Neruda, Pablo [The Stones of Chile]. Las Piedras de Chile. 

Photos by Antonio Quintana. 
Cover by Matilda Urrutia. 

Buenos Aires, Losada, [1960].
8vo, 132, [1] pp., ill. 

In original white cloth and pictorial dust jacket. Signed and inscribed on p. 4. 
In good condition, corners a little bumped, slight browning to cloth edges, dj rubbed, small losses to dj spine and corners. 

Signed and inscribed by the author: ‘para Savich y / Alla / abrazos / Pablo / Neruda / 1961 / Valparaíso’ [For Savich and Alla, with hugs, Pablo Neruda, 1961, Valparaíso]. First edition. 

This copy of poems by the Chilean poet, diplomat, and Nobel Prize laureate Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) was inscribed to the poet and translator Ovadi Savich (1896–1967) and his wife Alia (Alguta; 1904–1991), the daughter of a Moscow rabbi.
Savich, who was born in Warsaw, studied and worked as an actor in Moscow before moving abroad in 1922 – first to Berlin and later to Paris, where he worked as a correspondent for a Soviet newspaper. There he befriended the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, whom Neruda described as his 'very dear friend'. Savich also served as a TASS correspondent in Spain during the Civil War. Although he initially did not speak Spanish, he learned the language quickly and became one of the finest translators of Spanish-language poetry. In 1939, he returned to the USSR.
Savich translated many of Neruda’s poems, and Neruda mentioned him in his memoirs (English translation, 1977): 'And this same year, in Moscow, they buried the poet Ovadi Savich, who translated Gabriela Mistral’s poetry as well as mine and did it not only faithfully and beautifully but with shining love'.
This copy comes from the private library of Lev Ospovat (1922–2009), a literary critic, translator, and biographer of the poet Federico García Lorca and the artist Diego Rivera. It is known that Ospovat was close to Savich: he wrote a review of Gabriela Mistral’s poetry collection edited by him. Moreover, a known photograph shows Pablo Neruda together with Savich and Vera Kuteishchikova, a prominent scholar of Latin American literature, Ospovat’s wife and a close friend of Neruda.

OCLC does not list any copy of this edition in US libraries.