Gabriela Mistral

From Philosopedia

Gabriela Mistral (7 April 1889 - 10 Jan 1957)

Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga, known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral, was born in Vicuña, Chile. The poet, educator, diplomat, and feminist was born to Petronila Alcayaga (who died in 1929) and Juan Gerónimo Godoy Villanueva (who abandoned the family in 1903). Her pen name was derived from combining names of poets that she liked, Gabriele D'Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral and hinted at her bisexuality.

In 1906, she fell in love with Romelio Ureta, a railway worker, who was a suicide over a debt in 1909. Writing about his suicide affected her views, and although she had passionate friendships Mistral was secretive about her homosexuality.

She combined writing with a a career as a cultural minister and diplomat, working from 1926 to 1932 while she lived in France and Italy for the League for Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations. Also she taught in the United States at Columbia University's Barnard College, as well as at Middlebury, Vassar, and the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras. She was consul working in Naples, Madrid, Lisbon, Nice, Petrópolis, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Veracuz, Rapallo, Naples, and New York.

Her reputation as a poet was established in 1914 when she won a prize for three Sonnets of Death. Mistral was one of the first to write about Pablo Neruda's work who, she said, liked her work although in Chile her writing received mixed reviews. Some have thought of her as a fusty spinster who wrote poems for and about children.

John Oliver Simon claims that when a child, Mistral was molested and was stoned by schoolmates when she denied an allegation of theft. But when 16, her poems were published in La Serena, the provincial capital, under various pseudonyms: Alguien. Soledad. Alma. Someone. Loneliness. Soul. In Romelio's memory, she wrote a sonnet:

Out of the frozen niche where men have put you

I’ll bring you down to the humble, sunny earth.

Men will not know that I shall sleep there with you

that we must dream upon a self–same pillow.

I’ll lay you down in the sunny earth with a

sweetness of mothering for a sleeping child,

and the earth must turn to softness like a cradle

to touch your body of a wounded child.

Then I’ll go scattering earth and dust of roses,

and in the light blue whirlwind of the moon

slight jealous glances will be held prisoner.

I’ll go away singing my lovely vengeance

for to that hidden depth no other woman

will go down to fight me over your fistful of bones.

In 1945, Mistral became the first Latin American, and the fifth woman, to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Although Mistral has been labeled a "Jewish Catholic", her philosophic stance indicates she was not an active member of any organized religion.

Mistral died of cancer in Hempstead, New York.

Books

Sonetos de la muerte (1914, poetry, trans. Sonnets of Death)

Desolación (1922, poetry, trans. Despair)

Ternura(1924, poetry, enlarged 1945, trans. Tenderness)

Lecturas para mujeres (1924, essays)

Tala (1938, poetry)

Poemas de la madre (1950, poetry)

Lagar (1954, poetry, trans. The Wine Press)

Epistolario (1957, poetry)

Recados: Contando a Chile (1957, poetry)

Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (1957, anthology, introduction by Langston Hughes)

Poesías completas (1958, anthology)