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A Reading in Honor of Pablo Neruda's Centennial

Pablo Neruda, circa 1946.
Pablo Neruda, circa 1946.

The Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda would have turned 100 years old today. Fellow Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez called him the "greatest poet of the 20th century -- in any language."

Born the son of a railway worker, Neruda began writing poetry when he was 14. He spent his 20s in Spain, during the country's civil war, and went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1971, two years before he died.

Neruda is most famous for his love poems. To mark Neruda's centennial, Chilean-American poet Ariel Dorfman reads Neruda's poem "Sexual Water," from his collection Residence on Earth, in English and Spanish.

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