Canto General

The Mexican edition is the true first and the census is right about that, but the relationship to the Chilean printing needs stating precisely: both appeared in 1950 and the two are close enough that Memoria Chilena (Biblioteca Nacional de Chile) calls them "almost simultaneous," while confirming the Mexican edition preceded; the Fundación Pablo Neruda's own chronology likewise names Mexico the first edition with the Chilean version prepared concurrently. One ABAA/ILAB dealer (Blackwell's) puts the Chilean issue about a month after the Mexican and notes it was set from a different manuscript. The Chilean edition is genuinely clandestine, produced underground by the Communist Party of Chile while Neruda was a fugitive from the González Videla government: it bears the FALSE imprint "Imprenta Juárez, Reforma 75, México, D.F.", carries an introduction by party leader Galo González Díaz and woodcut illustrations by José Venturelli, and ran to 5,000 copies of 468 pages at 27 x 19 cm, printed on common paper from recycled linotype matrices with each production stage isolated in a different location to evade the police. It is collected in its own right as the clandestine first Chilean edition — it is not a reprint and should never be catalogued as one — but it does not displace Mexico as the true first.