Recently-discovered Neruda poems set for UK publication

Bloodaxe Books is to publish recently-discovered poems by the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda for the first time in the UK later this month.

Bloodaxe acquired the UK rights from Fundación Pablo Neruda, representing the heirs of Pablo Neruda, via the Spanish agent Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells, SA, Barcelona.

Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems gathers together 21 previously unknown poems that were discovered by archivists of the Neruda Foundation in Chile when they were cataloguing Neruda’s papers in 2014. The poems were written on scraps of paper, concert programmes, a menu, and in notebooks. Colour photographs of the originals are included in this dual language edition, together with detailed notes about where the poems were found and how they relate to Neruda’s published work.

The works were penned between the early 1950s and Neruda’s death in 1973. They show his "mature imagination" and writing at work, and include love poems, odes, anecdotes, and poems of political engagement.

Translator Forrest Gander said: "Not all of the poems are entirely finished. Some are handwritten on the backs of menus, some end in commas, some are typed up and corrected in Neruda’s hand. Movingly, this edition includes holographic reproductions: you’ll see Neruda’s handwriting, his cross-outs, his revisions. As when I first opened the lush facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson’s folded letter-poems, I found this record of the working mind of a great poet riveting."

Darío Oses, library and archives director at the Pablo Neruda Foundation, said: "For their literary quality and universal importance, there is no doubt that these poems deserve to be included among Pablo Neruda’s published works... a literary event of the first order… they allow for renewed readings, for numerous and varied reinterpretations of Neruda’s vast body of work."

Then Come Back, translated by Forrest Gander, will be published on 27th April.