Pablo Neruda from the Pacific to Palestine

From the mid-twentieth century, Pablo Neruda was the most well-known Latin American poet in the Arab world. Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab published poems by Pablo Neruda in a collection of his own translations, Qasa’id Mukhtara min al-Shi‘r al-‘Alami al-Hadith ( Selected Poems from Modern World Poetry ) in 1955. In 1975, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1942–2008) published “Dhahibun Ila al-Qasida – Ila Bablu Niruda” (“On the Way to the Poem – To Pablo Neruda”), a poem dedicated to Pablo Neruda (1904–1973). Years later, Darwish visited Neruda’s home in Isla Negra, Chile, in 1990, and thereafter composed another poem, which begins: “In Pablo Neruda’s home, on the Pacific / coast, I remembered Yannis Ritsos / at his house.” Drawing on the translation, circulation, and reception of Neruda in the Arab world, this essay will explore the relationship of Arab writers to Neruda and little-known Arab Latin American engagements within internationalist networks of Global South solidarity and nationalist politics.