Spain in the heart

Spain in the heart: hymn to the glories of the people in war is a collection of poems by the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, which exposes the horrors of Spanish civil war, and where he also presents his position as a republican. In this book he shows his face as a combatant and idealistic poet.

The first edition corresponds to Ediciones Ercilla Santiago de Chile, 1937. It was reprinted for the first time in Spain by the Eastern Army Commissariat, literary editions. In a first edition (printed at the Montserrat Monastery in 1938) of 500 numbered copies and a second (1939) unnumbered of 1,500. According to the "Author's Note" at the end of this edition, this "Hymn to the glories the people in the war» is part of the third volume of Residencia en la Tierra».

The 1938 edition is one of the rarest of a work by Neruda, since only six copies survive: one in the Library of Congress of the United States, in Washington D.C., one in the Library of the Monastery of Montserrat, one in the Library of Catalonia and two in the University of Barcelona and one in the hands of a private collector in Mexico. However, the second edition of 1939 is perhaps even rarer. The copy that is reproduced virtually in the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library belongs to this edition.

Structure

The book is made up of 23 poems of different lengths: