Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral

by Gabriela Mistral and Ursula K. Le Guin

Book Overview

The first Nobel Prize in literature to be awarded to a Latin American writer went to the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. Famous and beloved during her lifetime all over Latin America and in Europe, Mistral has never been known in North America as she deserves to be. The reputation of her more flamboyant and accessible friend and countryman Pablo Neruda has overshadowed hers, and she has been officially sentimentalized into a "poetess" of children...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0826328199
• ISBN13: 9780826328199
• Release Date: February 2011
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Length: 431 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Touching & Deep

Another fantastic poet pushed to the chest of oblivion of women's achievements, in spite of her Nobel Price of Literature. Touching and profound stories of innocence, longing for one's roots, lost loves, and nature's beauty. The Spanish original poems are so rythmic and endearing, and yet, the excellent English version maintains the purity of its message. A book worth reading and re-reading.

Great Read

This book gives you great insight about the amazing writer Gabriela Mistral. I wish more translations were available.

Expertly translated into English by Ursula K. Le Guin

A simply outstanding addition to any personal or academic poetry collection, Selected Poems Of Gabriela Mistral is an extensive anthology of poetry by Gabriela Mistral who is the first Latin American writer to earn the Nobel Prize in literature. These free-verse poems are presented side-by-side in their original Spanish and expertly translated into English by Ursula K. Le Guin. Impressionable imagery and powerful, sweeping themes of the human condition mark this truly exceptional collection as highly recommended and memorable reading. Evening: In this sweetness I feel/my heart melt like wax./In my veins runs/not wine, but slow oil,/and I feel my life slipping away/still and soft as a gazelle.

Best Mistral translations available in print

This bilingual collection offers a superb selection of poetry from all of Gabriela Mistral's volumes. Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957)was the first Nobel Laureate from Latin America, teacher to Pablo Neruda, forerunner of writers such as Garcia Marquez and Rigoberta Menchu. Her work is hardly known in the United States in part because Mistral was not (unlike these other, better-known writers) identified with any particular political platform. She was always, first and last, a writer and a teacher...and incidentally one of Latin America's first celebrities, a public intellectual in every sense of the word. This collection draws from Gabriela Mistral's poetry alone (excerpted from five volumes; short selections of Mistral's poetic prose have been ably translated by Stephen Tapscott, published by the U of Texas, while the hundreds of journalistic pieces that Mistral wrote and circulated all over the Spanish-speaking world are still unknown to US readers). The editorial standards in this text are very high. Pages have been laid out so that it is easy to consult the corresponding lines in Spanish and English. While LeGuin states in the introduction that she has little prior experience translating from Spanish to English, she makes clear in her introduction that she worked on this project for years, aided by associates fluent in both languages, and her motivation throughout was the desire to bring this extraordinary, brilliant, hard-to-classify poet's work to English language readers. LeGuin has succeeded admirably. The translations are close to the feeling of the Spanish, yet they avoid wooden literalism. At all moments LeGuin opts to communicate the mood of the poem, and her choices of poems to translate is clearly dictated by a combination of elements. She chooses, first, what can be most readily translated - she prefers the narrative poems over most of the "songs" (cradle songs and rounds) since the rhymes and rhythms of latter are difficult to convey. Also the book selects more or less equally from the volumes of poetry that Mistral produced over her lifetime, so that we get an excellent overview of this poet's development. Finally, the translator has worked with poems that are among the poet's most intellectually complex works, ones that show the poet's utopian vision for the Americas, her unique feminism, her fascination with landscape and her travels all over the world.