Chile’s Wandering Bard : NERUDA: An Intimate Biography, <i> By Volodia Teitelboim</i> , <i> translated by Beverly J. Delong-Tonelli (The Texas Pan American Series/ University of Texas Press: $29.95; 528 pp.)</i>

In “The Book of Questions,” a series of short poems completed shortly before his death, Chilean Nobel prize-winner Pablo Neruda asks--among questions both unanswerably childlike and pointedly political--this: “Whom can I ask what I came/ to make happen in this world?” The answer is not forthcoming, but is concealed in another, more playful, question: “Is there anything sillier in life/ than to be called Pablo Neruda?” Rattling loudly between the two questions is the notion of how some writers, by the very act of writing, invent themselves and become myth.

Neruda appears to have come to this world to be Pablo Neruda, to explore--indefatigably, in a monumental outpouring of words--a self and its relationship to the world: to friends, lovers, geographies, histories, natural phenomena and horrors. Neruda’s writings are richly autobiographical--from the recollected experiences of the splendid prose “Memoirs” and the long poem, “Notes From Isla Negra,” to the unblinking immediacy of poems written in the white heat of the moment, such as those in “Spain in My Heart,” cathartic laments and curses for the fallen Loyalist fighters of the Spanish Civil War.

As Neruda lived, so he wrote. In 1964, he remarked to a reporter in Santiago: “For me, writing poetry is like seeing or hearing.” In 1962, 11 years before his death, it was estimated that Neruda had already written 2,000 pages of poetry; two years later he published five new volumes. Such a “gigantic literary production” (as the Swedish Academy’s official announcement put it on awarding him the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature) should make the biographer’s task easier. In Volodia Teitelboim’s “Neruda: An Intimate Biography,” it seems not to have been the case.

Pablo Neruda was born Ricardo Eliecer Neftali Reyes Basoalto on July 12, 1904, in Parral, Chile. His mother died--probably of puerperal fever--shortly after Neruda’s birth, and his father, a failed farmer seeking work, moved the family to Temuco, a frontier town in the rainy south. As a boy, Neruda was sickly, thin (nicknamed “Shinbone”) and a voracious reader. (He borrowed Russian novels from the poet Gabriela Mistral, then director of the Temuco Lyceum, later the first Chilean Nobel Prize winner.)

When he was 14, Neruda’s first poem appeared in a Santiago magazine under the name Neftali Reyes. Against the wishes of his father (who thought writing a shameful vocation and burned the boy’s notebooks), numerous others followed. Hence, Neftali Reyes, in a situation reminiscent of Kafka, took the pseudonym he would legalize 35 years later: Neruda, from Jan Neruda, a 19th-Century Czech writer; and Pablo, a name he liked.

Neruda’s student years (beginning in 1921, at Santiago’s Pedagogical Institute, majoring in French) were years of hunger, literary companionship and skirmishing, drinking, love affairs and writing. He published dozens of reviews, editorials, poems and--beginning in 1923 with “Book of Twilights”--several collections of poetry, including the widely acclaimed “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair” (1924). In 1927, without a degree, Neruda was appointed honorary consul in Rangoon, Burma. This began a cycle of voyages and returns that continued throughout his life.

When the Spanish Civil War began in July, 1936, Neruda was consul in Madrid. His poetry was known in the Spanish-speaking world; his friends included Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti and Miguel Hernandez. The outbreak of war and, particularly, the assassination of Garcia Lorca triggered a major change in Neruda’s poetry. In a letter from Rangoon, he had labeled his books an “accumulation of unrelieved anxieties,” speaking of a poetry that turned inward; but he now called for an “impure” poetry that would, like a torrent, confront, sweep up and carry along everything in its path, politics included. Neruda recalled Lorca’s introducing him as a poet “closer to blood than to ink,” and demanded that “in the house of poetry, nothing (be) permanent except that which has been written in blood to be heard by blood.” The result was “Spain in My Heart,” a book published as a war operation, typeset and printed by soldiers. In it, under the title “I Explain Some Things,” Neruda wrote:

You all may ask why his poetry

doesn’t speak to us of the dream,

the leaves,

the great volcanoes of

his native land?

Come and see the blood

in the streets,

come and see

the blood in the streets,

come and see the blood

in the streets!

Though Spain represented a major turning point, both Neruda’s life and poetry were marked by constant shifts and reinventions. When he returned to Chile, he organized a rescue of Spanish refugees. He joined the Communist Party and was elected senator from the northern provinces of Tarapaca and Antofagasta; two years later, he went into hiding in the midst of a repressive anticommunist campaign and escaped Chile on horseback.

He wrote “General Song” with its huge sense of Latin American history and geography; he traveled in the Soviet Union and Asia. He fell in love with Matilda Urrutia who, after seven years of clandestine romance (Neruda was married to Delia del Carril, a painter 20 years his senior), became his third wife. He crafted a simpler poetic style, a celebration of elemental “things” in three books of odes; he collected shells, books, bottles, ships’ figureheads. He campaigned for Salvador Allende for president in 1964 and became a first-round Communist Party candidate himself in 1970, before bowing out to the Popular Unity Allende candidacy. Throughout, he wrote, published, and accepted awards.

Before he died on Sept. 23, 1973, 12 days after the overthrow of the Popular Unity government and the assassination of Allende, Neruda penned the final words of his “Memoirs”--damning the country’s betrayers--and made certain the book got out in a diplomatic pouch.

Teitelboim’s biography details these events (and many others) in an impassioned, impressionistic and anecdotal manner. The nature of the author’s relationship with Neruda is never made precisely clear, but seems more distant than the subtitle suggests. According to translator Beverly J. Delong-Tonelli’s foreword, Teitelboim has studied law, worked as a journalist and published three novels, a history of capitalism and America, and a biography of Gabriela Mistral. A theoretician of the Chilean left, he also served as Santiago’s senator in the short-lived Allende government.

Neruda’s junior by 12 years, Teitelboim first encountered the poet when the latter gave a reading in Santiago. The legendary (to Teitelboim, then an adolescent just arrived in the city) Neruda appeared, but only as a voice from behind “enormous larger-than-life masks.” Teitelboim writes: “The words created a warm climate and generated an atmopshere where you could see the struggle of a stormy soul, speaking from an interior world inhabited by many phantoms.” His biography often seems similarly lifeless: Neruda himself remains strangely inert, while minor characters--Delia del Carril, Acario Cotapos (“the fat man of surrealistic comedy”), Garcia Lorca and Nancy Cunard, among others--are sketched quickly and vividly.

The book is written in an odd style, shifting between a present-tense novelistic account and a more appropriate historical past. The strict chronology of events is often disrupted by Teitelboim’s reports of later conversations or consequences, and he depends heavily on Neruda’s own versions of events, a method that ignores both Neruda’s storytelling capacity and his Whitmanesque sense of contradictions: “I treasure the errors in my song.”

There are points in “Neruda: An Intimate Biography” where more information or clarification is needed. Twice, without details, Teitelboim mentions Neruda’s 1957 arrest and short detention in Buenos Aires. Neruda’s difficult relationship with a Burmese woman known as Josie Bliss (a story related in the “Memoirs”) is alluded to several times without full explanation. Accusations of counterrevolutionary activities made by Cuban writers in response to Neruda’s attending the 1966 PEN International Congress in New York are referred to only in a brief translator’s note.

These are small complaints in what is a large and exuberant biography. In some ways, Teitelboim’s “Neruda: An Intimate Biography” mimics Neruda’s own “Memoirs”--that indispensable book for understanding Neruda, his poetry, his continent and his century. This biography, too, is a book of fragments, glints and gleamings of all that is caught in the onrushing sweep of a truly monumental life. It is not likely to be considered “definitive,” but it does add a large and welcome Chilean perspective to our sense of Neruda. We are lucky to have it.