Canto General

Canto General is Pablo Neruda's tenth book of poems. It was first published in Mexico in 1950, by Talleres Gráficos de la Nación. Neruda began to compose it in 1938. "Canto General" ("General Song") consists of 15 sections, 231 poems, and more than 15,000 lines. This work attempts to be a history or encyclopedia of the whole continent of Hispanic America. "The Heights of Macchu Picchu" (Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu) is Canto II of the Canto Gener... more

Canto General is Pablo Neruda's tenth book of poems. It was first published in Mexico in 1950, by Talleres Gráficos de la Nación. Neruda began to compose it in 1938. "Canto General" ("General Song") consists of 15 sections, 231 poems, and more than 15,000 lines. This work attempts to be a history or encyclopedia of the whole continent of Hispanic America. "The Heights of Macchu Picchu" (Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu) is Canto II of the Canto General. The twelve poems that comprise this section of the epic work have been translated into English regularly since even before its initial publication in Spanish in 1950, beginning with a translation by Hoffman Reynolds Hays in The Tiger's Eye, a journal of arts and literature published out of New York from 1947-1949 and followed closely by a translation by Waldeen in 1950 in a pamphlet called Let the Rail Splitter Awake and Other Poems for a Marxist publishing house in New York. The first mass-marketed commercial publication of the piece... less