Venture of the Infinite Man

Pablo Neruda: Born in 1904 to a working-class family in rural southern Chile, Pablo Neruda became one of the most popular poets of the 20th Century, a Nobel Laureate, an icon. In the more than fifty books he wrote, he found an outlet for his most urgent passions about two things: the women he loved and the sufferings of the common people.
At age 19 he published Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song, which went on to sell more than 10 million copies. Venture of the Infinite Man followed, and though greatly overlooked, its avant-garde experientialism fostered the individualized form of surrealism he created in Residence on Earth I, employing language that redefined Spanish poetry. Eventually transferred to Spain, where he flourished among members of the Generation of ’27, his poetry took a new urgent, direct, populist and anti-fascist form in response to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
After returning to Chile, Neruda was elected Senator, in 1944, as a member of the Chilean Communist Party, representing the workers of Chile’s northern mining region. After he called out the President’s abuses on the senate floor, his arrest was ordered, and he fled into exile on horseback over the Andes. While in exile in Europe, he finished his monumental epic, Canto General, a reinterpretation of the history of the Americas through a Marxist lens. It includes what many consider to be his greatest poem, “The Heights of Macchu Picchu.”
After he was able to return to Chile, in 1952, he spent much of his time at his fabled coastal home, “Isla Negra,” where his poetry continued to evolve, from his odes to everyday objects that almost always held a social-political meaning, to the more whimsical and meditative poems.
In 1970, he was named the Communist Party’s candidate for President of Chile, but soon stepped down so the Left could unite around the Socialist Salvador Allende. Following his victory, Allende named Neruda Ambassador to France. When Neruda died of prostate cancer in 1973, twelve days after a military coup toppled Allende and his government, the poet’s funeral became an unprecedented public demonstration of the people’s grief and fury over the new military dictatorship. Gabriel Garci´a Ma´rquez once called Neruda "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language,” and today, more than one hundred years after his birth, he remains one of the most influential and beloved poets in the world.
Jessica Powell: Jessica Powell has translated numerous Latin American authors, including works by Ce´sar Vallejo, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Cardenal, Maria Moreno, Ana Lidia Vega Serova and Edmundo Paz Solda´n. Her translation (with Suzanne Jill Levine) of Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo's novel Where There's Love, There's Hate, was published by Melville House in 2013. She is the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in support of her translation of Antonio Beni´tez- Rojo’s novel Woman in Battle Dress, which was also a finalist for the 2016 PEN Center Literary Award for Translation. Her most recent translation, of Pedro Cabiya’s novel, Wicked Weeds, was published in 2016 by Mandel Vilar Press. She lives in Santa Barbara, CA.

 
Mark Eisner: After graduating from the University of Michigan with High Honors in English/Creative Writing, Mark Eisner spent many years backpacking through Latin America. Upon his return, he was awarded a fellowship to earn a Masters in Latin American Studies from Stanford University. They subsequently named him a “Visiting Scholar” to continue his scholarly and creative work on Pablo Neruda. A series of successful projects on the poet has followed. He conceived, edited, and was one of the principal translators for The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems (City Lights, 2004). For Neruda’s centennial that year, Eisner was interviewed by Renee Montaigne on NPR’s Morning Edition. He penned the introduction to Jessica Powell’s translation of Neruda’s early work venture of the infinite man, [**City Lights/First ever] He just completed what the bestselling novelist Cristina García called a “definitive” biography on Neruda. He is currently producing a documentary on Neruda, to be completed in 2018, backed by Latino Public Broadcasting. An initial, short version of the documentary, narrated by Isabel Allende, won the Latin American Studies Association Award of Merit.

Non-Neruda projects include his critically acclaimed translation of Tina Escaja’s award-winning book-length poem Free Fall / Caída Libre (Fomite Press, 2015.) He and Escaja also co-edited a forthcoming multilingual anthology of Latin American Poetry in Resistance. It is a project of his literary non-profit Red Poppy.