Gabriela Mistral: Selected Poems

By Gabriela Mistral and Ursula K. Le Guin

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0856687642
• ISBN13: 9780856687648
• Release Date: June 2006
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 8.4"

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.