To take a deeper look at Neruda’s time in Burma, I turned to Adam Feinstein’s Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life, published by Bloomsbury in 2004 – he covers the ground in roughly 15 pages (50-65). The basic point, that this was a “hellish” interlude, is fully confirmed – “fifteen desolate months in Rangoon” is the summary description. Yet it was also a period of considerable interest.

Neruda arranged this diplomatic posting before leaving Chile. At the Foreign Ministry in Santiago in the first half of 1927, he was fortunate to secure an interview with the minister himself – who, holding out a list of vacant positions, invited Neruda to pick one. “The name of the Burmese capital, Rangoon, meant nothing to him – and perhaps for that very reason, he chose it.” Following several train journeys to Buenos Aires and a two-month sea voyage via Europe to Asia, Neruda arrived in Rangoon on about October 25, 1927 – taking the name Ricardo Reyes for his consular mission.

The work was not pressing. “My official duties demanded my attention only once every three months, when a ship arrived from Calcutta bound for Chile with hard paraffin and large cases of tea. I had to stamp and sign documents with feverish speed. Then another three months of doing nothing followed, of solitary contemplation in markets and temples.” For around 10-12 weeks at the start of 1928 Neruda travelled to Shanghai and Yokohama with a Chilean friend. Towards the end of the year he went to Calcutta. For most of the rest of the period he was in Rangoon.

There he had no time for colonial society. “I led a life which was separate from the English. I attended their parties only very rarely, because there was no one interesting among the colonials. They were monotonous and even ignorant.” Again he writes: “Those intolerant Europeans were not very interesting and, after all, I had not come to the Orient to spend my life with transient colonisers.” Burmese Buddhism was also failed to charm. Feinstein writes that “Neruda found the religious element brutally inhuman and alienating”.

Only mundane daily existence was vital and vibrant. “The street became my religion. The Burmese street, the Chinese quarter … The Hindu street … All this engrossed me and drew me gradually under the spell of real life.” Ultimately none of this was enough to sustain Neruda. “Life in Rangoon is a terrible exile, I wasn’t born to spend my life in such a hell.” Nevertheless, the portrait of the poet that emerges is quite compelling.