Gabriela Mistral: Selected Poems

by Ortiz-Carboneres, Salvador; Burns, Paul

• ISBN13: 9780856687631
• ISBN10: 0856687634
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-05-21
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Summary

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 USA, 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. Spanish language and facing page translation.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	v
Preface	vii
Introduction	1	(30)
Desolation
Rodin's The Thinker	31	(2)
For the Hebrew People	33	(4)
The Lone Child	37	(2)
Ballad	39	(2)
The Sonnets of Death	41	(4)
Prayer	45	(4)
The Bones of the Dead	49	(2)
Patagonian Landscapes	51	(6)
To the Clouds	57	(2)
Autumn	59	(4)
Summit	63	(4)
Tenderness
Rocking	67	(2)
Discovery	69	(2)
Mexican Child	71	(4)
Chilean Land	75	(2)
Fear	77	(2)
The Rat	79	(2)
The Air	81	(2)
Mountain	83	(2)
Larks	85	(2)
The Earth	87	(4)
Felling
Flight	91	(4)
The Rose	95	(2)
The Foreigner	97	(2)
Drinking	99	(4)
We were All going to be Queens	103	(6)
Things	109	(6)
Catalonian Women	115	(4)
Wine Press
The Other	119	(4)
The Fall of Europe	123	(4)
Hospital	127	(4)
Helpers	131	(2)
The Jewish Refugee	133	(2)
Daybreak; Morning; Evening; Night	135	(4)
The Last Tree	139	(6)
Poem of Chile
Waking up	145	(2)
My Mountains	147	(2)
Patch of Clover	149	(2)
Valparaiso	151	(2)
Poplar Groves	153	(2)
Talcahuano	155	(2)
Apple trees	157	(4)
Ferns	161	(4)
Southern Islands	165	(1)
Bibliography	166