Canto General.

NERUDA, Pablo; Illustrated by Diego Rivera & David A. Siqueiros [Maria Izquierdo] [Raul Uribe].

$8,800.00

Item Number: 147732

Mexico: Talleres Graficos de la Nacion, 1950.

Signed limited first edition of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s masterpiece. Folio, original green leather, author’s name in gilt on front cover, pictorial endpapers designed by Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. One of only fifty copies printed on chateau paper, this is number B-47. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the verso to the half-title page, “A Maria Izquierdo y Raul con carino fraternel, Pablo Neruda Vo.Bo. Feliz.” The recipient, Maria Izquierdo, was the first Mexican woman to have a solo show in the United States in 1930. During the 1930s and 1940s she was among the top tier of Mexican painters. Around 1945 she married the painter-diplomat Raul Uribe. In very good condition with light rubbing. Rare and desirable.

"Canto General" ("General Song") consists of 15 sections, 231 poems, and more than 15,000 lines. It is the stunning epic of an entire continent and its people. The Canto speaks of the destiny of Latin American peoples and the life of the poet himself. Without question, this is one of the most important and powerful long poems written in the century. "Neruda was a kind of King Midas. Everything he touched turned to poetry," says Gabriel García Márquez, who also considers the Chilean Nobel laureate "the greatest poet of the twentieth century, in any language."