Neruda and Vallejo - Selected Poems Translated by Robert Bly, John Knoepfle and James Arlington Wright

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973) was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean writer and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto.

Neruda was accomplished in a variety of styles ranging from erotically charged love poems like his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. In 1971 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, a controversial award because of his political activism.

Neruda was hospitalized with cancer at the time of the Chilean coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet. Twelve days after being hospitalized, Neruda died of heart failure

Pinochet denied permission to transform Neruda's funeral into a public event. However, thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets. Neruda's funeral became the first public protest against the Chilean military dictatorship.

Source - Wikipedia

César Vallejo

César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza (1892 – 1938) was a Peruvian poet. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century.

In 1922 he published his second volume of poetry, Trilce, still one of the most radically avant-garde collections in the Spanish language. After publishing the short story collections Escalas melografiadas and Fabula salvaje in 1923, the poet emigrated to Europe under the threat of incarceration and remained there until his death in Paris in 1938.

Source - Wikipedia