Gabriela Mistral

(7 April 1889 – 10 January 1957)

Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet, educator,
diplomat, and feminist who was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in
Literature, in 1945. Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a
mother’s love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a
mixture of Native American and European influences. Her portrait also appears on the
5,000 Chilean peso bank note. Mistral herself was of Basque and Aymara descent.

A dedicated educator and an engaged and committed intellectual, Mistral defended the
rights of children, women, and the poor; the freedoms of democracy; and the need for
peace in times of social, political, and ideological conflicts, not only in Latin America but in
the whole world. She always took the side of those who were mistreated by society:
children, women, Native Americans, Jews, war victims, workers, and the poor, and she
tried to speak for them through her poetry, her many newspaper articles, her letters, and
her talks and actions as Chilean representative in international organizations. Above all,
she was concerned about the future of Latin America and its peoples and cultures,
particularly those of the native groups. Her altruistic interests and her social concerns had
a religious undertone, as they sprang from her profoundly spiritual, Franciscan
understanding of the world. Her personal spiritual life was characterized by an untiring,
seemingly mystical search for union with divinity and all of creation. 

Mistral's writings are highly emotional and impress the reader with an original style
marked by her disdain for the aesthetically pleasing elements common among modernist
writers, her immediate predecessors. Rhythm, rhyme, metaphors, symbols, vocabulary,
and themes, as well as other traditional poetic techniques, are all directed in her poetry
toward the expression of deeply felt emotions and conflicting forces in opposition.

Love and jealousy, hope and fear, pleasure and pain, life and death, dream and truth, ideal
and reality, matter and spirit are always competing in her life and find expression in the
intensity of her well-defined poetic voices.
In her poems speak the abandoned woman and the jealous lover, the mother in a trance of
joy and fear because of her delicate child, the teacher, the woman who tries to bring to
others the comfort of compassion, the enthusiastic singer of hymns to America's natural
richness, the storyteller, the mad poet possessed by the spirit of beauty and transcendence.

All of her lyrical voices represent the different aspects of her own personality and have
been understood by critics and readers alike as the autobiographical voices of a woman
whose life was marked by an intense awareness of the world and of human destiny. The
poetic word in its beauty and emotional intensity had for her the power to transform and
transcend human spiritual weakness, bringing consolation to the soul in search of
understanding. Her poetry is thus charged with a sense of ritual and prayer. 

Although she mostly uses regular meter and rhyme, her verses are sometimes difficult to
recite because of their harshness, resulting from intentional breaks of the prosodic rules.
This apparent deficiency is purposely used by the poet to produce an intended effect—the
reader's uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty and harshness that corresponds to the
tormented attitude of the lyrical voice and to the passionate character of the poet's
worldview. Even when Mistral's verses have the simple musicality of a cradlesong, they
vibrate with controlled emotion and hidden tension. In her prose writing Mistral also
twists and entangles the language in unusual expressive ways as if the common, direct style
were not appropriate to her subject matter and her intensely emotive interpretation of it.
Although she is mostly known for her poetry, she was an accomplished and prolific prose
writer whose contributions to several major Latin American newspapers on issues of
interest to her contemporaries had an ample readership. Several selections of her prose
works and many editions of her poetry published over the years do not fully account for her
enormous contribution to Latin American culture and her significance as an original
spiritual poet and public intellectual. Her complete works are still to be published in
comprehensive and complete critical editions easily available to the public. 

Lucila Godoy Alcayaga was born on 7 April 1889 in the small town of Vicuña, in the Elqui
Valley, a deeply cut, narrow farming land in the Chilean Andes Mountains, four hundred
miles north of Santiago, the capital: "El Valle de Elqui: una tajeadura heroica en la masa
montañosa, pero tan breve, que aquello no es sino un torrente con dos orillas verdes. Y
esto, tan pequeño, puede llegar a amarse como lo perfecto" (Elqui Valley: a heroic slash in
the mass of mountains, but so brief, that it is nothing but a rush of water with two green
banks. And this little place can be loved as perfection), Mistral writes in Recados:
Contando a Chile (Messages: Telling Chile, 1957). She grew up in Monte Grande, a
humble village in the same valley, surrounded by modest fruit orchards and rugged
deserted hills. She was raised by her mother and by an older sister fifteen years her senior,
who was her first teacher. Her father, a primary-school teacher with a penchant for
adventure and easy living, abandoned his family when Lucila was a three-year-old girl; she
saw him only on rare occasions, when he visited his wife and children before disappearing
forever. This evasive father, who wrote little poems for his daughter and sang to her with
his guitar, had a strong emotional influence on the poet. From him she obtained, as she
used to comment, the love of poetry and the nomadic spirit of the perpetual traveler. Her
mother was a central force in Mistral's sentimental attachment to family and homeland
and a strong influence on her desire to succeed. Not less influential was the figure of her
paternal grandmother, whose readings of the Bible marked the child forever. An
exceedingly religious person, her grandmother—who Mistral liked to think had Sephardic
ancestors—encouraged the young girl to learn and recite by heart passages from the Bible,
in particular the Psalms of David. Mistral declared later, in her poem "Mis libros" (My
Books) in Desolación(Despair, 1922), that the Bible was one of the books that had most
influenced her:
 
¡Biblia, mi noble Biblia, panorama estupendo,

en donde se quedaron mis ojos largamente,

tienes sobre los Salmos las lavas más ardientes

y en su río de fuego mi corazón enciendo!

Sustentaste a mis gentes con tu robusto vino

y los erguiste recios en medio de los hombres,

y a mí me yergue de ímpetu solo el decir tu nombre;

porque yo de ti vengo, he quebrado al destino

Después de ti tan solo me traspasó los huesos

con su ancho alarido el sumo florentino

(Bible, my noble Bible, magnificent panorama,

where my eyes lingered for a long time,

you have in the Psalms the most burning of lavas

and in its river of fire I lit my heart!

You sustained my people with your strong wine

and you made them stand strong among men,

and just saying your name gives me strength;

because I come from you I have broken destiny

After you, only the scream of the great Florentine

went through my bones).

These few Alexandrine verses are a good, albeit brief, example of Mistral's style, tone, and
inspiration: the poetic discourse and its appreciation in reading are both represented by
extremely physical and violent images that refer to a spiritual conception of human destiny
and the troubling mysteries of life: the scream of "el sumo florentino," a reference to
Dante, and the pierced bones of the reader impressed by the biblical text. 

The poet always remembered her childhood in Monte Grande, in Valle de Elqui, as Edenic.
Under the loving care of her mother and older sister, she learned how to know and love
nature, to enjoy it in solitary contemplation. There, as Mistral recalls in Poema de
Chile(Poem of Chile, 1967), "su flor guarda el almendro / y cría los higuerales / que azulan
higos extremos" (with almond trees blooming, and fig trees laden with stupendous dark
blue figs), she developed her dreamy character, fascinated as she was by nature around
her:
 
Me tenía una familia

de árboles, otra de matas,

hablaba largo y tendido

con animales hallados

(I had a family

of trees, and another of plants,

and I talked and talked

with the animals I found).

The mountains and the river of her infancy, the wind and the sky, the animals and plants of
her secluded homeland became Mistral's cherished possessions; she always kept them in
her memory as the true and only world, an almost fabulous land lost in time and space, a
land of joy from which she had been exiled when she was still a child. In the quiet and
beauty of that mountainous landscape the girl developed her passionate spirituality and
her poetic talents. As she evoked in old age, she also learned to like the stories told by the
old people in a language that kept many of its old cadences, still alive in the vocabulary and
constructions of a people still attached to the land and its past. In Poema de Chileshe
affirms that the language and imagination of that world of the past and of the countryside
always inspired her own choice of vocabulary, images, rhythms, and rhymes:
 
Me llamaban "cuatro añitos"

y ya tenía doce años.

Así me mentaban, pues

no hacía lo de mis años:

no cosía, no zurcía,

tenía los ojos vagos,

cuentos pedía, romances,

y no lavaba los platos . . .

¡Ay! Y, sobre todo, a causa

de un hablar así, rimado

(They called me "little four-years"

and I was already twelve.

They called me thus, because

I did not act my age:

I did not sew, I did not darn,

I had a vague gaze,

I asked for stories, narrative poems,

and I did not wash the dishes . . .

Alas! And, above all, because

I spoke thus, in rhyme).

Having to go to the larger village of Vicuña to continue studies at the only school in the
region was for the eleven-year-old Lucila the beginning of a life of suffering and disillusion:
"Mi infancia la pasé casi toda en la aldea llamada Monte Grande. Me conozco sus cerros
uno por uno. Fui dichosa hasta que salí de Monte Grande; y ya no lo fui nunca más" (I
spent most of my childhood in the village called Monte Grande. I know its hills one by one.
I was happy until I left Monte Grande, and then I was never happy again). This sense of
having been exiled from an ideal place and time characterizes much of Mistral's worldview
and helps explain her pervasive sadness and her obsessive search for love and
transcendence. Her love of the material world was probably also because of her childhood
years spent in direct contact with nature, and to an emotional manifestation of her desire
to immerse herself in the world." 

Among the several biographical anecdotes always cited in the life of the poet, the
experience of having been accused of stealing school materials when she was in primary
school is perhaps the most important to consider, as it explains Mistral's feelings about the
injustice people inflict on others with their insensitivity. Mistral refers to this anecdote on
several occasions, suggesting the profound and lasting effect the experience had on her.
Throughout her life she maintained a sense of being hurt by others, in particular by people
in her own country. This impression could be justified by several other circumstances in
her life when the poet felt, probably justifiably, that she was being treated unjustly: for
instance, in 1906 she tried to attend the Normal School in La Serena and was denied
admission because of her writings, which were seen by the school authorities as the work of
a troublemaker with pantheist ideas contrary to the Christian values required of an
educator. She had been sending contributions to regional newspapers--La Voz de
Elqui (The Voice of Elqui) in Vicuña and El Coquimbo in La Serena--since 1904, when
she was still a teenager, and was already working as a teacher's aide in La Compañía, a
small village near La Serena, to support herself and her mother." 

Mistral was determined to succeed in spite of having been denied the right to study,
however. She prepared herself, on her own, for a teaching career and for the life of a writer
and intellectual. She also continued to write. Among her contributions to the local papers,
one article of 1906--"La instrucción de la mujer" (The education of women)--deserves
notice, as it shows how Mistral was at that early age aware and critical of the limitations
affecting women's education. "Instrúyase a la mujer, no hay nada en ella que la haga ser
colocada en un lugar más bajo que el hombre" (Let women be educated, nothing in them
requires that they be set in a place lower than men). Some time later, in 1910, she obtained
her coveted teaching certification even though she had not followed a regular course of
studies. By studying on her own and passing the examination, she proved to herself and to
others that she was academically well prepared and ready to fulfill professionally the
responsibilities of an educator. She always commented bitterly, however, that she never
had the opportunity to receive the formal education of other Latin American intellectuals." 

With the professional degree in hand she began a short and successful career as a teacher
and administrator. A series of different job destinations took her to distant and opposite
regions within the varied territory of her country, as she quickly moved up in the national
education system. These various jobs gave her the opportunity to know her country better
than many who stayed in their regions of origin or settled in Santiago to be near the center
of intellectual activity. This direct knowledge of her country, its geography, and its peoples
became the basis for her increasing interest in national values, which coincided with the
intellectual and political concerns of Latin America as a whole. Beginning in 1910 with a
teaching position in the small farming town of Traiguén in the southern region of
Araucanía, completely different from her native Valle de Elqui, she was promoted in the
following years to schools in two relatively large and distant cities: Antofagasta, the coastal
city in the mining northern region, in 1911; and Los Andes, in the bountiful Aconcagua
Valley at the foothills of the Andes Mountains, about one hundred miles north of Santiago,
in 1912. In this quiet farming town she enjoyed for a few years a period of quiet dedication
to studying, teaching, and writing, as she was protected from distractions by the principal
of her school." 

Among many other submissions to different publications, she wrote to the Nicaraguan
Rubén Darío in Paris, sending him a short story and some poems for his literary
magazine, Elegancias. They appeared in March and April 1913, giving Mistral her first
publication outside of Chile. Pedro Aguirre Cerda, an influential politician and educator
(he served as president of Chile from 1938 to 1941), met her at that time and became her
protector. In 1918, as secretary of education, Aguirre Cerda appointed her principal of the
Liceo de Niñas (High School for Girls) in Punta Arenas, the southernmost Chilean port in
the Strait of Magellan. This position was one of great responsibility, as Mistral was in
charge of reorganizing a conflictive institution in a town with a large and dominant group
of foreign immigrants practically cut off from the rest of the country. In this faraway city in
a land of long winter nights and persistent winds, she wrote a series of three poems,
"Paisajes de la Patagonia" (Patagonian Landscapes), inspired by her experience at the end
of the world, separated from family and friends. They are the tormented expression of
someone lost in despair. The stark landscape and the harsh weather of the region are
mostly symbolic materializations of her spiritual outlook on human destiny." 

"Desolación" (Despair, 1918), the first composition in the triptych, is written in the
modernist Alexandrine verse of fourteen syllables common to several of Mistral's
compositions of her early creative period. The poem captures the sense of exile and
abandonment the poet felt at the time, as conveyed in its slow rhythm and in its concrete
images drawn with a vocabulary suggestive of pain and stress:
 
La bruma espesa, eterna, para que olvide dónde

Me ha arrojado la mar en su ola de salmuera.

La tierra a la que vine no tiene primavera:

Tiene su noche larga que cual madre me esconde

(Fog thickens, eternal, so that I may forget where

the sea has thrown me in its wave of brine.

The land I have come to knows no spring:

it has its long night that like a mother hides me).

As she had done before when working in the poor, small schools of her northern region,
she doubled her duties by organizing evening classes for workers who had no other means
of educating themselves. She was always concerned about the needs of the poor and the
disenfranchised, and every time she could do something about them, she acted,
disregarding personal gain. This attitude toward suffering permeates her poetry with a
deep feeling of love and compassion. "Tres árboles" (Three Trees), the third composition of
"Paisajes de la Patagonia," exemplifies her devotion to the weak in the final stanza, with its
obvious symbolic image of the fallen trees:
 
El leñador los olvidó. La noche

Vendrá. Estaré con ellos.

Recibiré en mi corazón sus mansas

Resinas. Me serán como de fuego.

Y mudos y ceñidos,

Nos halle el día en un montón de duelo.

(The woodsman forgot them. The night

Will come. I will be with them.

In my heart I will receive their gentle

Sap. They will be like fire to me.

And may the day find us

Quietly embraced in a heap of sorrow).

After two years in Punta Arenas, Mistral was transferred again to serve as principal of the
Liceo de Niñas in Temuco, the main city in the heart of the Chilean Indian territory. She
was there for a year. Pablo Neruda, who at the time was a budding teenage poet studying
in the Liceo de Hombres, or high school for boys, met her and received her advice and
encouragement to pursue his literary aspirations. Witnessing the abusive treatment
suffered by the humble and destitute Indians, and in particular their women, Mistral was
moved to write "Poemas de la madre más triste" (Poems of the Saddest Mother), a prose
poem included in Desolaciónin which she expresses "toda la solidaridad del sexo, la
infinita piedad de la mujer para la mujer" (the complete solidarity of the sex, the infinite
mercy of woman for a woman), as she describes it in an explanatory note accompanying
"Poemas de la madre más triste," in the form of a monologue of a pregnant woman who
has been abandoned by her lover and chastised by her parents:
Mi padre me dijo que me echaría, gritó a mi madre que me arrojaría esta
misma noche.
La noche es tibia; a la claridad de las estrellas yo podría caminar hasta la aldea
próxima; pero ¿y si nace a estas foras? Mis sollozos le han llamado tal vez; tal
vez quiera salir por ver mi cara
(My father said he would get rid of me, yelled at my mother that he would
throw me out this very night.
The night is mild; by the light of the stars, I might find my way to the nearest
village; but suppose he is born at such a time as this? My sobs perhaps have
aroused him; perhaps he wants to come out now to see my face covered with
tears).
 
In 1921 Mistral reached her highest position in the Chilean educational system when she
was made Principal of the newly created Liceo de Niñas number 6 in Santiago, a
prestigious appointment desired by many colleagues. Now she was in the capital, in the
center of the national literary and cultural activity, ready to participate fully in the life of
letters. A year later, however, she left the country to begin her long life as a self-exiled
expatriate." 

During her years as an educator and administrator in Chile, Mistral was actively pursuing a
literary career, writing poetry and prose, and keeping in contact with other writers and
intellectuals. She published mainly in newspapers, periodicals, anthologies, and
educational publications, showing no interest in producing a book. Her name became
widely familiar because several of her works were included in a primary-school reader that
was used all over her country and around Latin America. At about this time her spiritual
needs attracted her to the spiritualist movements inspired by oriental religions that were
gaining attention in those days among Western artists and intellectuals. She was for a
while an active member of the Chilean Theosophical Association and adopted Buddhism as
her religion. This inclination for oriental forms of religious thinking and practices was in
keeping with her intense desire to lead an inner life of meditation and became a defining
characteristic of Mistral's spiritual life and religious inclinations, even though years later
she returned to Catholicism. She never ceased to use the meditation techniques learned
from Buddhism, and even though she declared herself Catholic, she kept some of her
Buddhist beliefs and practices as part of her personal religious views and attitudes." 

Another reason Mistral became known as a poet even before publishing her first book was
the first prize--a flower and a gold coin--she won for "Los sonetos de la muerte" (The
Sonnets of Death) in the 1914 "Juegos Florales," or poetic contest, organized by the city of
Santiago. As a means to explain these three poems about a lost love, most critics tell of the
suicide in 1909 of Romelio Ureta, a young man who had been Mistral's friend and first love
several years before. Although the suicide of her former friend had little or nothing to do
with their relationship, it added to the poems a strong biographical motivation that
enhanced their emotional effect, creating in the public the image of Mistral as a tragic
figure in the tradition of a romanticized conception of the poet. With "Los sonetos de la
muerte" Mistral became in the public view a clearly defined poetic voice, one that was seen
as belonging to a tragic, passionate woman, marked by loneliness, sadness, and relentless
possessiveness and jealousy:
 
Del nicho helado en que los hombres te pusieron,

Te bajaré a la tierra humilde y soleada.

Que he de dormirme en ella los hombres no supieron,

Y que hemos de soñar sobre la misma almohada.

.......................................

Me alejaré cantando mis venganzas hermosas,

¡porque a ese hondor recóndito la mano de ninguna

bajará a disputarme tu puñado de huesos!

(From the cold niche where they put you

I will lower you to the humble and sunny earth.

They did not know I would fall asleep on it,

and that we would dream together on the same pillow.

...........................................

I shall leave singing my beautiful revenge,

because the hand of no other woman shall descend to this depth

to claim from me your fistful of bones!).

" 

From then on all of her poetry was interpreted as purely autobiographical, and her poetic
voices were equated with her own. Mistral was seen as the abandoned woman who had
been denied the joy of motherhood and found consolation as an educator in caring for the
children of other women, an image she confirmed in her writing, as in the poem "El niño
solo" (The Lonely Child). The scene represents a woman who, hearing from the road the
cry of a baby at a nearby hut, enters the humble house to find a boy alone in a cradle with
no one to care for him; she takes him in her arms and consoles him by singing to him,
becoming for a moment a succoring mother:
 
La madre se tardó, curvada en el barbecho;

El niño, al despertar, buscó el pezón de rosa

Y rompió en llanto . . . Yo lo estreché contra el pecho,

Y una canción de cuna me subió, temblorosa . . .

Por la ventana abierta la luna nos miraba.

El niño ya dormía, y la canción bañaba,

Como otro resplandor, mi pecho enriquecido . . .

 

(His mother was late coming from the fields;

The child woke up searching for the rose of the nipple

And broke into tears . . . I took him to my breast

And a cradlesong sprang in me with a tremor . . .

Through the open window the moon was watching us.

The baby was asleep, and the song bathed

Like another light, my enriched breast . . .).

It is difficult not to interpret this scene as representative of what poetry meant for Mistral,
the writer who would be recognized by the reading public mostly for her cradlesongs." 

To avoid using her real name, by which she was known as a well-regarded educator,
Mistral signed her literary works with different pen names. By 1913 she had adopted her
Mistral pseudonym, which she ultimately used as her own name. As Mistral she was
recognized as the poet of a new dissonant feminine voice who expressed the previously
unheard feelings of mothers and lonely women. The choice of her new first name suggests
either a youthful admiration for the Italian poet Gabrielle D'Annunzio or a reference to the
archangel Gabriel; the last name she chose in direct recognition of the French poet
Frèderic Mistral, whose work she was reading with great interest around 1912, but mostly
because it serves also to identify the powerful wind that blows in Provence. Explaining her
choice of name, she has said:
Siento un gran amor por el viento. Lo considero como uno de los elementos
más espirituales--más espiritual que el agua. Deseaba, pues, tomar un nombre
de viento que no fuese "huracán" ni "brisa," y un día, enseñando geografía en
mi escuela, me impresionó la descripción que hace Reclus, del viento, en su
célebre obra, y en ella encontré ese nombre: Mistral. Lo adopté en seguida
como seudónimo, y esa es la verdadera explicación de por qué llevo el apellido
del cantor de la Proveza
(I have great love of the wind. I take it for one of the most spiritual of the
elements--more spiritual than water. I wanted, then, to adopt a name of wind,
but not "hurricane" or "breeze"; one day, teaching geography in my school, I
was impressed by the description of the wind made by Reclus in his famous
work, and I found in it that name: Mistral. I immediately adopted it as my
pseudonym, and this is the true explanation of why I use the last name of the
singer of Provence).
In whichever case, Mistral was pointing with her pen name to personal ideals about her
own identity as a poet. She acknowledged wanting for herself the fiery spiritual strength of
the archangel and the strong, earthly, and spiritual power of the wind." 

The year 1922 brought important and decisive changes in the life of the poet and marks the
end of her career in the Chilean educational system and the beginning of her life of
traveling and of many changes of residence in foreign countries. It is also the year of
publication of her first book, Desolación. Coincidentally, the same year, Universidad de
Chile (The Chilean National University) granted Mistral the professional title of teacher of
Spanish in recognition of her professional and literary contributions. Invited by the
Mexican writer José Vasconcelos, secretary of public education in the government of
Alvaro Obregón, Mistral traveled to Mexico via Havana, where she stayed several days
giving lectures and readings and receiving the admiration and friendship of the Cuban
writers and public. This short visit to Cuba was the first one of a long series of similar visits
to many countries in the ensuing years." 

Once in Mexico she helped in the planning and reorganization of rural education, a
significant effort in a nation that had recently experienced a decisive social revolution and
was building up its new institutions. In fulfilling her assigned task, Mistral came to know
Mexico, its people, regions, customs, and culture in a profound and personal way. This
knowledge gave her a new perspective about Latin America and its Indian roots, leading
her into a growing interest and appreciation of all things autochthonous. From Mexico she
sent to El Mercurio (The Mercury) in Santiago a series of newspaper articles on her
observations in the country she had come to love as her own. These pieces represent her
first enthusiastic reaction to her encounter with a foreign land. They are the beginning of a
lifelong dedication to journalistic writing devoted to sensitizing the Latin American public
to the realities of their own world. These articles were collected and published
posthumously in 1957 as Croquis mexicano (Mexican Sketch). In Mexico, Mistral also
edited Lecturas para mujeres (Readings for Women), an anthology of poetry and prose
selections from classic and contemporary writers--including nineteen of her own texts--
published in 1924 as a text to be used at the Escuela Hogar "Gabriela Mistral" (Home
School "Gabriela Mistral"), named after her in recognition of her contribution to Mexican
educational reform." 

While she was in Mexico, Desolación was published in New York City by Federico de Onís
at the insistence of a group of American teachers of Spanish who had attended a talk by
Onís on Mistral at Columbia University and were surprised to learn that her work was not
available in book form. Desolación was prepared based on the material sent by the author
to her enthusiastic North American promoters. While the invitation by the Mexican
government was indicative of Mistral's growing reputation as an educator on the continent,
more than a recognition of her literary talents, the spontaneous decision of a group of
teachers to publish her collected poems represented unequivocal proof of her literary
preeminence. Most of the compositions in Desolación were written when Mistral was
working in Chile and had appeared in various publications. As such, the book is an
aggregate of poems rather than a collection conceived as an artistic unit. Divided into
broad thematic sections, the book includes almost eighty poems grouped under five
headings that represent the basic preoccupations in Mistral's poetry. Under the first
section, "Vida" (Life), are grouped twenty-two compositions of varied subjects related to
life's preoccupations, including death, religion, friendship, motherhood and sterility, poetic
inspiration, and readings. The following section, "La escuela" (School), comprises two
poems--"La maestra rural" (The Rural Teacher) and "La encina" (The Oak)--both of which
portray teachers as strong, dedicated, self-effacing women akin to apostolic figures, who
became in the public imagination the exact representation of Mistral herself. "La maestra
era pura" (The teacher was pure), the first poem begins, and the second and third stanzas
open with similar brief, direct statements: "La maestra era pobre" (The teacher was poor),
"La maestra era alegre" (The teacher was cheerful). The second stanza is a good example of
the simple, direct description of the teacher as almost like a nun:
 
La maestra era pobre. Su reino no es humano.

(Así en el doloroso sembrador de Israel)

Vestía sayas pardas, no enjoyaba su mano

¡y era todo su espíritu un inmenso joyel!

(The teacher was poor. Her kingdom is not of this world.

[Thus also in the painful sewer of Israel]

She dressed in brown coarse garments, did not use a ring

And her spirit was a magnificent jewel!).

"Dolor" (Pain) includes twenty-eight compositions of varied forms dealing with the painful
experience of frustrated love. "Los sonetos de la muerte" is included in this section. Also in
"Dolor" is the intensely emotional "Poema del hijo" (Poem of the Son), a cry for a son she
never had because "En las noches, insomne de dicha y de visiones / la lujuria de fuego no
descendió a mi lecho" (In my nights, awakened by joy and visions, / fiery lust did not
descend upon my bed):
 
Un hijo, un hijo, un hijo! Yo quise un hijo tuyo

y mío, allá en los días del éxtasis ardiente,

en los que hasta mis huesos temblaron de tu arrullo

y un ancho resplandor creció sobre mi frente

(A son, a son, a son! I wanted a son of yours

and mine, back then in the days of burning ecstasy,

when even my bones trembled at your whisper

and a wide light grew in my forehead).

"Naturaleza" (Nature) includes "Paisajes de le Patagonia" and other texts about Mistral's
stay in Punta Arenas. A series of compositions for children--"Canciones de cuna"
(Cradlesongs), also included in her next book, Ternura: Canciones de
niños (Tenderness: Songs for Children, 1924)--completes the poetry selections
in Desolación. An additional group of prose compositions, among them "Poemas de la
madre más triste" and several short stories under the heading "Prosa escolar" (School
Prose), confirms that the book is an assorted collection of most of what Mistral had written
during several years. In 1923 a second printing of the book appeared in Santiago, with the
addition of a few compositions written in Mexico." 

Mistral's stay in Mexico came to an end in 1924 when her services were no longer needed.
Before returning to Chile, she traveled in the United States and Europe, thus beginning her
life of constant movement from one place to another, a compulsion she attributed to her
need to look for a perfect place to live in harmony with nature and society. In 1925, on her
way back to Chile, she stopped in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, countries that received
her with public manifestations of appreciation. By then she had become a well-known and
much admired poet in all of Latin America. Her second book of poems,Ternura, had
appeared a year before in Madrid. Subtitled Canciones de niños, it included, together
with new material, the poems for children already published inDesolación. Because of
this focus, which underlined only one aspect of her poetry, this book was seen as
significantly different from her previous collection of poems, where the same compositions
were part of a larger selection of sad and disturbing poems not at all related to children." 

In Ternura Mistral attempts to prove that poetry that deals with the subjects of childhood,
maternity, and nature can be done in highly aesthetic terms, and with a depth of feeling
and understanding. As she wrote in a letter, "He querido hacer una poesía escolar nueva,
porque la que hay en boga no me satisface" (I wanted to write a new type of poetry for the
school, because the one in fashion now does not satisfy me). She wanted to write, and did
write successfully, "una poesía escolar que no por ser escolar deje de ser poesía, que lo sea,
y más delicada que cualquiera otra, más honda, más impregnada de cosas del corazón: más
estremecida de soplo de alma" (a poetry for school that does not cease to be poetry because
it is for school, it must be poetry, and more delicate than any other poetry, deeper, more
saturated of things of the heart: more affected by the breath of the soul). Ternuraincludes
her "Canciones de cuna," "Rondas" (Play songs), and nonsense verses such as "La pajita"
(The Little Straw), which combines fantasy with playfulness and musicality:
 
Era que era una niña de cera;

pero ne era una niña de cera,

era una gavilla parada en la era.

Pero no era una gavilla

sino una flor tieza de maravilla

(There was this girl of wax;

but she wasn't made of wax,

she was a sheaf of wheat standing in the threshing floor.

But she was not a sheaf of wheat

but a stiff sunflower).

The book also includes poems about the world and nature. They are attributed to an almost
magical storyteller, "La Cuenta-mundo" (The World-Teller), the fictional lyrical voice of a
woman who tells about water and air, light and rainbow, butterflies and mountains. "La
piña" (The Pineapple) is indicative of the simple, sensual, and imaginative character of
these poems about the world of matter:
 
Allega y no tengas miedo

De la piña con espadas . . .

Por vivir en el plantío

Su madre la crió armada . . .

Suena el cuchillo cortando

La amazona degollada

Que pierde todo el poder

En el manojo de dagas

(Come near, don't be afraid

Of the pineapple and her swords . . .

Because they live in the field

Her mother raised her well-armed . . .

The knife makes a sound as it cuts

The decapitated amazon

Who loses all her power

With her bundle of daggers).

There is also a group of school poems, slightly pedagogical and objective in their tone." 

In Ternura Mistral seems to fulfill the promise she made in "Voto" (Vow) at the end
ofDesolación: "Dios me perdone este libro amargo. Lo dejo tras de mí como a la
hondonada sombría y por laderas más clementes subo hacia las mesetas espirituales donde
una ancha luz caerá sobre mis días. Yo cantaré desde ellas las palabras de la esperanza,
cantaré como lo quiso un misericordioso, para consolar a los hombres" (I hope God will
forgive me for this bitter book. I leave it behind me, as you leave the darkened valley, and I
climb by more benign slopes to the spiritual plateaus where a wide light will fall over my
days. From there I will sing the words of hope, I will sing as a merciful one wanted to do,
for the consolation of men). Ternura, in effect, is a bright, hopeful book, filled with the
love of children and of the many concrete things of the natural and human world." 

Back in Chile after three years of absence, she returned to her region of origin and settled
in La Serena in 1925, thinking about working on a small orchard. The same year she had
obtained her retirement from the government as a special recognition of her years of
service to education and of her exceptional contribution to culture. The rest of her life she
depended mostly on this pension, since her future consular duties were served in an
honorary capacity. Mistral returned to Catholicism around this time. A fervent follower of
St. Francis of Assisi, she entered the Franciscan Order as a laical member. This decision
says much about her religious convictions and her special devotion for the Italian saint, his
views on nature, and his advice on following a simple life. As a member of the order, she
chose to live in poverty, making religion a central element in her life. Religion for her was
also fundamental to her understanding of her function as a poet. Her admiration of St.
Francis had led her to start writing, while still in Mexico, a series of prose compositions on
his life. Fragments of the never-completed biography were published in 1965 as Motivos
de San Francisco (Motives of St. Francis). At the time she wrote them, however, they
appeared as newspaper contributions in El Mercurio in Chile." 

Mistral stayed for only a short period in Chile before leaving again for Europe, this time as
secretary of the Latin American section in the League of Nations in Paris. A designated
member of the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, she took charge of the Section of Latin
American Letters. In Paris she became acquainted with many writers and intellectuals,
including those from Latin America who lived in Europe, and many more who visited her
while traveling there. She was the center of attention and the point of contact for many of
those who felt part of a common Latin American continent and culture. She started the
publication of a series of Latin American literary classics in French translation and kept a
busy schedule as an international functionary fully dedicated to her work. She was gaining
friends and acquaintances, and her family provided her with her most cherished of
companions: a nephew she took under her care. She was living in the small village of
Bedarrides, in Provence, when a half brother Mistral did not know existed, son of the
father who had left her, came to her asking for help. He brought with him his four-year-old
son, Juan Miguel Godoy Mendoza, whose Catalan mother had just died. The young man
left the boy with Mistral and disappeared." 

A few months later, in 1929, Mistral received news of the death of her own mother, whom
she had not seen since her last visit to Chile four years before. In a series of eight poems
titled "Muerte de mi madre" (Death of My Mother) she expressed her sadness and
bereavement, as well as the "volteadura de mi alma en una larga crisis religiosa" (upsetting
of my soul in a long religious crisis):
 
Madre mía, en el sueño

ando por paisajes cardenosos:

un monte negro que se contornea

siempre, para alcanzar el otro monte;

y en el que siempre estás tú vagamente,

pero siempre hay otro monte redondo

que circundar, para pagar el paso

al monte de tu gozo y de mi gozo

(Mother, in my dream

I walk purplish landscapes:

a black mountain that sways

trying to reach the other mountain;

and you are always in it vaguely,

but there is always another round mountain

to be walked around to pay the toll

to get to the mountain of your joy and mine).

The dream has all the material quality of most of her preferred images, transformed into a
nightmarish representation of suffering along the way to the final rest. In this poem the
rhymes and rhythm of her previous compositions are absent, as she moves cautiously into
new, freer forms of versification that allow her a more expressive communication of her
sorrow. When still using a well-defined rhythm she depends on the simpler Spanish
assonant rhyme or no rhyme at all. The strongly physical and stark character of her images
remains, however, as in "Nocturno de la consumación" (Nocturne of Consummation):
 
Hace tanto que masco tinieblas

Que la dicha no sé reaprender;

Tanto tiempo que piso las lavas

Que olvidaron vellones los pies;

Tantos años que muerdo el desierto

Que mi patria se llama la Sed

(I have been chewing darkness for such a long time

That I cannot learn my joy again;

I have been walking the lavas so long

That my feet have lost memory of softness;

I have been biting the desert for so many years

That Thirst is the name of my homeland).

In 1930 the government of General Carlos Ibáñez suspended Mistral's retirement benefits,
leaving her without a sustained means of living. The most prestigious newspapers in the
Hispanic world offered her a solution in the form of regular paid contributions. She had to
do more journalistic writing, as she regularly sent her articles to such papers as ABC in
Madrid; La Nación (The Nation) in Buenos Aires; El Tiempo (The Times) in
Bogotá; Repertorio Americano (American Repertoire) in San José, Costa Rica;Puerto
Rico Ilustrado (Illustrated Puerto Rico) in San Juan; and El Mercurio, for which she had
been writing regularly since the 1920s. Also, to offset her economic difficulties, in the
academic year of 1930-1931 she accepted an invitation from Onís at Columbia University
and taught courses in literature and Latin American culture at Barnard College and
Middlebury College. The same year she traveled in the Antilles and Central America, giving
talks and meeting with writers, intellectuals, and an enthusiastic public of readers." 
By 1932 the Chilean government gave her a consular position in Naples, Italy, but Benito
Mussolini's government did not accept her credentials, perhaps because of her clear
opposition to fascism. In 1933, always looking for a source of income, she traveled to
Puerto Rico to teach at the University in Río Piedras. The Puerto Rican legislature named
her an adoptive daughter of the island, and the university gave her a doctorate Honoris
Causa, the first doctorate of many she received from universities in the ensuing years.
Several of her writings deal with Puerto Rico, as she developed a keen appreciation of the
island and its people. In June of the same year she took a consular position in Madrid. As
had happened previously when she lived in Paris, in Madrid she was constantly visited by
writers from Latin America and Spain who found in her a stimulating and influential
intellect. Neruda was also serving as a Chilean diplomat in Spain at the time." 

In spite of all her acquaintances and friendships in Spain, however, Mistral had to leave the
country in a hurry, never to return. In characteristically sincere and unequivocal terms she
had expressed in private some critical opinions of Spain that led to complaints by
Spaniards residing in Chile and, consequently, to the order from the Chilean government
in 1936 to abandon her consular position in Madrid. Mistral was asked to leave Madrid,
but her position was not revoked. She left for Lisbon, angry at the malice of those who she
felt wanted to hurt her and saddened for having to leave on those scandalous terms a
country she had always loved and admired as the land of her ancestors. In 1935 the Chilean
government had given her, at the request of Spanish intellectuals and other admirers, the
specially created position of consul for life, with the prerogative to choose on her own the
city of designation." 

Included in Mistral's many trips was a short visit to her country in 1938, the year she left
the Lisbon consulate. It coincided with the publication in Buenos Aires of Tala (Felling),
her third book of poems. In solidarity with the Spanish Republic she donated her author's
rights for the book to the Spanish children displaced and orphaned by the war.
In TalaMistral includes the poems inspired by the death of her mother, together with a
variety of other compositions that do not linger in sadness but sing of the beauty of the
world and deal with the hopes and dreams of the human heart. These poems are divided
into three sections: "Materias" (Matter), comprising verse about bread, salt, water, air;
"Tierra de Chile" (Land of Chile), and "America." Particularly important in this last group
are two American hymns: "Sol del trópico" (Tropical Sun) and "Cordillera" (Mountain
Range). These poems exemplify Mistral's interest in awakening in her contemporaries a
love for the essences of their American identity." 

Because of the war in Europe, and fearing for her nephew, whose friendship with right-
wing students in Lisbon led her to believe that he might become involved in the fascist
movement, Mistral took the general consular post in Rio de Janeiro. After living for a while
in Niteroi, and wanting to be near nature, Mistral moved to Petropolis in 1941, where she
often visited her neighbors, the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig and his wife. The suicide of the
couple in despair for the developments in Europe caused her much pain; but the worst
suffering came months later when her nephew died of arsenic poisoning the night of 14
August 1943. For Mistral this experience was decisive, and from that date onward she lived
in constant bereavement, unable to find joy in life because of her loss. Although it was
established by the authorities that the eighteen-year-old Juan Miguel had committed
suicide, Mistral never accepted this troubling fact. In her pain she insisted on another
interpretation, that he had been killed by envious Brazilian school companions. She never
brought this interpretation of the facts into her poetry, as if she were aware of the negative
overtones of her saddened view on the racial and cultural tensions at work in the world,
and particularly in Brazil and Latin America, in those years. In "Aniversario"
(Anniversary), a poem in remembrance of Juan Miguel, she makes only a vague reference
to the circumstances of his death:
 
Me asombra el que, en contra el logro

De Muerte y de matadores,

Sigas quedado y erguido,

Caña o junco no cascado

Y que llamado con voz

O con silencio, me acudas

(I am surprised that, contrary to the accomplishment

Of Death and the killers,

You still remain and standing,

Unbroken cane or bulrush

And that, when called by my voice

Or by silence, you come to me).

This poem reflects also the profound change in Mistral's life caused by her nephew's death.
She composed a series of prayers on his behalf and found consolation in the conviction that
Juan Miguel was sometimes at her side in spirit. In her sadness she only could hope for the
time when she herself would die and be with him again. 

Despite her loss, her active life and her writing and travels continued. She was still in Brazil
when she heard in the news on the radio that the Nobel Prize in literature had been
awarded to her. It was 1945, and World War II was recently over; for Mistral, however,
there was no hope or consolation. She traveled to Sweden to be at the ceremony only
because the prize represented recognition of Latin American literature. In the same year
she published a new edition of Ternura that added the children's poems from Tala, thus
becoming the title under which all of her poems devoted to children and school subjects
were collected as one work. As a consequence, she also revised Tala and produced a new,
shorter edition in 1946. Minus the poems from the four original sections of poems for
children, Tala was transformed in this new version into a different, more brooding book
that starkly contrasts with the new edition of Ternura." 

These changes to her previous books represent Mistral's will to distinguish her two
different types of poetry as separate and distinctly opposite in inspiration and objective.
While the first edition of Ternura was the result of a shrewd decision by an editor with
expertise in children's books, Saturnino Calleja in Madrid, these new editions of both
books, revised by Mistral herself, should be interpreted as a more significant manifestation
of her views on her work and the need to organize it accordingly. The same creative
distinction dictated the definitive organization of all her poetic work in the 1958 edition
of Poesías completas (Complete Poems), edited by Margaret Bates under Mistral's
supervision." 

Not wanting to live in Brazil, a country she blamed for the death of her nephew, Mistral left
for Los Angeles in 1946 and soon after moved to Santa Barbara, where she established
herself for a time in a house she bought with the money from the Nobel Prize. Ciro Alegría,
a Peruvian writer who visited her there in 1947, remembers how she divided her time
between work, visits, and caring for her garden. Mistral liked to believe that she was a
woman of the soil, someone in direct and daily contact with the earth. In all her moves
from country to country she chose houses that were in the countryside or surrounded by
flower gardens with an abundance of plants and trees. According to Alegría, "Todo el
panteísmo indio que había en el alma de Gabriela Mistral, asomaba de pronto en la
conversación y de manera neta cuando se ponía en contacto con la naturaleza" (The
American Indian pantheism of Mistral's spirit was visible sometimes in her conversation,
and it was purest when she was in contact with nature)." 

Mistral's love of nature was deeply ingrained from childhood and permeated her work with
unequivocal messages for the protection and care of the environment that preceded
present-day ecological concerns. She had a similar concern for the rights to land use in
Latin America, and for the situation of native peoples, the original owners of the continent.
After two years in California she again was not happy with her place of residence and
decided in 1948 to accept the invitation of the Mexican president to establish her home
there, in the country she loved almost as her own. Her failing health, in particular her heart
problems, made it impossible for her to travel to Mexico City or any other high-altitude
cities, so she settled as consul in Veracruz. The Mexican government gave her land where
she could establish herself for good, but after building a small house she returned to the
United States." 

The beauty and good weather of Italy, a country she particularly enjoyed, attracted her
once more. War was now in the past, and Europe appeared to her again as the cradle of her
own Christian traditions: the arts, literature, and spirituality. For a while in the early 1950s
she established residence in Naples, where she actively fulfilled the duties of Chilean
consul. These duties allowed her to travel in Italy, enjoying a country that was especially
agreeable to her. In part because of her health, however, by 1953 she was back in the
United States. This time she established her residence in Roslyn Harbor, Long Island,
where she spent her last years. While in New York she served as Chilean representative to
the United Nations and was an active member of the Subcommittee on the Status of
Women." 

Besides correcting and re-editing her previous work, and in addition to her regular
contributions to newspapers, Mistral was occupied by two main writing projects in the
years following her nephew's death and the reception of the Nobel Prize. These two
projects--the seemingly unending composition of Poema de Chile, a long narrative poem,
and the completion of her last book of poems, Lagar(Wine Press, 1954)--responded also to
the distinction she made between two kinds of poetic creation. In the first project, which
was never completed, Mistral continued to explore her interest in musical poetry for
children and poetry of nature. Both are used in a long narrative composition that has much
of the charm of a lullaby and a magical story sung by a maternal figure to a child:
 
Vamos caminando juntos

Así, en hermanos de cuento,

Tú echando sombra de niño,

Yo apenas sobra de helecho

(We are walking together,

Thus, like brothers in a story,

Yours is the shadow of a boy,

Mine barely resembles the shadow of a fern).

The delight of a Franciscan attitude of enjoyment in the beauty of nature, with its
magnificent landscapes, simple elements--air, rock, water, fruits--and animals and plants,
is also present in the poem:
 
En pasando el frío grande

Las mariposas han vuelto

Y en el aire, amigo, va

Un dulce estremecimiento

Y las hojas del romero

Baten de su ángel sin peso,

Un ángel garabateado

Como por veras y juego

(As soon as the big cold left

The butterflies returned

And in the air, my friend, is

A sweet tremor

And the rosemary leaves

Sway under their light angel,

An angel all painted

As if it were for real or just for play).

The aging and ailing poet imagines herself in Poema de Chile as a ghost who returns to
her land of origin to visit it for the last time before meeting her creator. Inspired by her
nostalgic memories of the land of her youth that had become idealized in the long years of
self-imposed exile, Mistral tries in this poem to conciliate her regret for having lived half of
her life away from her country with her desire to transcend all human needs and find final
rest and happiness in death and eternal life. In characteristic dualism the poet writes of the
beauty of the world in all of its material sensuality as she hurries on her way to a
transcendental life in a spiritual union with creation. Poema de Chile was published
posthumously in 1967 in an edition prepared by Doris Dana. This edition, based on several
drafts left by Mistral, is an incomplete version." 

Lagar, on the contrary, was published when the author was still alive and constitutes a
complete work in spite of the several unfinished poems left out by Mistral and published
posthumously as Lagar II (1991). A book written in a period of great suffering, Lagar is an
exemplary work of spiritual strength and poetic expressiveness. It follows the line of sad
and complex poetry in the revised editions of Desolación and Tala. In LagarMistral deals
with the subjects that most interested her all of her life, as if she were reviewing and
revising her views and beliefs, her own interpretation of the mystery of human existence.
As in previous books she groups the compositions based on their subject; thus, her poems
about death form two sections--"Luto" (Mourning) and "Nocturnos" (Nocturnes)--and,
together with the poems about the war ("Guerra"), constitute the darkest aspect of the
collection. At the other end of the spectrum are the poems of "Naturaleza" (Nature) and
"Jugarretas" (Playfulness), which continue the same subdivisions found in her previous
book. Other sections address her religious concerns ("Religiosas," Nuns), her view of
herself as a woman in perpetual movement from one place to another ("Vagabundaje,"
Vagabondage), and her different portraits of women--perhaps different aspects of herself--
as mad creatures obsessed by a passion ("Locas mujeres," Crazy Women). Indicative of the
meaning and form of these portraits of madness is, for instance, the first stanza of "La
bailarina" (The Ballerina):
 
La bailarina está ahora danzando

La danza del perder cuanto tenía.

Deja caer todo lo que ella había,

Padres y hermanos, huertos y campiñas,

El rumor de su río, los caminos,

El cuento de su hogar, su propio rostro

Y su nombre y los juegos de su infancia

Como quien deja todo lo que tuvo

Caer de cuello, de seno y de alma

(The ballerina is now dancing

The dance of losing all she had.

She lets fall everything she owned,

Parents and brothers, orchards and fields,

The sound of her river, the roads,

The story of her home, her own face

And her name, and the games of her childhood

As if everything she had she let

Fall from neck, bosom and soul).

In 1951 Mistral had received the Chilean National Prize in literature, but she did not return
to her native country until 1954, when Lagar was published in Santiago. She had not been
back in Chile since 1938, and this last, triumphant visit was brief, since her failing health
did not allow her to travel much within the country. The following years were of
diminished activity, although she continued to write for periodicals, as well as
producing Poema de Chile and other poems. Late in 1956 she was diagnosed with
terminal pancreatic cancer. A few weeks later, in the early hours of 10 January 1957,
Mistral died in a hospital in Hempstead, Long Island. Her last word was "triunfo"
(triumph). After a funeral ceremony at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, the body of
this pacifist woman was flown by military plane to Santiago, where she received the funeral
honors of a national hero. Following her last will, her remains were eventually put to rest
in a simple tomb in Monte Grande, the village of her childhood." 

Her tomb, a minimal rock amid the majestic mountains of her valley of birth, is a place of
pilgrimage for many people who have discovered in her poetry the strength of a religious,
spiritual life dominated by a passionate love for all of creation. Almost half a century after
her death Gabriela Mistral continues to attract the attention of readers and critics alike,
particularly in her country of origin. Her poetic work, more than her prose, maintains its
originality and effectiveness in communicating a personal worldview in many ways
admirable. The strongly spiritual character of her search for a transcendental joy
unavailable in the world contrasts with her love for the materiality of everyday existence.
Her poetic voice communicates these opposing forces in a style that combines musicality
and harshness, spiritual inquietudes and concrete images, hope and despair, and simple,
everyday language and sometimes unnaturally twisted constructions and archaic
vocabulary. In her poetry dominates the emotional tension of the voice, the intensity of a
monologue that might be a song or a prayer, a story or amusing. 
— Santiago Daydí-Tolson, University of Texas at San Antonio.

Couch, R. (Ed.). (2008). Madwomen: the Locas Mujeres poems of Gabriela Mistral. A bilingual
Edition / edited and translated by Randall Couch. Chicago, USA: University of Chicago Press.

Daydí-Tolson, S. (n.d.). Gabriela Mistral. In Poetry Foundation. Retrieved from

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/gabriela-mistral

Le Guin, K. U. (n.d.). Selected poems of Gabriela Mistral. Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. Mumbai,
India: Arun K. Mehta for Vakils Feffer & Simons Pvt. Ltd.