Canto General

“The greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language.”
—Gabriel García Márquez, of Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda’s epic poem Canto General is a prodigious work that scrolls out like the chronicle of a journey through the Americas. In his most audacious and ambitious achievement, Neruda depicts history as a vast, continuous struggle against oppression. Constructed in fifteen parts, and made up of more than fifteen thousand lines, Canto General unfolds in successive epochs, celebrating the flora and fauna and geology of Neruda’s homeland and recounting episodes in the lives of explorers and conquistadors, emperors and dictators, revolutionaries and everyday laborers. Here is Canto General seen afresh, the breathtaking beauty of Neruda’s poetry fully revealed in English, with a new translation for the twenty-first century.
Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904— September 23, 1973), author of nearly forty books, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.