Gabriela Mistral : selected poems / translated by Paul Burns and Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres ; with an introduction by Paul Burns.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mistral, Gabriela, 1889-1957.

Contributor:

Burns, Paul, 1934-

Ortiz-Carboneres, Salvador.

Series:

Aris & Phillips Hispanic classics

Standardized Title:

Selections.

Language:

English

Spanish

Subjects (All):

Mistral, Gabriela, 1889-1957--Translations into English.

Mistral, Gabriela.

Mistral, Gabriela, 1889-1957.

Genre:

Poetry.

Physical Description:

viii, 168 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxbow Books, 2006.

Language Note:

Translated from the Spanish.

Summary:

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1967), Chile's 'other' great poet of the twentieth century, is little known outside the Spanish-speaking world, and unlike Pablo Neruda has not been extensively translated into English. She deserves better, particularly as the first Latin American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1945), and this selection of her poetry is designed to introduce her to an English-speaking public.

Born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga in the Elqui valley in the 'little north' of Chile, she became a schoolteacher at the age of fifteen and went on to become an educator of international renown, an architect of educational reform in Mexico, and a cultural administrator at the League of Nations. She began publishing prose and verse pieces in newspapers and reviews at about the same age. Four major collections of her poems were published in her lifetime: Desolacion (Desolation) in 1922, Ternura (Tenderness) in 1924, Tala (Felling) in 1938, and Lagar (Wine Press) in 1954, followed by Poema de Chile published after her death. Poems from each of these five collections are included here.

The landscape and people of her native Chile are a constant theme in her work, even though she lived most of her adult life away from Chile, largely as a consul - unpaid for many years - in Europe, Brazil, and the U.S.A., where she died. Her great love of children, who were the main preoccupation of her life and whom she both understood and respected; motherhood, and her lack of it; loss of people she loved; religious faith, tested and at times unorthodox, are other abiding themes. Her language is direct, passionate, rooted in local usage. The whole of her work, in prose as well as in verse, is a reflection of the absolute integrity of her life.

Contents:

I Desolation

Rodin's The Thinker 31

For the Hebrew People 33

The Lone Child 37

Ballad 39

The Sonnets of Death 41

Prayer 45

The Bones of the Dead 49

Patagonian Landscapes 51

To the Clouds 57

Autumn 59

Summit 63

II Tenderness

Rocking 67

Discovery 69

Mexican Child 71

Chilean Land 75

Fear 77

The Rat 79

The Air 81

Mountain 83

Larks 85

The Earth 87

III Felling

Flight 91

The Rose 95

The Foreigner 97

Drinking 99

We were All going to be Queens 103

Things 109

Catalonian Women 115

IV Wine Press

The Other 119

The Fall of Europe 123

Hospital 127

Helpers 131

The Jewish Refugee 133

Daybreak; Morning; Evening; Night 135

The Last Tree 139

V Poem of Chile

Waking up 145

My Mountains 147

Patch of Clover 149

Valparaiso 151

Poplar Groves 153

Talcahuano 155

Apple trees 157

Ferns 161

Southern Islands 165.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 166-168).

ISBN:

0856687634

0856687642

OCLC:

70910010

Publisher Number:

9780856687631

9780856687648