This essay focuses on Elicura Chihuailaf’s 1996 bilingual Mapuzugun/Spanish anthology of Neruda’s work. The translation and selection in the anthology titled Todos los cantos/Ti kum ul reveal a creative and ambitious rereading of Neruda’s virtues and flaws in understanding the Mapuche world. A close reading of Chihuailaf’s Todos los cantos/Ti kum ul shows how Neruda’s poetry can be reinterpreted in ways that allow for the presence of Mapuche voice and ethos. Chihuailaf’s rereading of Neruda’s work expands and redefines the idea of the “National Poet” in the twenty-first-century Chilean context.

In the decades of Romanticism a new view on culture emerged: one in which culture was nationally specific (each nation having its own characteristic cultural traditions) and should be seen as process of historical development (rather than the condition of being civilized and refined). In the emergence of this new, historicist and nationally specific idea of culture, an initial impetus was provided by the ‘discovery’ in the 1760s of the epic poems of the ancient Scottish bard Ossian. The figure of Ossian amplified the aesthetics of the ‘sublime’ and a view of the poet as a prophetic, even mantic figure, drawing on a transcendent-spiritual intuition and hence being able to speak with an inspired wisdom that went beyond mere rational cognition. This became enshrined in the poetics of the nascent Romantic movement and fed into the Hegelian notion of poet–prophets as world-historical figures articulating the consciousness of their national communities.