 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) - pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga |
|
Chilean educator, cultural
minister, diplomat, and poet, first Latin American woman to win the
Nobel Prize for Literature (1945).
Gabriela Mistral's
reputation as poet was established when she won in 1914 Chilean prize
for Sonetos de la Muerte (Sonnets of Death),
love poems in memory of the dead. Much of her poetry is simple and
direct in language, but full of warmth and emotion. A steady procession of cotovías, books on the supernatural, arrived and also the handkerchiefs. Thank you so much! You shouldn't have spent your money on so many expensive books. I hope you don't wear yourself out running around those terrible streets of your apocalyptic city, New York. You're trying to take care of everything—even my errands. Have pity on the poor, weakm provisional body God gace you . . . If you manage to sell the anthology of my poetry leave the money there to help pay for the car you want, or wanted, to buy. Don't send the money here. (Gabriela Mistral, June 15, 1950, in Gabriela Mistral's Letters to Doris Dana, edited and translated by Velma García-Gorena, University of New Mexico Press, 2018, p. 156) Central
themes in Mistral's poems are love, mother's love,
sterility, nature, sorrow and recovery. Anything can serve as a symbol
of loving care: "the bread I baked / with anise seed and honey, / and
the goldfish / flaming in its bowl. // All these are yours, / baby born
of woman, / if you only / go to sleep." ('If You'll Only Go To Sleep,' Selected Poems of Gabriela
Mistral, translated and edited by Doris Dana,
Johns Hopkins Press, 1971, p. 63) Painful personal memories, like the suicide of her lover Romelio Ureta in 1909, left deep marks on Mistral's writings. Several of her early poems were written for him. Ureta had shot himself after he was found guilty of embezzlement. In the metaphysical poems of Tala (1938) and Lagar (1954) Mistral suggested that life is a mysterious pilgrimage leading to death, a final liberation from the world. But the poet is also a medium of his of her own time. "What the soul is to the body, so is the artist to his people," she once stated, and these words were also inscribed on her tomb. Gabriela Mistral was born Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga in the high Andean village of Vicuña. Both of her parents came from familes of mixed Basque and Indian heritage. Her father, who was a teacher, abandoned the family when she was three years old. Before he left, he made a garden for his daughter. There Gabriela discussed with flowers and birds. Mistral grew up in an all-female household. She attended rural primary school and Vicuña state secondary school (1898-1901). At the age of sixteen she began to support herself and her mother by working as a teacher's aide. Mistral's meteoric advancement as a teacher and educator was owed to her extensive publications, which were directed at a diverse audience of schoolteachers, administrators, children and fellow poets. Her first texts were published in the newspapers La Voz de Elqui and Diario Radical de Coquimbo in 1905. She used the pen name Gabriela Mistral – taking it from the French poet Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914) and the Italian writer Gabriele d'Annunzio (1863-1938) – only for her poetry. In the year following Romelio Ureta's death, Mistral passed an
examination at the Santiago Normal School. She worked
as a teacher in several schools (La Serena, Barrancas, Traiguen,
Antofagasta, Los Andes, Punta Arenas, Temuco, Santiago). Her career as
a school employee lasted for twenty years. While in Temuco,
where she had been appointed Head of the Liceo de Niñas (the
state-sponsored girls' school) Mistral met the sixteen years old Pablo Neruda
(1904-1973), introducing him to the work of European poets. Neruda was
too timid to show her his works. "When I was introduced to her I found
her a good-looking woman. Her tanned face showed her predominant Indian
blood. Like a beautiful Araucan pitcher, her translucent white teeth
stood in a full generous smile that lit the room. (Mistral’s Struggle with God and Man: A
Biographical and Critical Study of the Chilean Poet by Martin C.
Taylor, 2012, p. 97) Mistral's frienship with the Mexican poet, essayist and
literary critic Alfonso Reyes (1889-1959) also
dates back to her
time in Temuco. Reyes came by the school frequently to ask her opinion
about his poems, or to borrow a book. Their
correspondence, which began in the early 1920s, continued throughout
their lives. Mistral became in 1921 the principal of Santiago High School, Chile's most prestigious secondary school for girls. This appointment earned her more than few enemies. In 1922 she published her second collection of poems under the title Desolación, which gained an immediate international acclaim. Its main themes were Christian faith and death – she promises that, after the death "sunny land" will emerge from decay. In the final sonnet the poet expresses faith in a forgiving God. Many of the poems in Ternura (1924) deal with childhood. In the 1930s Francisco Donoso, a Chilean author and priest, wrote that "almost all of Gabriela Mistral's poems have the accent of a prayer". Soon after Mistral had assumed her post in Santiago, she was
invited
to work in Mexico on a plan for the reform of schools and libraries. In
the following years she returned to Chile for only two brief visits, in
1938 and 1954. From Mexico she went to the Unites States and Europe.
Between the years 1925 and 1934, Mistral lived primarily in France and
Italy, and worked for the League for Intellectual Co-operation of the
League of Nations. During this period she write fifty or more newspaper
and magazine articles a year. Her friends included among others Mme.
Curie and Henri
Bergson (1859-1941). Mistral was in 1930 a visiting professor at Barnard College,
New
York City, and Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. In 1933 she
entered the Chilean Foreign Service and was appointed by the Chilean
government as a kind of ambassador-at-large for Latin American Culture.
Because Benito Mussolini's government did not accept women as
diplomats, Italy rejected her credentials. In the 1930s, Mistral
served as consul in Madrid (1933), Lisbon (1935), and Nice (1939). When the Winter War (1939-40) between Finland and the Soviet Union broke out, many writers and journalists around the world expressed their support to the Finnish cause. Mistral's contribution to this wave of sympathy was a poem entitled 'Campeón Finlandés' (1940), about the Olympic gold medal winner Gunnar Höckert, who died at the front. The poem was later included in Lagar. It remained unknown in Finland, until 2017, when it was translated into Finnish as a part of Finland's 100th anniversary as an independent state. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech Mistral said: "At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues. Both rejoice to have been invited to this festival of Nordic life with its tradition of centuries of folklore and poetry." (Nobel Lectures: Literature 1901-1967, edited by Horst Frenz, World Scientific, 1999, p. 408) During WW II Mistral became in Brazil friends with the
Austrian-born writer Stefan Zweig
(1881-1942) and his wife; they committed suicide in 1942 in
the mountain resort of Petrópolis,
near Rio de Janeiro. Mistral felt that she had fallen into a
black hole. The tragedy
continued when Mistral's nephew Juan Miguel Godoy (known as "Yin-Yin")
killed himself at the age of 18 years in Petrópolis. Mistral insisted
that he had been assassinated. However, people closest to her said that
he had killed himself because he felt culturally isolated in Brazil. It
was also speculated that her negative commentary on a draft of
his novel shettered Yin-Yin's self-esteem. Gabriela writes with a dead earnestness and a profound modesty. Hardly ever do we hear a light gay note, a dancing rhythm to balance the gray and black hues of her ardent passion. She differs from other women poets of her time, often painfully self-centered and extremely conscious of their 'feminity,' in that she seldom mentions herself unless it is to tell us of her plainness. In her poems, as in her life, she is the arch enemy of vanitas. (Margaret Bates in her introduction to Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, p. xxi) Before and after the war Mistral was associated
with a number of American universities. She also served as the Chilean
consul in Los Angeles and in Italy. Eventually poor health forced her
to retire to her home in New York. Throughout the last ten years of her
life Mistral worked with Poema de Chile (1967),
in which she returned to the agrarian Chile of her childhood. She died
of cancer on January 10, 1957, at the age of sixty-seven. The American
poet Langston Hughes translated a selection of her verses that was
published just after she died. "Gabriela Mistral Prize" was created in
1979. In the late 1990s CEPCIDI, an OAS organization, assumed
responsibility for the establishing the rules of procedure for awarding
the Prize. The Peruvian poet Antonio Cisneros received in 2000 the
"Gabriela Mistral" Inter-American Prize for Culture. In 2001 the
British rock singer Sting was given Gabriela Mistral medal. In his
song, 'They Dance Alone' from the 1980s, the lyrics went: "Why are
these women here, dancing on their own? / Why is there this sadness in
their eyes? / Why are the soldiers here, their faces fixed like stone?
/ I can't see what it is that they despise." The song written as a
tribute to the mothers of those who disappeared under the rule of
Chile's former military leader, General Augusto Pinochet. Mistral never married but she adopted a child who later died. Longing for physical maternity is seen in her cradle songs and poems of mothers. Religiosity marked also Mistral verse – she joined the lay order of the Franciscans and published such poems as 'Motivos de San Francisco' and 'Elogios de las cosas de la tierra', which combined spiritual and material values. In 2001 Mistral's sexual inclinations arose fierce debate in Chile. Yuri Labarca's film, La Pasajera, written by Francisco Casas, dealt with her relationship to Doris Dana, her American secretary. Mistral's devoted readers considered the film outrageous and said that her true, traditional views of life and love were present in her works. However, an independent woman, Mistral has also been presented as a feminist icon. The absence of male friendship and her life as an unmarried woman has contributed to her image of a defender of all racial minorities and "the mixed-race mother of the nation". For further reading: Gabriela Mistral: Magnifient Rebel by Matilde Ladrón de Guevara (1962); Gabriela Mistral by M. Arce de Vázqquez (1964); An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature by Jean Franco (1966); Gabriela Mistral's Religious Sensibility by Martin C. Taylor (1968); Mysticism in Gabriela Mistral by Rose Aquin Caimano (1969); Gabriela Mistral: the Teacher from the Valley of Elqui by Marie-Lise Gazarian-Gautier (1975); Una mujer nada de tonta by Roque Esteban Scarpa (1976); Gabriela Mistral en Antofagasta by Mario Bahamonde (1980); Beauty and the Mission of a Teacher by W.J. Castleman (1982); Gabriela Mistral by Jaime Concha (1986); Gabriela Mistral: A Reader, edited by Isabel Allende (1992); Gabriela Mistral by Elisabeth Horan (1994); Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, ed. by Verity Smith (1997); A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral by Licia Fiol-Matta (2002); Mistral’s Struggle with God and Man: A Biographical and Critical Study of the Chilean Poet by Martin C. Taylor (2012); 'Not Just Children's Poetry: Gabriela Mistral, Consul in Nice,' in On the Edge of the Holocaust: the Shoah in Latin American Literature and Culture by Edna Aizenberg (2016); Gabriela Mistral en México: laconstrucción de una intelectual (1922-1924) by Carla Ulloa Inostroza (2022) - Suom.: Runosuomennoksia Espanjan ja Portugalin kirjallisuuden kultaisessa kirjassa. Selected works:
|
