What was the real birth name of the poet Pablo Neruda?

The real birth name of the poet Pablo Neruda was Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. He was born with that name in Parral, Chile, on July 12, 1904, and later became internationally famous under his literary pseudonym.

Neruda began publishing as Neftalí Reyes while still a teenager. His father reportedly disapproved of his interest in poetry, encouraging the young writer to adopt a pen name. By 1920, he was using “Pablo Neruda,” a name generally associated with the Czech poet Jan Neruda, although accounts of the pseudonym’s exact inspiration vary.

The name change was more than a casual author’s signature. In 1946, the Chilean poet legally adopted Pablo Neruda as his name. His early collection “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair,” published in 1924, established his reputation, while later work expanded into political, historical, and socially engaged poetry.

A frequent quiz mistake is choosing Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, the birth name of Gabriela Mistral, another Chilean Nobel laureate. Neruda won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971; Mistral had won it in 1945.