Canto General

Canto General is Pablo Neruda's tenth book of poems. It was first published in Mexico in 1950, by "Talleres Gráficos de la Nación". Neruda began to compose it in 1938.
"Canto General" ("General Song") consists of 15 sections, 231 poems, and more than 15,000 lines. This work attempts to be a history or encyclopedia of the entire American Western Hemisphere, or New World, from a Hispanic American perspective.
The Heights of Macchu Picchu.
"'The Heights of Macchu Picchu" ("Las Alturas de Macchu Picchu") is Canto II of the "Canto General". The twelve poems that comprise this section of the epic work have been translated into English regularly since even before its initial publication in Spanish in 1950, beginning with a 1948 translation by Hoffman Reynolds Hays in "The Tiger's Eye", a journal of arts and literature published out of New York from 1947–1949, and followed closely by a translation by Waldeen in 1950 in a pamphlet called "Let the Rail Splitter Awake and Other Poems" for a Marxist publishing house in New York. The first mass-marketed commercial publication of the piece did not come until 1966 with Nathanial Tarn's translation, followed by John Felstiner's translation alongside a book on the translation process, "Translating Neruda" in 1980. Following that is Jack Schmitt's full translation of "Canto General"—the first to appear in English—in 1993. In recent years there have been several partial or full new translations: Stephen Kessler in 2001 for a photo/journey book on the ancient ruins ("Machu Picchu" edited by Barry Brukoff) and Mark Eisner's re-translation of seven of the twelve poems (Cantos I, IV, VI, VIII, X, XI, and XII) for an anthology celebrating the centennial of Neruda's birth in 2004, "The Essential Neruda".
Musical versions.
The "Canto General" has been set to music by several musicians.