Selected Prose and Prose-Poems (Texas Pan American Literature in Translation Series)

by Gabriela Mistral, Stephen Tapscott (Contributor)

The first Latin American to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature, the Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) is often characterized as a healing, maternal voice who spoke on behalf of women, indigenous peoples, the disenfranchised, children, and the rural poor. She is that political poet and more: a poet of philosophical meditation, self-consciousness, and daring. This is a book full of surprises and paradoxes. The complexity and structural boldness of these prose-poems, especially the female-erotic prose pieces of her first book, make them an important moment in the history of literary modernism in a tradition that runs from Baudelaire, the North American moderns, and the South American postmodernistas. It's a book that will be eye-opening and informative to the general reader as well as to students of gender studies, cultural studies, literary history, and poetry.

This Spanish-English bilingual volume gathers the most famous and representative prose writings of Gabriela Mistral, which have not been as readily available to English-only readers as her poetry. The pieces are grouped into four sections. "Fables, Elegies, and Things of the Earth" includes fifteen of Mistral's most accessible prose-poems. "Prose and Prose-Poems from Desolacion / Desolation [1922]" presents all the prose from Mistral's first important book. "Lyrical Biographies" are Mistral's poetic meditations on Saint Francis and Sor Juana de la Cruz. "Literary Essays, Journalism, 'Messages'" collects pieces that reveal Mistral's opinions on a wide range of subjects, including the practice of teaching; the writers Alfonso Reyes, Alfonsina Storni, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Pablo Neruda; Mistral's own writing practices; and her social beliefs. Editor/translator Stephen Tapscott rounds out the volume with a chronology of Mistral's life and a brief introduction to her career and prose."

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Collections

262 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga (pseudonym: Gabriela Mistral), a Chilean poet, educator, diplomat, and feminist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945 "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world." Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Indian and European influences.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sand. The sand that has lost our footsteps, even those we didn’t want to lose. Where are my happy steps? And the slow ones, and the fast ones, where? Because sometimes I wanted to gather all my footsteps from the four points of the compass, to stand in the middle among them so that they would dance around me, now that I’m like the broken axle of a wheel. The sand has lost my footprints; it doesn’t remember any of them and can’t return them to me.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

"While you burned, my memories or my dreams began to kindle, and as coals slow down, they'd begin to dim, and then to die down...

Intimacy is what you are: without you the house exists, but it didn't feel like home."
.
'El Brasero' / The Hearth from 'Poemas del hogar' / Poems of the Home from SELECTED PROSE and Prose-Poems by Gabriela Mistral, translated from the Spanish by Stephen Tapscott / 2002 by University of Texas Press

This was my introduction to "Gabriela", (one of) the pre-eminent poets of Chile, beloved and revered teacher, diplomat, activist - and the 1st Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize in 1945.

This volume collects Mistral's various short works: fables, microfictions, prose poetry, lyric biographies (as called in the text), literary criticism, and essays.

Much of the #poetry is grouped into themes - like the excerpt above from "Poems of the Home" where other poems are entitied 'Lamp', or 'Clay Pitcher'. Others include the sensual and evocative "Poems of the Mothers", the mystic and passionate "Poems of Ecstacy". "Motifs of Clay" includes a running conversation with a 'potter' and communicates a sensuous earthiness and groundedness that is hard to describe, but is deeply moving. There's an ecstatic/passionate undercurrent to much of her work in this volume, and likely in her other works too.

Literary criticism and praise for various modernist poets and international writers like Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and Austro-Hungarian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and her Latin American contemporaries like Alfonisina Storni, Pablo Neruda, Alfonso Reyes... The list continues, as does the variety of her topics: teaching methodology, her diplomatic work in Naples, Italy, the plight of indigenous Mexican women, St. Francis and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. She was a passionate and socially conscious woman, one of devotion to her Catholic faith (with many strands of mysticism) and to her culture.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning -- just don't read it in English!

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

i've been wanting to check out mistral for a long time. she writes beautifully about women's experiences. her religious writing i find more opaque, difficult to get into as someone who is outside the church. the translation here seems to be good, but it was difficult to make comparisons because the publisher did not set the book up as facing-page.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's my review on Belletrista: [return][return]http://www.belletrista.com/2010/issue...

[Cat Fithian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful poems from this Chilean poet. I particularly liked her poems on child-bearing. Poignant, earthy and ethereal, simultaneously.

[Jenina · Rating 5 out of 5]

What got me was how she was describing the different types of flours

A masterclass!!!