The Essential Neruda

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) was born in the town of Parral in Chile. He received numerous prestigious awards for his work, including the International Peace Prize in 1950 and the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953. In 1971 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Translated by Mark Eisner, John Felstiner, Forrest Gander, Robert Hass, Jack Hirschman, Stephen Kessler, Stephen Mitchell, and Alastair Reid

Stephen Mitchell was born in Brooklyn, educated at Amherst, the Sorbonne, and Yale, and de-educated through intensive Zen training. His many books include the bestselling Tao Te Ching, Gilgamesh, The Gospel According to Jesus, The Book of Job, The Second Book of the Tao, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Bhagavad Gita, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf, and his latest, The Way of Forgiveness. He is also the co-author of three of his wife Byron Katie’s bestselling books.

Mark Eisner is a full-time writer, translator, and documentary filmmaker.

John Felstiner professor emeritus of English at Stanford University, is an American literary critic, translator, and poet. His interests include poetry in various languages, environmental and ecologic poems, literary translation, Vietnam era poetry and Holocaust studies.

Forrest Gander is an American poet, essayist, novelist, critic, and translator. His Be With won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Robert Hass is an acclaimed, award-winning American poet. He was poet laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He has won the National Book Award, and he shared the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation. His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry received the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has served as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alastair Reid (1926–2014) was a Scottish poet and a scholar of South American literature. He was known for his lighthearted style of poems and for his translations of South American poets Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda.