Unique Pablo Neruda archive – and slice of history – up for auction
Chilean poet’s letters, photos, rare books, postcards and artefacts represent ‘a huge part of the 20th century’
A little over two years into the Spanish civil war, one of Spain’s greatest poets wrote to a Chilean friend to tell him how desperately he and a couple of their mutual acquaintances longed to escape the conflict and travel to South America.
“We’ll come to your sad and beautiful land,” wrote Miguel Hernández in September 1938. “We have to leave, and we’ll rest from this fight, and we’ll breathe the air we lack.”
Hernández, a goat-herder-turned-poet and staunch Republican, would never breathe Chilean air. He was dead within four years of writing the letter, his lungs eaten away by the tuberculosis he
