Inscribed by Neruda to José Balmes and Gracia Barrios
Incitación al Nixonicidio y Alabanza de la Revolución Chilena.
[Santiago, Chile: Editora Nacional Quimantú, 1973].
Price: $3,000.00
About the item
First trade edition. 210, [4] pp. 12mo. Inscribed by Neruda to José Balmes and Gracia Barrios. Original wrappers printed in green, purple, and pink. Creasing to bottom edge of a few pages, very good. In custom folding chemise and morocco backed slipcase.
Item #309433
Neruda's final book of verse, inscribed in green ink to two renowned Chilean painters and fellow leftists: "Salud! a José Balmes y Gracia Barrios Pablo Neruda 1973 Isla Negra." An outstanding association copy of one of Neruda's most controversial works.
A polemic on behalf of Salvador Allende's Unidad Popular party ahead of Congressional elections in March of 1973, "Incitement to Nixoncide and Praise for the Chilean Revolution" was prompted by US attempts to undermine the Allende government in favor of pro-US business elements inside Chile. As Neruda explains in the prologue to the poem cycle [in translation]: "My song is a tough attack on the enemies of my people, as hard as Araucanian stone. This may be an ephemeral function. But I am fulfilling it. And I am resorting to the oldest weapons available to poetry: song and pamphleteering, used by the classics and the romantics with the aim of destroying the enemy. So stand firm, I'm about to fire the first shot!" Allende's government was toppled nevertheless by a US-backed military junta headed by Augusto Pinochet in September 1973. (See Feinstein, Pablo Neruda, pp. 392ff, for more on the political context in which the book was written.)
The Chilean painters José Balmes (1927-2016) and Gracia Barrios (b. 1927) were active in Unidad Popular politics at the time of this inscription. In the same year Balmes created a series of works, "Imaginarios del Canto General," based on texts from Neruda's epic "Canto General." Their relationship began decades earlier, however: born in Catalonia, Balmes arrived in Chile with 2,200 other refuges from the Spanish Civil War in 1939 aboard the SS Winnipeg; a rescue mission which Neruda, as Special Consul for Immigration, personally orchestrated. (For an interview in which Balmes recalls first meeting Neruda as a 12 year-old immigrant, see: http://www.latercera.com/noticia/un-nino-y-el-poeta-las-memorias-de-jose-balmes-a-bordo-del-winnipeg/)
"Incitación al nixonicidio" was also published by Quimantú in a limited edition of 1,000 in the same month as this first trade edition. Neruda died in September 1973.
