Review copied from Goodreads

To be clear: the poems are lovely. I was thoroughly enjoying them until I hit number 76, when the poet started talking admiringly about Diego Rivera. "Uh-oh," I thought, "wasn't Diego Rivera a famously shitty husband and legendary cheater? What's he doing in a book of love sonnets dedicated to the poet's beloved wife?"

Lo and behold.

I didn't actually know anything about Pablo Neruda before I started reading. When I picked this book up used, I knew he was a famous and well-loved poet, and I knew he was South American. From the introduction, I learned that he was Chilean and a Communist and that he wrote these poems for his wife Matilde, who is gazing at him adoringly in the photograph in the front of the book. I didn't know that:

-He had confessed to raping a woman.

-He had rejected and abandoned his daughter Malva for being born with hydrocephalus, leaving her and her mother, Maryka Hagenaar, completely unsupported in Spain. He traveled onward with his new partner, Delia del Carril, eventually returning to Chile. Hagenaar, who was from a Dutch family, settled with her daughter in The Hague. She wrote Neruda frequently asking for support, but he ignored all her letters. Eventually his daughter (then eight) died, and Hagenaar asked Neruda (a government official) to help get her out of Nazi-occupied Holland, but he continued to ignore her letters, and she was imprisoned in a Nazi transit camp, escaping transit to a concentration camp only due to the war ending. Afterward, Hagenaar followed Neruda to Chile, whereupon she learned that he had divorced her without telling her and was now married Delia del Carril.

-He had married his second wife, Delia del Carril, an Argentine painter twenty years his senior, under legally ambiguous circumstances (due to the aforementioned sketchy divorce), and their marriage was never recognized by the Chilean government. She gave up her own artistic career to move to Chile with Neruda and become his secretary and editor. In 1949 Neruda went into political exile (leaving del Carril behind) and while abroad began an affair with Matilde Urrutia, who had been his nurse during an illness. When he returned to Chile, he built a house, La Chascona, for Urrutia to live in so that he could cheat on his wife with her more conveniently. It is to Urrutia that 100 Love Sonnets is dedicated.

Damn, I thought, these love sonnets seem a lot less sweet now. I wonder if he ever cheated on Urrutia? After all, "if they cheat with you, they'll cheat on you." Sure enough, in 2008 it was revealed that he had cheated on her with her niece, Alicia.

Anyway, the poems are very pretty. It seems like the translation is generally good (I have a basic reading knowledge of Spanish, but my vocabulary is limited (which is why I needed the translation), so I can't say for sure). There are even a few lines (in #47, for example) where I thought the translation was as pretty, or even prettier than, the Spanish. There were quite a few times where the translator would make slight changes to the meaning of a line in order to make the English sound prettier, and I really don't like that, but in general it seemed like he tried to stay faithful. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to keep the book or not, so I guess for now I'll put it on the shelf next to complete poems of also-talented-and-also-shitty Yeats. :/