NERUDA, Pablo | Todo el amor

Santiago, Chile: Nascimiento, 1953. 

Royal 8vo.; age-toned; cardboard wrappers. In original dust jacket reproducing a detail of Botticelli's La Primavera toned in grey/light blue; chipped; rubbed; heavy edgewear. 

First edition. Inscribed on the half-title by Pablo Neruda to the costariccense poet Ninfa Santos Mora: “es para Ninfa amiga desde los treintes lejanos y cercanos” [“this is for Ninfa, friend since the thirties, far away and near”]. 

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904–73) rst compiled these love poems, selected from his entire poetic work, in 1953 and expanded and revised them in 1964. Todo el amor is, without a doubt, the most widely distributed collection of poems in the entire history of poetry in the Spanish language. 

They are poems to women, odes to love full of fantasy and passion but also of vitality and indecision. The volume was an important point in the production of the great Chilean poet. Todo el amor, in fact, was strongly desired by Neruda himself in order to be able to deliver and capture another side of his poetics, that is, the one linked to the feeling of love, to the private and avowedly personal sphere, distant from civil and political commitment. In this regard, Giuseppe Bellini – an authoritative interpreter of Neruda – writes in the preface to the Italian edition of the work that we are in the presence of a “new book of Neruda confessions, all the more personal because the poet himself has constructed it.” It should be noted that Horacio Jorge Becco, in his famous bibliography dedicated to Neruda, erroneously indicates 1943 as the year of the rst original edition, equally erroneously reporting 256 as the total number of pages of the volume. 

Neruda and the Costa Rican poet Santos Mora were longtime friends. On one occasion while Neruda was visiting Mexico, he left his lucky hat behind after a typical evening chatting and drinking. Claimed by no one, the hat was shunted around until Santos Mora needed a dozen eggs and gave it to a neighbor in exchange. The neighbor promptly gave the hat to her ten-year-old son, who immediately made it fashionable by cutting it up into a whoopee cap (a style most famously worn by Jughead in the Archie comics). A year later Neruda returned, asking for his lucky hat – Santos Mora panicked, gathered a dozen eggs, and recovered the chapeau, in its altered state.