This chapter focuses on the influence of women in Neruda’s life and poetry. Starting from the poet’s assertion that his life is made up of all lives, and the unfortunate passage in his memoirs that the Chilean feminist movement interpreted as the sublimation of a rape, it analyzes Neruda’s poetic work and the accounts of Teresa Vásquez, Albertina Azócar, Laura Arrué, Josie Bliss, Marijke Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang, Delia del Carril, Matilde Urrutia, and Alicia Urrutia, who accompanied him at different times in his life, to demonstrate that women always had agency in Neruda’s work and life. They were more than muses. It also shows how Neruda dialogued with the poetic work of women poets who preceded him, as in the case of Alfonsina Storni.

Chapter 2 introduces the “nuts and bolts” of the brain. It describes how neurons represent and transmit information, and how the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain most relevant to word meaning. Special emphasis is placed on the following large-scale cortical systems: modal networks of sensory and motor areas; transmodal networks of association areas; and the core language network. This chapter also briefly outlines the brain mapping methods that are used in the various experiments discussed in Chapters 3–7.

Pablo Neruda is a fundamental author in twentieth-century Latin American literature. He is a poet who has been characterized by his commitment to the scope of love, and, at the same time, his political work makes him an intellectual of universal stature. Due to his love poetry, in the Arab world he has been associated with authors such as Nizâr Qabbânî and Mahmûd Darwîsh. This text tries to trace the dialogue that Pablo Neruda has established with the Arab world and how his topics have allowed us to respond symbolically to the issues of our time and the need of certain social and political situations.

Pablo Neruda’s Nobel lecture “To the Splendid City” was a summary of his poetic practice as well as a consummate presentation of his literary persona to the world stage. Although highly conscious of the political context of his utterance, and hugely laudatory of the recently elected socialist Allende administration, Neruda devoted most of his lecture to evoking the breadth and beauty of the Chilean landscape and the creativity and the imagination of the Chilean people. Evoking the panoramic and eulogistic register of Canto general, Neruda proffered a buoyant and empathetic vision of his homeland, even though some aspects of his approach might seem insufficiently critical to a twenty-first-century literary sensibility. Neruda used the platform of his lecture to give a convincing statement of his identity as a Latin American writer.

Modern proponents of free speech maintain that the value of expression resides in its authenticity-making power, which generates political legitimacy. They simultaneously concede that the value of expression is not without abridgments, no matter how deeply felt or authentically fulfilling such expression may be. Given these commitments, how can free speech be valued for its authenticity-making power, and yet also conditionally regulated? This chapter explores a resolution based on an interpretation of Aquinas’s thought on speech and expression. First, Aquinas clarifies Aristotle’s distinction between vox (animal expression) and loquutio (logical discourse) as an irreducible relationship of explanandum and explanans: loquutio is uniquely disposed to comprehending what is just or unjust within what is pleasant or painful. Second, Thomistic loquutio is directed to truth while permitting false claims as logical-temporal constituents of discourse, requiring above all a “discursive situation” that avoids both contradiction and epistemically unjustified conviction. These characteristics of Thomistic loquutio are supported by his treatment of angelic communication, which is not revelatory so much as consultatory from a second-person perspective and clarificatory from a first-person perspective. Ultimately, this interpretive Thomistic account rejects the modern commitment of authenticity without absolutism, while affirming certain aspects of what makes speech politically valuable.

This chapter addresses the topic of legacy and its relevance in the work of Pablo Neruda. Thus, starting from the rescue of 2,000 refugees from the Spanish Civil War on the steamship Winnipeg, it explores the relationship of the Spanish language with death in poems from Residencia en la tierra, and its re-emergence in Canto general, exemplified in “Alturas de Macchu Picchu.” The essay argues that the writing of this poem implies the reconciliation of the Spanish language, which is marked by the violence of its imposition in the Americas, with its speakers. It also looks at the relationship between Nerudian poetry and César Vallejo, who, in España, aparte de mí este cáliz, saw in each letter of the imposed language the origin of punishment, thus making reconciliation impossible. Returning to the Winnipeg, the essay concludes that the legacy of Pablo Neruda’s work is immeasurable because it is a debt, that which our time has with his poetry.