Chilean Poet Gabriela Mistral
First South American Writer to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature
Apr 10, 2007
Gabriela Mistral is the pseudonym of Lucila Godoy de Alcayaga. She was a Chilean poet, teacher, educator, diplomat, cultural minister, and the first Latin American to win the 1945 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her reputation as a poet was established when she won the Chilean prize for Sonetos de la Muerte (Sonnets of Death, 1914), love poems in memory of the dead.
Gabriela Mistral combined a busy life – first as a teacher, then as a diplomat, and as a poet, with a gift for poetry inspired by religious sentiments with intense lyricism. Her central themes are love, childhood, motherhood, nature, sorrow, death and recovery.
Early Years
Mistral was born April 7, 1889 in Vicuna, Chile. She used the pen name Gabriela Mistral only for her poetry – something she took from the French poet Frédéric Mistral and the Italian writer Gabriele d'Annunzio. Her parents came from families of mixed Basque and Indian heritage. Her father, a teacher, abandoned them when she was three years old. She attended the local primary and secondary schools. At 16, she started supporting herself and her mother by working as a teacher's aide.
Mistral's Writing Influence. Career as Educator and Writer
The suicide of her fiancé Romelio Ureta in 1909 left painful personal memories. Several of her earlier writings were written for him, including her winning poetry Sonetos de la muerte ('Sonnets of Death') at Santiago.
The following year, she passed the test at the Santiago Normal School. She started working as a teacher in several schools until 1922, the year she published her second collection of poems under the title Desolación (Desolation), which catapulted her immediate international acclaim. The main themes were Christian faith and death, the poet expressing faith in a forgiving God in the final sonnet.
Incidentally, in one of the schools she taught, in Temuco, she met then 16 years old Pablo Neruda, later to become the most widely read of the Spanish American poets. Neruda introduced her to the works of European poets.
Her meteoric rise as a teacher and educator was due to her publications directed at diverse audience in the academe, and also with fellow poets. Likewise a gifted teacher, she became an important figure in Chile's education system. Her teaching career also led her to write a great deal of work for children, notably the songs in Ternura (1924), much of her children's writing translated in Crickets and Frogs (1972).
Travels and Visiting Professor
She travelled in Mexico, the United States and Europe to study teaching methods and became a visiting professor at several universities, including Columbia University, Vassar and University of Puerto Rico.
Diplomat and Cultural Minister
Later in life, she became a diplomat and cultural minister in the some of the world's capitals during the turbulent years of the 20th century, including World War II and the beginning of the Cold War in Europe. She was formerly consul at Madrid, Brazil, Portugal and the USA. But in contrast to the horrors of war, her poetry is full of warmth and emotion.
Mistral's Works Translated into Different Languages
Mistral wrote in her native tongue, Spanish. She became one of the most translated of all South American writers. Her work has appeared in English, French, German, Italian and Swedish. American poet Langston Hughes translated a selection of her verses published following her death.
She never married but adopted a child who later died. Mistral died of cancer on January 10, 1957.
Mistral's Books include
- Desolatión (1922)
- Tenderness (1924)
- Poems (1936)
- Felling (1938)
Link
Sources:
Dictionary of women's Biography, edited by Jennifer Uglow (1999)
Larousse Dictionary of Writers, Edited by Rosemary Groing (1994)
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