Isabel Allende writes her stories in Spanish and one of her motivators is Pablo Neruda. Allende even features Neruda in the epigraph of The House of the Spirits, “How long does a man spend dying?/What does it mean to say ‘for ever’?” She mentions in an interview that his works brings back her language because their rich with Chile’s culture. (Penguin Random House) She even mentions his opinion on her journalism, a time before she was a literature writer:
“He thought that I was the worst journalist in the country, that I could never be objective, that I lied all the time and if it didn’t have a story, I would make it up. But he loved the way I wrote so he said you should switch to literature where all these defects are virtues.” ((Penguin Random House)
Pablo Neruda was born in Parral, Chile with the name Neftali Ricardo Reyes y Basoalto. (Hirsch 113) “Pablo Neruda” was his pseudonym for his poems that he later adopted as his legal name. (Hirsch 113) Although, he was born in Parral, he spent most of his childhood in Temuco, Chile and then later moved to Santiago, Chile. (Hirsch 113) His poems went from love poems of people but also of Chile’s landscape to poems of activism for social change. (“Pablo Neruda”) In Allende’s work, The House of the Spirits, Neruda is referred to as “The Poet”, a figure who was admired by the working class. The scene of “The Poet’s” funeral in chapter thirteen is based on a real-life event where people gathered to give their respects to Neruda and yelled “Here! Now and forever!” and again for Salvador Allende, the late president then.
Works Cited
Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits. 1982. New York, Atris Paperbacks, 2015.
Hirsch, Edward. “Poetry: Pablo Neruda.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), vol. 22, no. 2, 1998, pp. 113–14. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40259760. Accessed 27 Apr. 2026.
“Pablo Neruda.” The Poetry Foundation, 2024, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/pablo-neruda#tab-poems.
Penguin Random House. “Isabel Allende on Her Memories of Pablo Neruda.” YouTube, 12 July 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0zQhf7rCtw.
Xarucoponce. “Theater and Public Library of Parral (Chile),” Wikimedia Commons, 11 Apr. 2012, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Teatro_Parral.JPG.
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