Gabriela Mistral - Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1967), Chile's 'other' great poet of the
twentieth century, is little known outside the Spanish-speaking
world, and unlike Pablo Neruda has not been extensively
translated into English. She deserves better, particularly as the
first Latin American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature
(1945), and this selection of her poetry is designed to introduce
her to an English-speaking public. Born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga in
the Elqui valley in the 'little north' of Chile, she became a
schoolteacher at the age of fifteen and went on to become an
educator of international renown, an architect of educational
reform in Mexico, and a cultural administrator at the League of
Nations. She began publishing prose and verse pieces in
newspapers and reviews at about the same age. Four major
collections of her poems were published in her lifetime:
Desolacion
(Desolation) in 1922,
Ternura
(Tenderness) in 1924,
Tala
(Felling) in 1938, and
Lagar
(Wine Press) in 1954, followed by
Poema de Chile
published after her death. Poems from each of these five collections are included here. The
landscape and people of her native Chile are a constant theme in
her work, even though she lived most of her adult life away from
Chile, largely as a consul - unpaid for many years - in Europe,
Brazil, and the U.S.A., where she died. Her great love of
children, who were the main preoccupation of her life and whom
she both understood and respected; motherhood, and her lack of
it; loss of people she loved; religious faith, tested and at
times unorthodox, are other abiding themes. Her language is
direct, passionate, rooted in local usage. The whole of her work,
in prose as well as in verse, is a reflection of the absolute
integrity of her life.