Craft: Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) was born Lucilla Godoy Alcayaga in the Elqui Valley, Chile. She was a major figure in Chilean poetry: she won the first Nobel Prize from Latin America in 1945 and is thus far still the only Latin American woman to have won it. She published about 400 poems in her lifetime. 

Mistral described herself as an “Incan/Basque poet from Chile.” She was one of the founders of UNICEF, and spent her life in the struggle for workers’ rights, for women’s rights, and for children’s rights. Her poems are committed to social justice, but have a passionate realism tempered with the universal alienation of not understanding death.

Mistral: “I give you back your name and land / to melt away oblivion, / Before I send you off to sleep / and to dream your dream and mine.”

Mistral on the Chilean 5,000-peso note (Where is our Melville ten? Our Dickinson dime?)

Her poems also remain physical: speech vibrating through air, a body moving through space, the rhythm of the heart and lungs to the sounds words actually make. Her selected poems in translation, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, really convey the thrust and potency of the originals.