It is impossible not to feel a thrill of expectation upon opening “The Complete Memoirs” by Pablo Neruda. But once a reader discovers what’s actually on its pages, the title’s claim of completeness—with its promise of juicy restorations and the accretion of long-lost chapters written by the great Chilean poet—seems no better than a gimmick to sell afresh a book that was first published in English translation 44 years ago.

An “editorial note” at the book’s end lists all the additions to Neruda’s original memoirs—while unhelpfully omitting the page numbers that would transport a reader straight to the new material. There are 19 texts added in all, ranging in length from a half-dozen pages of previously unpublished words to the wispiest fragments. Here’s an example of the latter, as vaunted by the editors: “We now publish, for the first time, the only known version in writing of this phrase: ‘What is my poetry? I don’t know. It would be easier to ask my poetry who am I.’ ” Readers who know their Neruda will contend that only one textual addition—which deals plainspokenly with the homosexuality of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca—truly adds value.

The Complete Memoirs

By Pablo Neruda
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 488 pages, $22

Which is fine, of course, because the original version—let us not call it “incomplete”—is a deliciously self-serving and unabashed narrative account of the poet’s life, loves, grudges, contempt and ideology. It is stunningly vain in places yet always beautiful, and reading it today—in our age of much-curbed masculinity—raises taxing moral questions. What should we think of a man so casually priapic, who never hesitated to use his power—as poet or diplomat—to drive women (who were often vulnerable) to his bed?

Neruda chose to call his book “I Confess I Have lived”—“Confieso Que He Vivido” in the original Spanish. It was published posthumously in 1974, a year after he succumbed to cancer and—some like to think—heartbreak, brought on by the suicide of Chile’s President Salvador Allende only days before Neruda’s own death. Allende was a dear friend and leftist fellow traveler, and Neruda had abandoned his own presidential ambitions—he was the Communist Party’s candidate for Chile’s highest office—so as to throw in his lot with the socialist Allende. The latter appointed Neruda Chile’s ambassador to Paris in 1971—the year in which the poet won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Neruda used “Memorias”—“Memoirs”—as his book’s subtitle, and it’s a pity that this single word was chosen as the text’s English title in 1977. It is an ill-fitting description for a series of loosely connected meditations—only tenuously chronological—that dwell on Neruda’s turbulent life, his Stalinist politics, and his literary and spiritual inspirations. The translation was done by Hardie St. Martin, who died in 2007, and the English text in this latest plumped-up edition is still his—with the additional material translated by Adrian Nathan West.

Although first published in 1974, much of what came to comprise Neruda’s memoirs had appeared in print in 1962, in a series of 10 installments for O Cruzeiro, a Brazilian magazine. As his health faded in the last year of his life, Neruda rushed to finish his story, which gives the last chapters of his book a galloping, fragmented quality. In fact, the very first lines of his original text forewarn readers that his thoughts in the book will be scattered, even disconnected, the result of the literary tensions—as he saw them—within himself: “What the memoir writer remembers is not the same thing the poet remembers.”

That line, if rendered from Neruda’s Spanish with greater fidelity, might have read: “The memoirs of the memoirist are not the memoirs of the poet.” The translator, St. Martin, loses the lines’ tart economy. Yet the infelicities in St. Martin’s translation of Neruda’s “Memoirs” are far fewer than those inflicted on the Chilean by his poetical translators, of whom there has been an unseemly cluster. Prose is much harder to screw up than poetry.

Readers of Neruda’s poetry in English-language versions will find him speaking with different voices. Michael Wood, the professor and literary critic, has written that the English translations of Neruda’s verse “are not, on the whole, very good.” Only Robert Bly and Anthony Kerrigan—he writes—“make Neruda sound in English as if he might be a good poet in Spanish.”

The highlights of “The Complete Memoirs” are the new subsections that deal with García Lorca, and identify a male lover with whom Neruda frequently met the Spanish poet when he knew him in the early 1930s. An editor’s note points out that the motive for the non-publication of these texts was rooted in a question that Neruda put to his wife, Matilde Urrutia: “Is the public sufficiently free of prejudices to accept Federico’s homosexuality without compromise to his prestige?” The widowed Urrutia, who oversaw the publication of the memoirs after Neruda’s death, shared these misgivings. “I had similar doubts,” she said in a handwritten note, “and I didn’t include it in the memoirs.”

It is revealing, by contrast, that neither she nor Neruda had any misgivings about including in the memoirs an episode from the poet’s time as Chile’s honorary consul in Colombo, in British-ruled Ceylon, in 1929. The passage is, by now, among the most (in)famous in the book. In it, he describes how he—as a 25-year-old diplomat—forces himself upon a Tamil cleaning-woman who emptied the latrine in his house every day. The encounter lasts no more than four paragraphs, and yet these scant words impart a stench to his memoirs that is hard to ignore.

The woman was “a dusky statue,” “the most beautiful woman I had yet seen in Ceylon.” She was “a shy jungle animal.” For a few days, he had been leaving her gifts—a piece of silk, some fruit. Then, one morning, he “got a strong grip on her wrist” and took her to his bed. There followed “the coming together of a man and a statue.” As he had sex with her, “she kept her eyes open all the while, completely unresponsive.” Neruda had raped her—although he never phrases the encounter as that. He does observe that “she was right to despise me.”

Those lines have returned to tarnish Neruda in death. Three years ago, a move to rename the airport in Santiago after him was opposed by feminists who found the idea unpalatable. But Neruda continues to be a beloved poet. However much we may believe that Gabriel García Márquez was exaggerating when he called the Chilean “the greatest poet of the 20th century—in any language,” we must acknowledge that he is among the most beguiling love-poets of the modern era. Rare is the Spanish-speaking youth (who is not entirely a boor) who has not read Neruda’s “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair,” one of the most widely translated books in the world.

Neruda’s politics were distasteful, even odious—he admired Stalin, regarding him as “a good-natured man of principles, as sober as a hermit.” In his memoirs he writes that “fascists and reactionaries have described me as a lyric interpreter of Stalin. I am not particularly put out by this.”

Still, it is as a poet and not as an ideologue that Neruda is revered—and rightly. He was incomparable in his refashioning of the Spanish language—“a fine language we inherited from the fierce conquistadors”—and in incorporating into his poetry the soul and history of Latin America. The forests of southern Chile were his greatest muse. The sage Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges should get the last word. He regarded Neruda as a fine poet—among the finest, in fact. But Borges added a qualification. “I don’t,” he said, “admire him as a man.”

—Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.

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