[Neruda] will keep on dying with the movement of our century and with us: a vast and profound death of incalculable significance, dying first here, later there, and then beyond; now in me and then in other men and women, without obvious rhythm, but really with the rhythm of the seasons, of the sea, the stars and the trees, through which he keeps growing, stretching, resting from his life, breathing at last all the atmosphere and all the earth, all of time, the components of his death….
I want to write a few things down about the friend I loved and the poet, who at the end faced up to the fact of his death, clothed as always in a magical complexity and simplicity. To my mind what is significant is how Neruda, dying so quickly, transformed this moment of truth into a fascinating and delicate balancing act of reserve, allusion, boldness, shyness, vertigo and tranquility. My evidence is … the ten poems which Neruda published in Crísis in August, 1973….
