Neruda and Murieta: Rewriting of a Legend

Abstract

We research into intertextuality relations concerning the protagonist of Pablo Neruda’s Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta (1964), unique drama wrote and published by the Chilean Nobel. We deepen in the production’s conditions of a discourse about an “honorable bandit”, who embodies the demands of the Latin-American victims of racist violence in a place ruled by covetousness, in the days of the Californian “Gold Rush”. Neruda assembles antecedents on Murieta from chroniclers, historians, novelist and dramatists, in order to provide it an (new) ideological use, according to his poetic project.