venture of the infinite man was Neruda's third book, published in 1926, two years after his widely celebrated Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. In a stark stylistic departure from the love poems, Neruda composed an epic poem in 15 cantos, discarding rhyme, meter, punctuation and capitalization in what he described as an attempt to better capture the voice of the subconsious. His readers were not prepared for this experiment, and decades after its publication, Neruda lamented that "one of the most important books of my poetry" remained woefully neglected and virtually unknown.

Neruda considered venture essential to his evolution: "Within its smallness and minimal expression, more than most of my works, it claimed, it secured, the path that I had to follow." Its long-overdue translation into English is cause for celebration!

"Experimental, obscure, timeless, essential, venture of the infinite man, published two years after his famous Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, set Pablo Neruda on his course toward becoming the greatest poet in the history of the Spanish language. Its publication in English is a historic event, above all today, above all in this moment, above all, now."--Ra