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Gabriela Mistral: Selected Poems

translated and edited by Paul Burns and Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres

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: Desolación (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. 176p (Aris & Phillips 2006)

Review Quote

"...a highly recommended no-nonsense introduction to the work of Mistral"

David Bellis
Bulletin of Spanish Studies Vol. LXXXV no.2 (2008)

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
I. Desolation:
Rodin's the Thinker, For the Hebrew People, The Lone Child, Ballad, The Sonnets of Death, prayer, The Bones of the Dead, Patagonian Landscape, To the Clouds, autumn, Summit
II. Tenderness
Rocking, Discovery, Mexican Child, Fear, The Rat, The Air, Mountain, Larks, The Earth
Feeling:
Flight, The Rose, The Foreigner, Drinking, We were All going to be Queens, Things, Catalonian Women
IV. Wine Press
The Other, The Fall of Europe, Hospital, Helpers, The Jewish Refugee, Daybreak; Morning; Evening; Night, The Last Tree
V. Poem of Chile
Waking up, My Mountain, Patch of Clover, Valparaiso, Poplar Groves, Talcahuano, Apple Trees, Ferns Southern Islands, Bibliograhy.

Author Bibliographic

Paul Burns is an Oxford modern-language schlar and has combined publishing with translating for most of his adult life, He has recently worked on text The Lives of Saints published in 2003.
Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres is Principal Language Tutor at the University of Warwick and the author of numerous translations, books and articles.

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