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Selected Poems Of Gabriela Mistral translated by Ursula K LeGuin
(University Of New Mexico Press, $34.95) 431pp.
Available from www.unmpress.com

Lucila Goday Alcayaga was born on April 7th 1889, and died on the 10th of January 1957. She is an unknown name to most people. Even in literary circles a name may have slipped the net of most readers experience, yet at her death, the Government of the day in her country, Chile, declared three days of national mourning.

   In 1960, when her body was moved to lie in state in the town of her birth ten thousand fellow citizens attended its arrival and final resting place. So are the famous feted in their own time, yet so can the famous be equally forgotten, or even not heard of, by the world at large.
 
   So who was this earth mother, this poet, this winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945? Who was this teacher, diplomat, ambassador, lover of youth, who was much honoured in Paris, Florence, Cuba, Mexico, and New Orleans, in many places, on many occasions, in ‘her’ Latin America? Who was this writer in exile and world traveller who shuttled back and forth between the Americas and Europe between 1922 and 1956? This Consul and Special Envoy?
 
   Perhaps some readers have already warmed to a few clues, perhaps sufficient to recall the name by which she was really known, a name which she chose for herself and her poetry and a name now revered in the country of her birth. That name by which she is both remembered and honoured was Gabriela Mistral, the Angel Of The Mountain Wind, from the ‘beautiful land on the edge of the world’.
 
   If you still profess to have no knowledge of her then I urge you to visit her work. If possible, even travel to that incredible country which provided so much of the inspiration for her writing, that same ‘Thin Country’, the one through which intrepid journalist Sara Wheeler journeyed before producing her own Travels In A Thin Country in 1994. I have made it both a duty and a pleasure to search out the work of La Gabriela, which I first encountered via the Rough Guide to her most amazing of homelands, 3000 miles long 150 miles wide...Chile.
 
   After all, no one should ignore a poet of Mistral’s stature and achievment, or fail to act on the promptings of fellow explorers to her truly remarkable country. Certainly no-one should neglect the praise of her by the even more famous and feted Chilean Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda, who, incidentally, also changed his name for the sake of his poetry, and who writes of their shared homeland:

Noche, nieve, y arena hacen la forma de mi delgada patria, todo el silencio esta en su larga linea

(Night, snow and sand make up the form of my thin country, all silence lies in its long line) 

                              Pablo Neruda: Descubridores de Chile, 1950.
 
   Neruda (then Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalta) met La Cabriela in 1920. She was 31, he only 16. She was the principal of Temuco Girls’ High School, he a schoolboy in the same town. He recounts these encounters in his Memoirs of 1972:

   Around this time a tall lady who wore long, long, dresses and flat shoes came to Temuco…from the southernmost city, Punta Arenas. From Magellan’s snows. Her name was Gabriela Mistral…I used to watch her passing…I was scared of her…
  
   But, taken to meet her several times he was soon under her spell, although always in awe:
 
   I found her very gracious. In her dark face, as lovely as an Indian pitcher, her very white teeth flashed in a full and generous smile…I was too young to be her friend, too taken up with myself, too shy, but I always went away with books which she gave me…Russian novels…with dark and terrifying visions of the world…they are with me still.
 
   Much more recently travel writer Sara Wheeler describes visiting La Gabriela’s tomb in the small town of Montegrande in the Elqui Valley. She relates that many thought the writer quite eccentric both as a woman and a poet. “Her work has never found its translator”, she comments ruefully. American critic Margaret J Bates makes the same point: “she has created a plant that does not grow”, she writes.

   For this reason we must all be indebted to her fellow writer Ursula K LeGuin who since 2003 has made available a Gabriela Mistral Selected Poems, a 407 page volume from the University Of New Mexico Press. With parallel Spanish and English text, LeGuin confounds both of the negatives previously intimated. This new volume, in five sections, covers poems from Desolacion, Ternura, Tala, Lagar and Poema de Chile with an astute introduction from V.B. Price and a lucid, brief chronology of Mistral’s life.
 
   The ardent urgent voice of the poet streams out from the pages and the selection ensures that the causes and motivations which drove La Gabriela’s poetry are fully explored. At the same time LeGuin ensures for her readers a remarkable awareness of the poet’s spiritual commitment to liberty and civilisation through education, especially in her lifetime’s concern for the rights of children. But it is the “burning blade” of poetry and her involvement with it which comes across most strongly:
 
     Tengo ha veinte anos en la carne hundido
     - y es caliente el punal -
     un verso enorme, un verso con cimeras
     de pleamar…

     (that burning blade deep In her flesh
     twenty years like a high tide)

and in the last stanza of the same poem, El Suplicio (Torture), poetry becomes:

     …that terrible gift...
     may he who thrust it into me have mercy on my soul…

   With themes of ‘life, grief, nature, cradle songs, Round Dances, The Raving Woman’, the lifeblood of Mistral’s work is made plain. LeGuin’s selection provides a roller-coaster ride through the poet’s work and life, all along the thin length of her birth country with its earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanoes, mountains, fjords, forests, its deserts of sand, ice and snow, its raging winds and calm valleys, with opening lines like:
 
     How do they sleep Lord…suicides?
 
     In my mouth everything acquires
     a lasting taste of tears…
 
     Old Woman census-taker
     Death the crafty lady
     When you’re going along
     Don’t find my baby…
 
   We sense all the emotion in the poet’s work. In other finely crafted poems of children and their play we tread her dancing lines. We are able to share her love for family and friends and most of all her frequent longing for the land from which, by the very nature of her life, she was so often working in imposed exile. She also reveals to us her thanks for having been granted, by that life, her own voice in poetry:
 
     I thank you for the vehement thrush
 
   Finally, in Ballad Of My Name, we are allowed to glimpse her innermost being:

     My name, the name I lost
     is it happy? Where does it live?
     …but they tell me it walks
 
     por las quiebras de mi montana
     tarde a la tarde silencio
     y sin mi cuerpo y vuelto mi alma
 
     (without my body having turned into my soul)

   So if you’ve only ever heard of Pablo Neruda, or if you have never read any Chilean writers at all, I urge you to visit both their lines and their land. That ‘thin country’, their beautiful ‘land on the edge of the world’, awaits your steps. As the poet herself writes in La Huella (The Footprint), from her collection Lagar (The Winepress):

     Y signe hasta el termino del mundo la huella!
     (and the footprints go on to the end of the world)
 
2007 will mark the 50th anniversary of La Gabriela’s death. No doubt her homeland will both remember and honour her still further then. The world of poetry has a duty to do so too.