Pablo Neruda ransacked the spiritual poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, borrowing and plagiarizing at will.
When Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Nobel Laureate, published his first collection of verse, titled Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, he put his borrowings of the Bengali Poet Rabindranath Tagore on display.
While many of the poems demonstrate their debt to Tagore’s poems, Neruda’s number 16 is a total rip-off of Tagore’s #30 from The Gardener. In his memoirs, Neruda claims that he had told his friend, Joaquin Cifuentes Sepveda, that he had considered putting a disclaimer with the poem, saying that it was a “paraphrase,” but Sepveda discouraged him, saying Neruda would be accused of plagiarism. Sepveda’s advice was flawed.
After Neruda’s “paraphrase” was discovered to be perilously close to the Tagore poem, in the next edition the poem carried the explanation, “This poem is a paraphrase of the 30th poem in Rabindranath Tagore's The Gardener.” While this disclaimer might give the act legal cover, it in no way diminishes the fact that Neruda plagiarized Tagore.
Pablo Neruda is July’s featured poet: July Poet – Pablo Neruda: ‘To be men! That is the Stalinist law!’
