Next in my sequence of educating myself about the work of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who were not white men. Gabriela Mistral (real name Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, 1889-1957) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945, the first Latin American writer to get the award. Originally trained as a teacher, she had become famous as a writer with her second volume of poetry, Desolación, published in 1922, and had also pursued an international career in education which transitions to being a full-time diplomat from 1932 onwards.
Her Nobel speech is short and modest, and the presentation speech from the Swedish Academy is also short but makes interesting parallels with the career of Selma Lagerlöf, also a schoolteacher who hit the big time with her writing.
It’s actually quite difficult to get hold of Mistral’s writing in English, and I had to be satisfied with a 2002 collection of prose and prose-poems edited and translated by Stephen Tapscott. The second paragraph of the third piece, “The Golden Pheasant”, is:
| Gracias al blanco y al negro no hace arder el arrayán sobre el que se coloca. | Thanks to the white part and the dark part, it doesn’t scorch the myrtle tree where it perches. |
I found the pieces in general lyrical, but also sad; a lot of them are religious, rooted in the Catholic tradition which looked eternal in the early twentieth century but is now crumbling away; the emotional energy is rich and intense. None of the passages particularly jumped out at me, but I could see that the whole is at least as great as the sum of tis parts. The observations at the end about writing and politics are also interesting, as she tried to carry the perspectives of Chile to the rest of the world and vice versa. You can get it here. I wish I had been able to find a translation of Desolación though, or of Ursula Le Guin’s tranlation of some of her poems.
Next up in this sequence is Nelly Sachs.
