These days, when an American President has decreed that “there are only two genders: male and female” and issued a slew of executive orders and actions undermining the rights of trans people, an undaunted, lyrical voice from a southern corner of the hemisphere offers a model of resistance. Pedro Lemebel, the late Chilean writer who uniquely portrayed the overlapping calamities of the Pinochet dictatorship and the AIDS epidemic, wrote in his celebrated “Manifesto”:

I need no mask
Here is my face
I speak from my difference

Those lines, which he famously read publicly wearing high heels, his face painted with a hammer and sickle, during a Communist Party rally in Santiago in 1986, have new resonance today.

An exquisitely original writer, an activist who stood against the dictatorship and a critic of the traditional left’s homophobia, Lemebel played with drag and the gender binary. His work was entirely focussed on those living on the farthest margins of society—people escaping the norms and seen as different.

With the exception of Lemebel’s only novel, “My Tender Matador,” translated by Katherine Silver and published in 2005, and a few essays published in literary magazines, his work was mostly unavailable in English until last year, when Penguin Classics released “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles,” a collection of his most celebrated crónicas, including “Manifesto.” Crónicas are a distinctive Latin American hybrid that combines observation, memoir, reportage, history, fiction, and sometimes poetry—an apt genre for Lemebel’s literary innovations. He uses humor, vulgarity, acidic commentary, and tenderness to describe the lives of the most marginalized people in his society. His protagonists tend to be gender-nonconforming locas (queens), some of whom make their living as sex workers in the streets. The collection has been short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize. The nomination was announced, coincidentally, on January 23rd, on the tenth anniversary of Lemebel’s death; the winner will be named on March 20th.

Lemebel was born Pedro Mardones in Santiago in 1952, but as an adult he changed his last name to his mother’s, in a gesture, he said, of “an alliance with all that is feminine.” He grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city; his brother Jorge, who often had to defend him from the insults and attacks of other kids, summarized those early years in a sentence: “Life was cruel.” His parents provided a refuge from that hostile world, loving and accepting him as he was. His father, a baker, “understood him very well,” Jorge said in the 2019 documentary “Lemebel.” His mother shared her makeup with him.

Pedro studied carpentry and metal forging before attending art school. He found work as a high-school art teacher in the seventies but was fired for suspicions of homosexuality, which was illegal in Chile until 1999. He was twenty when the military, under Augusto Pinochet, took over the government, on September 11, 1973; he would not become a published writer for another decade. But in the underground circles of Santiago he became known for his provocative appearances with a performance-art duo he formed with the queer artist Francisco Casas, called Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, or the Mares of the Apocalypse, a name that likely refers to the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and frames the AIDS epidemic as a Biblical plague. They sabotaged cultural and political events and staged unannounced actions in public spaces to protest the marginalization of poor and queer Chileans in a very conservative society. In 1988, during a student occupation of the School of Arts of the University of Chile, they entered the campus fully naked, riding together on a mare, in a parody of the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, who founded Santiago. The performance, meant to protest the élitism of the university, was called “The Refoundation of the University of Chile.” The Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño once wrote that Lemebel “is the best poet of my generation, even if he does not write poetry,” adding that “the Yeguas were, above all, two poor homosexuals, which in a homophobic and hierarchical country (where being poor is shameful, and being poor and an artist, criminal) constituted almost an invitation to be shot, in every sense. A good part of the honor of the real Republic and the Republic of letters was saved by the Yeguas.”

In the foreword to “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles,” the writer Idra Novey mentions an “apocryphal story” in which Lemebel, accepting his first literary prize, wore a pink miniskirt. This is, she writes, “a liberator tale, marking the arrival of an unforeseen leader, the artist capable of showing all of Chile that performing sameness wasn’t as necessary to their survival as they assumed it to be—that they didn’t, in fact, need to resign themselves to social and cultural suffocation for the rest of their lives.”

Lemebel’s crónicas, most of which were printed in local newspapers after the dictatorship fell, make up the most significant part of his work, and all of “A Last Supper of Queer Apostles.” The collection has been brilliantly edited and translated by Gwendolyn Harper (who also works part-time in The New Yorker’s fiction department). The translation was particularly difficult. “In truth, all of Lemebel’s crónicas have been described, rightly or wrongly, as untranslatable,” Harper writes, in a note early in the book. Part of what makes reading Lemebel in Spanish exhilarating is his playfulness with language, the freedom with which he creates variations of Chilean slang, the love with which he turns derogatory words into endearing terms. In “The Million Names of María Chameleon,” he writes, “There’s a huge baroque allegory that enfeathers, enlivens, traverses, disguises, dramatizes, or punishes identity through a nickname” before listing a hundred and eight nicknames “plucked from the prickly fields of pansy culture.”

Harper has organized the crónicas into five sections. The first, “Maricón” (she leaves the word, which literally means “faggot,” another slur that Lemebel reclaimed, untranslated), includes “Manifesto” and other crónicas about gay life in Santiago. It also includes one about a trip to New York City in 1994, for the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, in which Lemebel writes about being disgusted by the commodified nature of gay culture in the United States. He describes “the thousands who respectfully remove their Calvin Klein visors and pray a few seconds while lining up for the dance club next door.” He condemns the whiteness of the gay movement, which, he says, looks down on him, “little miss native.” He writes, “It’s enough to step into the Stonewall Inn, where it’s always night, for you to figure out that the majority of the crowd is white, blond, and lean. . . . And if by some chance there’s a Black man or some Latina loca, it’s just because no one wants to be called antidemocratic.” In the introduction, Harper notes, “I don’t know whether Lemebel would be horrified or gleeful to have infiltrated Penguin Classics (possibly a little of both).”

Santiago de Chile, 1986, in the dying days of Pinochet’s dictatorship: the streets are flooded with teargas and littered with the remains of anti-government protests. The military is losing its grip on power, citizens are demanding information on the thousands who have been disappeared, and armed cells of communist revolutionaries are plotting to bring down the regime. Amid this turbulence we find the Queen of the Corner, a queer middle-aged former sex worker, embroidering linens for the wives of Chile’s army generals and singing along to corny ballads on the radio. (The cover blurb describes her as a trans woman, while the original 2001 US edition framed her as a drag queen, but the Chilean “travesti” identity of the 80s is culturally specific.)

She’s a marginalised figure, largely apolitical, living in a derelict building she has adorned “like a wedding cake” with paper garlands, and dreaming of love. By chance she meets a young man who claims to be a university student and asks if, since she has so much space, he can store books in her house, and maybe study there with his classmates. Charmed by his good looks and sophisticated manners, the Queen agrees, choosing not to see the reality of the situation; Carlos is using her home as a safe house, a base from which to plan Pinochet’s assassination.

First published in 2001, My Tender Matador is Pedro Lemebel’s only novel, a jewel in a colossal multimedia catalogue that spans live performance, essays and radio programmes. Far more than just an odd-couple romance, it is the story of love’s transformative, emboldening power, as well as a record of the bestial cruelty which the people of Chile fought against for 17 bloody years. It is not a maudlin book; frequently, it is hilarious, especially in the extended monologues of the first lady, who endlessly harangues Pinochet for refusing to take seriously the advice of her psychics and personal shoppers. It’s not that the people of Chile are unhappy with the government, she insists, “the problem is the grey color of your uniform … so dull, and it doesn’t go with anything”. Later, the Queen sizes up a friend: “But she was thick, Lupe was, that’s why she considered herself right-wing.” In such moments you can’t help but recognise the author peeping out cheekily from behind his characters, like a showgirl giving us a flash of leg from behind the curtain.

Indeed, the novel brims with illusion, masquerade and creative fabrication. When they picnic together as a cover for Carlos’s reconnaissance, the Queen directs the experience like a magazine shoot; when she throws him a birthday party, she invites all the neighbourhood children for hot chocolate and cake, just like they do in Cuba, the spiritual home of the communist revolution in Latin America. Carlos delights in the way the Queen beautifies “even the most insignificant moment”, creating a baroque universe from the crumbs of pure penury, a maximalist talent shared with the author himself. Certainly Lemebel’s playful ornamentation belies the fact that, as stylised as his work is, it is actually very lean. There are no unnecessary scenes and the florid atmosphere is perfectly balanced against a plot of genuine threat and tension. Passion informs brutality; action and reflection are held in graceful equilibrium, with crucial details stashed in the middle of unassuming sentences, and moments of humanity afforded even to Pinochet.

It is also deeply romantic. Though the Queen and Carlos know their affair can never come to anything, due both to the political climate and their discordant sexualities, nevertheless they give each other beauty, hope and courage amid the surrounding horrors. As such, Matador offers a study of resilience, showing how to not only survive the tyranny of stupid, vicious men, but to do so majestically – a timely gift.

It may come as no surprise that a country as deeply polarized by its recent history as Chile is also at war over the relevance of its preëminent poet, Pablo Neruda. In December, fifty years after the coup d’état that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, Chileans rejected an attempt to write a new constitution to replace the heavily amended one adopted by the dictator’s regime. It was the second plebiscite aimed at doing so in two years. The first time, in September, 2022, voters rejected a left-wing reform in a landslide. In December, a right-wing alternative was also soundly rejected, underscoring the extent to which, as the writer and political commentator Patricio Fernández told me, “building agreements” has become “extremely difficult” in Chile.

Neruda was arguably the most important Spanish-language poet of the twentieth century, and a symbol of the Chile that succumbed to Pinochet. He died in September, 1973, twelve days after the coup overthrew the government of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist President and a friend of Neruda’s. For generations, Neruda’s prestige seemed beyond reproach. In recent years, however, his life and death have been subjected to new scrutiny—and the interpretation and legitimacy of his work along with them. But the difficulty in reaching a consensus about the poet is the result of efforts coming not from opposing political camps but from within the left, to which he historically belonged. One side seeks to portray him as a perpetrator, the other as a victim. The former is Chile’s formidable feminist movement; the latter is led by the Communist Party—which Neruda was a longtime member of and which is now part of the governing coalition—and by some of his nephews and nieces, who are determined to prove that the poet was assassinated by the dictatorship.

Neruda’s life traversed a good part of the twentieth century, and from early on he knew what he was meant to do. He was born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto on July 12, 1904, and grew up in Temuco, in the southern Araucanía region, which was known for its magnificent virgin forests and the relentless rainfall that he called, in the first pages of his “Memoirs,” the “one unforgettable presence” of his childhood. His father, a train driver, opposed his desire to become a poet and, according to Adam Feinstein, Neruda’s biographer, took him on long train rides through the forests, in an effort to distract his son from writing. Those rides, however, only fuelled a love of nature, which shaped much of Neruda’s work. He became a published writer at thirteen, when a local newspaper printed a short essay in which he argued that “enthusiasm and perseverance” are the engines of progress. At the age of sixteen, to hide his identity from his father—and possibly in homage to the Czech realist writer and poet Jan Neruda—he adopted the pen name Pablo Neruda. His first book of poems, “Crepusculario” (“Book of Twilight”), was published three years later. A month shy of turning twenty, he released “Veinte Poemas de Amor y una Canción Desesperada” (“Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”), about the heartbreak of falling in love, which remains one of the most iconic books of poems in Spanish.

“The naturalness of these lines, their exuberant and youthful melancholy, their casual repetitions, their over-all simplicity mark Neruda’s early style and account in some measure for the continued popularity of the book,” Mark Strand, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, wrote in this magazine, in 2003. The twentieth poem in the collection, which is perhaps the most famous, begins:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, “The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.”
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Neruda studied French and pedagogy at the University of Chile, in Santiago, but soon devoted himself to writing. His initial literary success brought him “a small aura of respectability,” he later wrote in “Memoirs,” and in 1927 he used it to get an appointment, through a well-connected friend, with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who offered him a position as consul in colonial Burma.

In 1933, Neruda published a very different kind of book, “Residencia en la Tierra” (“Residence on Earth”), a collection of Surrealist poems, some about the Chilean landscape, that he wrote, in part, during his years spent abroad as consul. After Burma, he was sent to Colombo, then to Java—where, in 1930, at the age of twenty-six, he married María Antonia Hagenaar, known as Maruca, with whom he had his only child, Malva Marina—and later to Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. Feinstein described the collection as “hard to understand because of its obscure imagery, its hermetic richness,” but noted that it contains “some of the most beautiful poetry ever written in Spanish.” From “Walking Around”:

There are brimstone-colored birds and horrible intestines
hanging from the doors of the houses that I hate,
there are dentures left forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and fright,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and poisons, and navels.

Neruda was living in Madrid when the Spanish Civil War broke out, in July, 1936. A month later, his friend Federico García Lorca was executed by a Nationalist firing squad. For the first time, Neruda’s work became politically engaged, and in 1937 he published “España en el Corazón” (“Spain in Our Hearts”), an antifascist hymn. He returned to Santiago, but when the republic fell, in 1939, he was sent to Paris, where he led the evacuation of more than two thousand Spanish refugees to Chile on the Winnipeg, a French cargo ship that had to be refitted; he later called the mission his most enduring poem. After a stint as consul in Mexico, he returned to Chile, where, in 1945, he was elected to the Senate and officially joined the Communist Party. A couple of years later, at the onset of the Cold War, the government of President Gabriel González Videla, which had been elected with Communist support, shifted to the right and initiated a crackdown on workers and Party members. After Neruda condemned González Videla on the Senate floor, he was accused of treason and an order was issued for his arrest. Neruda went into hiding until, a year later, he left the country, crossing the Andes on horseback to Argentina, and then went into exile in Europe.

In 1950, a collection that was widely regarded as his masterpiece, “Canto General,” was published in Mexico. More than five hundred pages long, it contains, in three hundred and forty poems, a history of the New World and its Indigenous peoples. The writer and literary critic Diamela Eltit noted, in 2004, that parts of “Canto General” try to “break with white history.” Strand described it as Whitmanesque. From the collection’s first canto, “A Lamp on Earth”:

No one could
remember them afterward: the wind
forgot them, the language of water
was buried, the keys were lost
or flooded with silence or blood.

Life was not lost, pastoral brothers.
But like a wild rose
a red drop fell into the dense growth,
and a lamp of earth was extinguished.