Pablo Neruda and the U.S. Culture Industry

Ed. Teresa Longo

This collection gathers a diverse group of critical and poetic voices to analyze the politics of packing and marketing Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Latin American poetry in general in the United States. The ground swell of enthusiasm in America, the contributors argue, has relied upon a vastly oversimplified, romanticized, and depoliticized interpretation of Neruda's celebrated poetry as panacea—offering healing visions of community, hope, and wonder. The essays rediscover the richness to be found in the work of Neruda and his peers as a challenge to their commodification and misrepresentation in the American literary marketplace. This volume refocuses the lens through which we read, translate and write about Neruda-and Latin American culture-in the United States.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Poetry Like Wonder Bread

Teresa Longo

Part I. Reading Neruda

  1. Pablo Neruda, Interpreter of Our Century

    Giuseppe Bellini

  2. Speak through my Words: the Poetics and Politics of Translating Neruda

    Janice A. Jaffe

  3. Pablo Neruda: Absence and Presence: the Photograph as Historical Referent

    Patricia Santoro

  4. Quests for Alternative Cultural Antecedents: The Indigenism of Pablo Neruda, Ernesto Cardenal, and Gary Snyder

    Jill Kuhnheim

    Part II. Neruda Reconfigured: Culture, History, Politics

  5. Loving Neruda

    Bruce Dean Willis

  6. The De-Chileanization of Neruda in Il postino

    Irene B. Hodgson

  7. Buying into the Nerudian Condominium or Building Community: Border Culture Reclaims the Past for the New Century

    Ann Marie Stock

  8. The Poetics of Politics and the Politics of the Poet: Experience and Testimony in Pablo Neruda

    Silvia N. Rosman

    Part III. Linking Theory to Praxis: U.S. Latino Responses

  9. Post Wonder Bread: Pablo Neruda in Centerfield?

    Teresa Longo

  10. “The Good Liar Meets his Executioners”: the Evolution of a Poem

    Martín Espada

  11. Pablo Neruda’s Dilemma

    Julio Marzán

  12. In Search of Literary Cojones: Pablo Neruda, U.S. Latino Poetry, and the U.S. Literary Canon

    Marcos McPeek Villatoro

Afterword: Pablo Neruda (1904): A Centennial Greeting

René Jara