In his House-Museum
of "La Chascona": New Pablo Neruda
Library
With a colloquium about "Neruda and his love for books" it was recently inaugurated the Archives and Library of the Pablo Neruda Foundation, in his house-Museum of "La Chascona", in Santiago. The especially built place will help preserve his valuable book collection and is open to investigators and general readers.
Thousands of books and documents are part of this
collection, some of them bought by Neruda in the
most remote places of the world. There are also
some rare and translated editions of his work and
texts written by specialists in Neruda´s poetry
from all countries.
There are about 11,500 books. 5,000 of them belonged
to Neruda himself. The rest are part of a specialized
library about his work. There are also 5,000 photos,
press clips, old letters and more than 5,000 handwritten
texts.
This was the library that Neruda had started gathering
after donating a book and seashells collection to
the Universidad de Chile. From there on, he would
go on buying, some books because of their literary
value, some because of their rarity. All that he
bought in Europe, while working as Chile's
Ambassador in France, arrived to Chile by ship after
his death, in September of 1973, unfortunately damaged,
partially because of the troubled times that followed
Pinochet´s coup. It is something that his
widow, Matilde Urrutia, talks about in her book
"Memorias": "the most painful thing
was the looting of books. The most valuable were
lost and the collections were left incomplete".
But some important volumes were saved, such as Diderot
and D`alembert´s Encyclopedia that Neruda
got in France. All books were brought from his three
houses at La Chascona (Santiago), La Sebastiana
(Valparaíso) and Isla Negra. Especially remarkable
are all the volumes about Chile's History,
by such authors as Andrés Bello, Barros Arana,
Vicuña Mackenna, Lord Cochrane and José
Miguel Carrera. From universal literature one can
find fantastic editions by writers like Chateaubriand,
Paul Verlaine, Guy de Maupassant, Lord Byron and
Edgar Allan Poe.
Just for holding this collection, in 1996 it was
bought La Chascona´s neighboring house. In
especially built floors, there were installed the
photo laboratory, safety cabinets, a especially-designed
computer net, the reading room and several offices.
The Library is located at Fernando Márquez
de la Plata 0192, Barrio Bellavista, Providencia.
Santiago de Chile. The phone number is (56-2) 735-7461.
