Selected Poems

Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and her works are among the finest in all contemporary poetry. She is loved and honored throughout the world as one of the great humanistic voices of our time. This bilingual edition of selected poems was translated and edited by Doris Dana, a close personal friend with whom Gabriela lived and worked with prior to her death in 1957. These translations give a profound insight into the original poetry of this greatest of contemporary Latin American women. They were selected from her four major works ‘Desolación', ‘Ternura', ‘Tala', and ‘Lagar’. ‘Desolación’ reflects the lonely, majestic landscapes of Gabriela’s native Chile, as well as her early years as a rural schoolteacher in the high Andean villages of the valley of Elqui. This book is passionate, personal, subjective; the pervading tone is tragic. In ‘Ternura’, Gabriela’s deep sense of the maternal is evident, as is her dedication to a lifelong vocation of teaching. With this book she created the first authentic body of children’s literature in Latin America. In ‘Tala’, there is a continuity of the themes found in the earlier works—death, grief, children, nature, religious faith, and a new heightened sense of hope, an ecstatic encounter with familiar everyday things, the mystery of the imponderable world of the spirit. ‘Lagar’ was Gabriela’s last published book. In it she cried out against persecution, racial hatred, war, genocide—crimes perpetrated by man against his brother. She was quick to defend all who suffer injustice, and attentive to all who suffer pain. For the people who had no voice, Gabriela became their voice. The woodcuts in this volume were created especially for it by the Uruguayan artist Antonio Frasconi.