New Delhi: On the 107th birth anniversary of Nobel literature laureate Pablo Neruda, a leftist poet who died after the 1973 coup that ousted a socialist government, we pay tribute to some of his best works.
Neruda, among Latin America's most renowned literary figures and an active Communist Party member, died of cancer on September 23, 1973 just days after then-president Salvador Allende was toppled and General Augusto Pinochet rose to power.
Neruda, who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature, is best-known for his love poems. His "Canto General" is an epic poem about South America's history and its people.
Neruda's surrealistic style is reflected in his 'Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair.' Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said Neruda was "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language." He wrote in green ink as it was his personal color of hope.
Neruda, real name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto and he took the pen name of Pablo Neruda in memory of the Czech poet Jan Neruda. He was a senior member of Chile's Communist Party whose writings were work banned during Pinochet's 1973-1990 military dictatorship.
He was elected to the Chilean Senate in 1945 and also held several diplomatic posts.
Here are 10 best quotes from his works
1. Tonight I can write the saddest lines...Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.
2. I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
3. Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars, through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain: Love is a war of lightning, and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.
4. And because love battles not only in its burning agricultures but also in the mouth of men and women, I will finish off by taking the path away to those who between my chest and your fragrance want to interpose their obscure plant.
5. I love you only because it's you the one I love; I hate you deeply, and hating you bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.
6. Well, now, if little by little you stop loving me I shall stop loving you little by little. If suddenly you forget me do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you.
7. With chaste heart, and pure eyes I celebrate you, my beauty, restraining my blood so that the line surges and follows your contour, and you bed yourself in my verse, as in woodland, or wave-spume: earth's perfume, sea's music.
8. Never has one goblet contained you, one song, one man, you are choral, gregarious, at the least, you must be shared.
9. I hunt for a sign of you in all the others, In the rapid undulant river of women, braids, shyly sinking eyes, light step that slices, sailing through the foam.
10. In you the wars and the flights accumulated. From you the wings of the song birds rose. You swallowed everything, like distance. Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank! It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss. The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.
#### Andy Garcia reciting "Tonight I can write the saddest lines"
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If You Forget Me (Pablo Neruda read by Madonna)
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