From “Hurricane Neruda”

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Notes on contributors

Pedro Mir

Pedro Mir (1913–2000) is considered the Dominican Republic's foremost literary figure of the twentieth century. Since publishing his first poems in 1937, he sought through literature to place the Caribbean experience in a global historical perspective. He went into exile in 1947 as he had become the subject of mounting suspicions by the Trujillo dictatorship. When he returned fifteen years later, following the death of the dictator, the poet immediately won the hearts of the Dominican people, and his poetry readings were mass public events attended by enthusiastic crowds of citizens from every walk of life.

In 1982 the legislature of the Dominican Congress conferred upon Mir the title of National Poet, and in 1993 he received the National Prize for Literature, the highest honor a literary artist can receive in the Dominican Republic. On the occasion of Mir's death, the president of the Dominican Republic declared three days of national mourning and celebrated the poet's memory and his work: “[Don Pedro] will always be with us because his thinking was transcendent, and he truly fathomed the national Dominican soul.”

El Huracán Neruda won the Annual Poetry Award given by the Secretary of Education of the Dominican Republic in 1975, the year of the poem's original publication. This “Elegy with a Song of Despair” was written in response to the death of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904–73) and the military dictatorship that followed the assassination of the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, which occurred twelve days before the poet's death. The poem is modeled in part on Neruda's tribute to Simón Bolívar, “A Song for Bolívar,” the source of its epigraph (adapted by Mir): “The bolívar roar over / Bolívar Volcano.”