Gael García Bernal in Pablo Larraín's Neruda . by William Alexander Yankes For those unfamiliar, Chile has fielded two Nobel laureates in literature. Poet Gabriela Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945. Pablo Neruda, born in 1904, took the Swedish laurel home in 1971. But just who was this Neruda whose body of work has made his name immortal? His birth name was Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basualto. Because he admired the Czech poet Jan Neruda, he adopted his surname, taking it in a break with his father, a railroad worker who thought him less of a man for his pursuit of poetry and literature. He was born and raised in Chile’s south, in the heart of an indigenous region where the invasion of foreign Spanish colonizers had been most fiercely resisted. There, a millennial Mapuche cosmology sought to preserve an equilibrium between man and the natural world with its rivers and forests and rain and sea. This harmony between man and nature inspired Neruda, who took his ...