Del océano al verso. Las caracolas de Pablo Neruda

accumulation overlaps with his communism ". 9 Coupled with this idea, it’s possible to identify that Neruda detaches himself from the figure of the bourgeois collector while stressing the effort displayed to gather all these pieces: "t he splendour of these books, the oceanic glory of these seashells, everything I’ve achieved throughout my life, despite the poverty and constant exercise of my work, I hand over to the university, that is, to everyone ". 10 The origins of the pieces secured in the Malacological Section are quite diverse, and to elucidate how each one of them came into the Neruda’s hands is to discover a part of his sociability networks in Chile and the world. The same happens with the books in the collection and the tiny scribblings hidden inside some seashells, revealing information of his travels and contact with relevant figures in his socio-political life. For example, in the collection we find small boxes with numerous glass tubes, each one containing hundreds of molluscs, micromolluscs and seashells in a larval state. Each tube is accompanied by small carefully typewritten tags with the scientific names used back in the day. These pieces were gifted by the renowned Cuban malacologist Carlos de La Torre (1858-1950), during one of the poet’s visits to Cuba. Thanks to this gift, Neruda started to acquire a deeper interest in the scientific world and study of these species, something reflected in the great amount of books [9] Kelly Austin, "‘I have put all I possess at the disposal of the people's strug- gle’: Pablo Neruda as collector, translator and poet", in Collecting from margins. mate- rial culture in a Latin American context (Bucknell University Press, 2016), 149. [10] Discurso del rector de la Universidad de Chile, 19. 70 universidad de chile