchu, 1945

The twelve-part Alturas de Macchu Picchu was written in September 1945 at Isla Negra, and first appeared in a magazine Revista Nacional de Cultura in Caracas in 1946. It was then published separately in Chile in 1947 as part of a recording, though Robert Pring-Mill claimed it was 1948. It reappeared as the second section of the ambitious but flawed Canto general, 1950, which Paz labelled a ‘gran olla en donde hay de todo’ [a great stew in which there's everything] and lists ‘arengas, diatribas, kilómetros de lugares comunes y de pronto, sin aviso, luminosos … esplendores’ [harangues, diatribes, kilometres of commonplaces and suddenly, without warning luminous splendours]. As Rodríguez Monegal first mooted, there was a gap of two years between Neruda's ascent in 1943 of the Incan ruins discovered by Hiram Bingham in 1911 and the actual writing of the poem in 1945. Neruda was clearly not writing a tourist's breathless impression of the most iconic ruins in the Americas. In fact, it was reported that his first comment on seeing the ruins was ‘¡Qué lugar para comer un asado de cordero!’ [what a great place to roast lamb], though a biographer deemed this a joke. He also imposed his own spelling of the ruins (the official guide book has Machupicchu) and never corrected himself (did he feel as the poet of the Americas that he had the right to rebaptise it?). Most critics agree that this is a Janus poem, assessing the first twenty years of the poet's career, and announcing his future intentions as the date 1945 coincided with his officially joining the Chilean Communist Party. It has been translated at least six times into English, with John Felstiner's version included in one of the finest works of criticism on Neruda. The poem is so crucial that few question its value.

The eleven-year gestation of Neruda's attempt to rewrite Latin American history in verse as his Canto general is a complex story that gripped Robert Pring-Mill over many years.