At least three poems by different authors are being assigned, some years ago, to Pablo Neruda, reaching a considerable electronic circulation. One of them, "Die slowly", has been used on many New Year greetings and other messages, which cause visibility grew to several newspaper articles. This poem  belongs to Martha Medeiros, a brazilian writer, author of several books and columnist for the newspaper "Zero Hora", in Porto Alegre. It was published under the name "A morte devagar" mentioned in the newspaper in November 2000.

Another of the poems referred is "Prohibited", which first appeared online on July 23, 2001 on the website deusto.com. Its author, Alfredo Cuervo Barrero, has clarified that the currently poem is not exactly  like the original, The text is inscribed in the Register of Intellectual Property of Biscay, its behalf, with the number BI -13 -03. On the Internet are about twenty thousand attributions of this poem to Neruda.

Finally there is the poem "Never complain." We do not know the author and also we do not know why are these poems attributed to Pablo Neruda. If you read the three texts it is evident that they all have an uplifting tone, prescriptive, in which caution might be related to self-help literature, extemporaneously at the time of Neruda. Without detracting from these poems, Pablo Neruda's work is far from this kind of poetry in tone, content, language and the images that it creates.

Darío Oses
Library Director
Pablo Neruda Foundation