Gabriela Mistral

Selected poems

Qasà id mujtâra

A schoolteacher whose poetry catapulted her to early fame in her native Chile and an international diplomat whose boundary-defying sexuality still challenges scholars, Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last century. The Locas mujeres poems collected here are among Mistral’s most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self in extremis—poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning. From disquieting humor to balladlike lyricism to folkloric wisdom, these pieces enact a tragic sense of life, depicting “madwomen” who are anything but mad. Strong and intensely human, Mistral’s poetic women confront impossible situations to which no sane response exists. This groundbreaking collection presents poems from Mistral’s final published volume as well as new editions of posthumous work, featuring the first English-language appearance of many essential poems. Madwomen promises to reveal a profound poet to a new generation of Anglophone readers while reacquainting Spanish readers with a stranger, more complicated “madwoman” than most have ever known.

The "Locas mujeres" Poems of Gabriela Mistral, a Bilingual Edition

Madwomen

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 and motherhood. Translations, and even selections of her work in Spanish, have tended to underplay the darkness, the strangeness, and the raging intensity of her poems of grief and pain, the yearning power of her evocations of the Chilean landscape, the stark music of her Round Dances, the visionary splendor of her Hymns of America. During her lifetime Mistral published four books: Desolation, Tenderness, Clearcut, and Winepress. These are included in the "Complete" Nobel edition published in Madrid; the Poem of Chile, her last book, was printed years after her death. Le Guin includes poems from all five books in this volume, with particular emphasis on the later work. The intelligence and passion of Le Guin's selection and translation will finally allow people in the North to hear the originality, power, purity, and intransigence of this great American voice. Le Guin has published five volumes of her own poetry, an English version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, and a volume of mutual translation with the Argentine poet Diana Bellessi, The Twins, the Dream/Las Gemalas, El Sueño. Strongly drawn to Mistral's work as soon as she discovered it, Le Guin has been working on this translation for five years.

Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral

Uno de los epistolarios más relevantes de la poesía chilena: las cartas de amor y pasión de Gabriela Mistral a Doris Dana. Doris, vida mía alumbra aspectos de la vida y obra de una de las más grandes intelectuales y poetas: su vida amorosa y su dimensión como lesbiana que por décadas estuvieron ocultas. Unos meses después de recibir el premio Nobel, Gabriela Mistral fue invitada a un homenaje a Barnard College, en Nueva York. En ese auditorio estaba Doris Dana, quien dos años más tarde le escribió la primera carta en torno a la devoción compartida por Thomas Mann. Desde entonces no se separarán más hasta la muerte de Mistral y vivirán una intensa relación que quedó guardada en secreto hasta que el legado de la autora llegó a la Biblioteca Nacional de Chile. En esta nueva selección de cartas, que incluye material inédito y un exhaustivo trabajo de archivo a cargo de Daniela Schutte, el lector tiene ante sí un libro fundamental e imprescindible, que permite redimensionar, releer y observar uno de los ámbitos más íntimos de la poeta, profesora, premio Nobel, diplomática, intelectual, viajera, emigrante y «madre queer de la nación», autora de una obra que no deja de crecer y significarse. “Apasionadas cartas de una mujer a otra mujer donde Gabriela Mistral expresa con ferocidad y dulzura sus angustias, sus celos, su amor, sus aprehensiones y su ternura (...) En esta cuidada selección vuelve a revelarse esa otra dimensión de Mistral que con tanto esmero y durante tanto tiempo se intentó borrar o maquillar con curiosos y anacrónicos eufemismos.” Alia Trabucco, del prólogo de Doris, vida mía

Doris, vida mía. Cartas

Alia Trabucco Zerán

Doris Dana

cartas

Doris, vida mía

Desolacion

Desolación - Ternura - Tala - Lagar

Blanca Nieves En La Casa De Los Enanos  Gabriela Mistral Version

Stephen Tapscott

The first Latin American to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature, the Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) is often characterized as a healing, maternal voice who spoke on behalf of women, indigenous peoples, the disenfranchised, children, and the rural poor. She is that political poet and more: a poet of philosophical meditation, self-consciousness, and daring. This is a book full of surprises and paradoxes. The complexity and structural boldness of these prose-poems, especially the female-erotic prose pieces of her first book, make them an important moment in the history of literary modernism in a tradition that runs from Baudelaire, the North American moderns, and the South American postmodernistas. It's a book that will be eye-opening and informative to the general reader as well as to students of gender studies, cultural studies, literary history, and poetry. This Spanish-English bilingual volume gathers the most famous and representative prose writings of Gabriela Mistral, which have not been as readily available to English-only readers as her poetry. The pieces are grouped into four sections. "Fables, Elegies, and Things of the Earth" includes fifteen of Mistral's most accessible prose-poems. "Prose and Prose-Poems from Desolación / Desolation [1922]" presents all the prose from Mistral's first important book. "Lyrical Biographies" are Mistral's poetic meditations on Saint Francis and Sor Juana de la Cruz. "Literary Essays, Journalism, 'Messages'" collects pieces that reveal Mistral's opinions on a wide range of subjects, including the practice of teaching; the writers Alfonso Reyes, Alfonsina Storni, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Pablo Neruda; Mistral's own writing practices; and her social beliefs. Editor/translator Stephen Tapscott rounds out the volume with a chronology of Mistral's life and a brief introduction to her career and prose.

Selected Prose and Prose-Poems

Desolación

Antologia Poetica

Una de las grandes poetas del siglo XX, Premio Nobel de Literatura, en una antología fundamental, seleccionada y prologada por Lina Meruane Merecedora del Premio Nobel en 1945, Gabriela Mistral es una de las poetas más radicales y memorables de la lírica hispanoamericana del siglo XX. La escritora chilena Lina Meruane ha seleccionado y reordenado con atrevimiento casi un centenar de sus poemas, permitiendo nuevas lecturas de una obra en la que destacan la rebeldía, la extranjería, la incomodidad y la aspereza como ejes de una poética singular y poderosa, hoy más vigente que nunca. «La poesía dialogante de la Mistral -nos dice Meruane en su prólogo- reniega del poder del territorio, entabla una relación fluida con la tierra y nos deja como legado la posibilidad de acabar con los viejos modelos de sociedad. Es su modo de enseñarnos a mirarlo y pensarlo todo de otro modo». ENGLISH DESCRIPTION One of the greatest poets of the 20th century and a Nobel Prize winner, in a fundamental anthology, curated and prefaced by Lina Meruane. Winner of the 1945 Nobel Prize, Gabriela Mistral is one of the most radical, memorable poets of 20th-century Hispanic American lyric poetry. Chilean writer Lina Meruane has selected and daringly reordered almost 100 of her poems, allowing for new interpretations of a body of work in which rebellion, foreignness, discomfort, and harshness act as axes of a special, powerful poetry that is more valid today than ever. “Mistral’s responsive poetry,” says Meruane in her prologue, “renounces the power of territories, opens up a fluid relationship with the earth, and leaves us the possibility of ending old models of society as a legacy. It is her way of teaching us to look at and think about everything in another way.”

Gabriela Mistral

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