Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

Lot 98
11.12.2024 00:00UTC +00:00
Classic
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1349673
Lot 98 | Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
Estimate value
£ 50 000 – 70 000
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
The ‘Cuadernos de Temuco’: three autograph manuscript notebooks containing his earliest poems, Temuco and Pueto Saavedra, 1918-1920
Volume 1: three sections, the first, paginated i-xxxiv, comprising copies (on rectos only) of Spanish translations (by Enrique Díez-Canedo) of 13 poems by Sully Prudhomme, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Henry Bataille and others; thereafter fair copies of approx. 160 poems by Neruda, paginated 1-319 (lacking 279-282, many versos blank), of which approx. 207 pages in autograph, and 6 by Laura Reyes, the poems subdivided into at least five groups (with dividers titled ‘Los Alamos’, p.53, ‘Las emociones eternas’, p.97, ‘Mes de Diciembre de 1919’, p.173, and ‘1920 / Enero’, p.213), many poems dated, 1918-1920; an unpaginated [pp. 320-323] section at the conclusion in Laura Reyes’s hand, in pencil, listing Neruda’s publications up to 1949; altogether approx. 240 pages in autograph, plus blanks, stamped ‘Neftalí Reyes’ in various places, signature on front paste-down as ‘Neftalí Reyes’ erased, signed ‘Pablo Neruda desde Octubre de 1920’. In a blue exercise book.

Volume 2: title ‘Helios / Poemas / de / Pablo Neruda’, thirty autograph poems by Neruda (six as revised versions of poems in vol. 1), laid out as groups in a sequence, on approx. 40 pages, the remainder comprising notes, drawings and school work in the hand of Laura Reyes, one page with a pencil sketch of Neruda. In a black exercise book.

Volume 3: title ‘Poesías’ on inside cover, one autograph poem by Neruda, ‘Nocturno’, 19 April 1918 (signed ‘Neftalí Reyes’), and autograph transcriptions in Spanish of two poems by Victor Hugo and Gabriela Mistral, with approx. 30 transcriptions by Laura Reyes of poems by various authors, cancelled signature ‘Neftalí Reyes’ on inside cover with date 16 January 1919, altogether approx. 12 pages in Neruda’s hand. In a black exercise book.

Provenance: Sotheby's, 11 November 1982, lot 167.

The earliest known poetical manuscripts by Neruda, dating from Neruda's early years in Temuco and Puerto Saavedra in southern Chile before his move to Santiago in March 1921: they include all but one of the 26 poems published by him in periodicals between October 1918 and October 1920, and versions of eight poems included in his first collection, Crepusculario (1923). A few others have been quoted by scholars, but approx. 120 remain apparently unpublished. The notebooks are discussed by Hernan Loyola in Ser y morir en Pablo Neruda (1918-1945), (Santiago, 1967).

Neruda was a famously precocious writer: he composed his first poems as early as 1914 at the age of 10, and his first published work (an essay in a local newspaper) is from July 1917. By the period of these notebooks in 1918 to 1920 he was regularly published poems in local magazines, and in 1919 won third prize in the literary competition 'Juegos Florales del Maule'; in 1921, still only 16 years old, he moved to Santiago to study at the University of Chile, but soon devoted himself wholly to poetry, with his first compilation, Crepusculario, being published in 1923. The notebooks, which were clearly shared with Neruda's half-sister, Laura Reyes, intriguingly track the change in 1920 from his birth name, Ricardo Neftalí Reyes to his lifelong pseudonym Pablo Neruda (usually assumed to derive from the Czech poet Jan Neruda).




Provenance

Sotheby's 11 November 1982, lot 167.
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