Gabriela Mistral

In the process of researching Blanca’s life in Chile, my eyes were awakened to a fascinating country that has – sadly – received very little attention in North America. Though I grew up in California, I never knew that Chile had a devastating earthquake in 1906 a few months after our San Francisco quake. The big businesses who exploited the mineral resources for their own profits certainly knew where Chile is, but there is more to a country than what you can get out of it.

Gabriela Mistral is one of my discoveries. She was a contemporary of Blanca de Saulles, born a couple years earlier and died about 10 years later, but the 2 women cannot be more different. Gabriela (her pen name) is the first Latin American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature ironically because she did not consider herself primarily a poet. She came from humble beginnings (unlike Blanca) and worked as a schoolteacher in a small village at the foot of the Andes mountains. Her clear, passionate voice brought her public recognition as a journalist and a lecturer. She traveled to Europe and advocated for the rights of impoverished children, was on the ground floor of UNICEF, and survived the horrors of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. She dedicated one of her books to the orphaned children displaced by the war.

At the end of her life, she settled outside New York City on Long Island in the small harbor town of Roslyn – the same town where Blanca lived in the year she killed her ex-husband.

Gabriela Mistral dealt with her grief and outrage by writing poems about the pain of loss and death, as well as the joy of life illustrated by the beauty of nature. She published 4 books of poetry during her lifetime, and after her death in 1957 from cancer, those who loved and admired her worked on translations to make her poems accessible to an English speaking audience (like me.)

Poetry is the hardest to translate into other languages because so much depends on the cadence, the sound, the structure of each word that is absolutely lost. I have fallen in love with a particular volume, “Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, a bilingual edition translated and edited by Doris Dana,” because it has each original Spanish poem side by side with the English version.

Begging forgiveness, I’d like to reproduce one poem here. I encourage anyone who thinks they know what poetry is to go and find more publications of Gabriela’s work. Even in translation, she moves me to tears.

Una Palabra (One Word)

(Spanish – original)

Yo tengo una palabra en la garganta
y no la suelto, y no me libro de ella
aunque me empuje su empellon de sangre.
Si la soltase, quema el pasto vivo,
sangra al cordero, hace caer al pajaro.

Tengo que desprenderla de mi lengua,
hallar un agujero de castors
o sepultarla con cales y cales
porque no guarde como el alma el vuelvo.

No quiero dar senales de que vivo
mientras que por mi sangre vaya y venga
y suba y baje por mi loco aliento.
Aunque mi padre Job la dijo, ardiendo,
no quiero darle, no, mi pobre boca
porque no ruede y la hallen las mujeres
que van al rio, y se enrede a sus trenzas
o al pobre matorral tuerza y abrase.

Yo quiero echarle violentas semillas
que en una noche la cubran y ahoguen
sin dejar de ella el cisco de una silaba.
O rompermela asi, como a la vibora
que por mitad se parte con los dientes.

Y volver a mi casa, entrar, dormirme,
cortada de ella, rebanada de ella,
y despertar despues de dos mil dias
recien nacida de sueno y olvido.

Sin saber mas que tuve una palabra
de yodo y piedra-alumbre entre los labios
ni saber acordarme de una noche,
de una morada en pais extranjero,
de la celada y el rayo a la puerta
y de mi carne marchando sin su alma!

(English)

I have in my throat one word
that I cannot speak, will not free
though its thrust of blood pounds me.
If I voiced it, it would scorch the living grass,
bleed the lamb, fell the bird.

I have to cut it from my tongue,
find a beaver’s hole,
or bury it beneath lime and more quicklime
lest, soul-like, it break free.

I wish to give no sign of what I live
as this word courses through my blood, ebbs and flows,
rises, falls with each mad breath.
Though Job, my father, burning, spoke it,
I will not give it utterance
lest it roll vagrant
and be found by river women,
twist itself in their braids,
or mangle and blaze the poor thicket.

I wish to throw seeds so violent
they burst and smother it in one night
leaving not even a syllable’s trace.
Or rip it from myself
with the serpent’s severing tooth.

And return to my house, enter and sleep,
torn from it, sliced from it;
wake after two thousand days
newly born out of sleep and oblivion.

Never again to remember the word between my lips,
that word of iodine and alum stone,
or ever again that one night,
the ambush in a foreign land,
the lightning bolt at the door
and my flesh abroad with no soul.