I. Lettres

These letters were not written for history. They were written to someone specific.

A mother has been waiting two months for news of her pregnant daughter. An eighty-seven-year-old woman, losing her memory and barely able to hold a pen, writes that she is content and asks her relatives to raise their children well. A gravely ill father sends his son a turkey and two capons for a carnival feast. Before going to sea, a young sailor says goodbye to his family; at the thought that he may be leaving them forever, he can no longer continue the letter.

I. Lettres brings together sixty private letters written between 1716 and 1899, whose physical originals are preserved in the Neruda Archives. They were written in different countries, languages, and social worlds. They speak of family, work, money, illness, war, separation, hope, and survival—experiences that remain human, whatever the century.

The letters are presented without interpretation and without smoothing away their voices. Transcriptions and translations preserve, as faithfully as possible, the repetitions, awkwardness, contradictions, deletions, and damaged passages of the originals. Each letter links to scans and its complete archival record in the Neruda Archives.

In I. Lettres, people speak from the midst of their own lives—without imagining that one day we would hear them.