1982 saw the almost simultaneous appearance of two Chilean texts pivoting on Pablo Neruda as a fictional character: Ardiente paciencia and Desde la sangre y el silencio (Fulgor y muerte de Pablo Neruda. Departing from a traditional philological approach, this paper adopts a cultural translation perspective, while aiming at descriptive analysis with what is defined by Torop as 'translational method criticism'. Ardiente paciencia appears of particular relevance for such a translation perspective: it is an interesting piece of literature form a so-called marginal culture, worth analysing in the ways it has been translated into Western languages. Since two films have been based on this Chilean text, it also invites us to widen the discourse and to include intersemiotic translation. The aim of this article is to try to verify in a concrete context the possibility of widening translation criticism.