Gabriela Mistral

Chilean poet, educator, and diplomat.

• Born: April 7, 1889
• Place of birth: Vicuña, Chile
• Died: January 10, 1957
• Place of death: Hempstead, New York

Biography

It is speculated that Lucila Godoy Alcayaga took her pen name, Gabriela Mistral, from the names of two earlier poets, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral. “Gabriela” also recalls the angel Gabriel and “Mistral,” the Mediterranean wind. Spiritual and natural forces pervade her work, which generally displays the virtues of simplicity and clarity. Long considered a leading poet of Latin America, she gained wider international recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945.

Mistral grew up in Montegrande, a small village in northern Chile. Her father, Juan Jerónimo Godoy Villanueva, was a schoolteacher who was also known locally as a writer and singer of songs. He abandoned the family when Mistral was three years old. Her mother, Petrolina Alcayaga Rojas, was a seamstress. She also had an older half sister, Emelina Molina Alcayaga, from her mother's first marriage. Emelina was also a schoolteacher, and she taught at the elementary school that Mistral attended.

Mistral thought of herself primarily as a teacher rather than a poet. Her teaching career began at the age of fifteen, when she began working as a teacher's assistant to supplement her mother and sister's earnings. In late 1904, after a year of teaching, Mistral applied to a teacher's training school but was rejected for her allegedly pagan attitude toward nature. Dismayed by the rejection, she nevertheless continued teaching in the village of La Cantera and worked as school staff in the city of La Serena, where her lack of credentials prevented her from holding a teaching position. At the school in La Serena, she made friends with Fidelia Valdez Pereira, a teacher about twenty years older than her. In 1910, at Valdez's urging, Mistral took a special credentialing exam at the Instituto Pedagógico in Santiago and passed, earning a certificate that enabled her to teach at the liceo (secondary school) level.

Mistral began teaching in secondary schools. For a short time she was the mentor of young Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, who adopted the pen name of Pablo Neruda and was in 1971 the second Chilean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1911 Mistral received the post of inspector general and professor of Castilian at the Liceo de Niñas in Antofagasta, where Valdez was also hired as principal and professor of history and geography. A year later she was appointed inspector and professor of Castilian at the Liceo de los Andes, where she remained for six years.

By that time she had achieved some fame for her “sonetos de la muerte” (“sonnets of death,” appearing in Desolación, 1922), which had won first prize in a national contest. The sonnets grew out of her love for a railroad worker, Romelio Ureta. Their love did not end happily; he left her and later shot himself fatally over a financial debt. The sonnets include such imagery as the poet’s taking and walking with the urn containing her love’s ashes, feeling a sense of contentment because no woman now contends with her for him. In another sonnet she asks Christ to forgive the suicide and asserts that only Christ can judge her. Desolación was first published in the United States, appropriately at the initiative of students who read her poetry in the classroom.

Mistral loved children, but she never married or had any of her own, although she adopted a nephew, Juan Miguel Godoy. Ternura: Canciones de niños (Tenderness: Songs for children, 1924) in particular is devoted to the spiritual bond between mother and child and the spiritual greatness of motherhood and childhood. It contains numerous poems that may also be considered lullabies or children’s poems. Children throughout Latin America have sung Mistral’s poems. Ternura also was published at the urging of readers of Mistral’s poetry; Mistral, modest about her art, favored publishing in periodicals.

From 1922 to 1924, already famous as a poet and educator, Mistral was in Mexico, at the invitation of the Mexican government, to assist in the reorganization and development of libraries and schools. She also lectured there on Latin American literature. After travel in Europe, she returned to her native Chile to receive many honors.

As is common in South American culture, Mistral, as a leading author, was given a series of diplomatic posts abroad. One of her assignments was as the Chilean delegate to the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. She also served in her country’s consular service at a number of cities, including Madrid, Lisbon, Genoa, and Nice. In addition, she taught for some months in the United States, at Barnard College and at Middlebury College.

By the time Mistral received the Nobel Prize, her fame had been spread by way of the many translations of her work into other languages. The proceeds from Tala (Felling of trees, 1938), which contains poems honoring the natural beauty of her native region in Chile, were donated to aid children who were left homeless by the Spanish Civil War.

From 1946 to 1948 Mistral lived in Santa Barbara, California. Then, at the invitation of Mexican president Miguel Alemán Valdés, she lived for two years in Mexico. In the early 1950s she served as the Chilean consul at Naples. She had, by a special law, become a “lifetime consul” for her native country wherever she chose to live. Lagar (Winepress, 1954) expresses some of the grief she felt after the suicides of her friends, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his wife, and of her adopted son. She remained in the United States from 1953 until her death in January 1957 from pancreatic cancer.

Author Works

Poetry:

Desolación, 1922

Lecturas para mujeres, 1923 (with others; includes prose)

Ternura: Canciones de niños, 1924, enlarged 1945

Tala, 1938

Antología: Selección de Gabriela Mistral, 1941

Los sonetos de la muerte y otros poemas elegíacos, 1952

Lagar, 1954

Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, 1957 (Langston Hughes, translator)

Poesías completas, 1958 (Margaret Bates, editor)

Poema de Chile, 1967

Lagar II, 1991

A Gabriela Mistral Reader, 1993 (Maria Giachetti, translator; Marjorie Agosín, editor)

Nonfiction:

Croquis mexicanos: Gabriela Mistral en México, 1957 (Alfonso Calderón, editor)

Recados: Contando a Chile, 1957 (Alfonso M. Escudero, editor)

Bibliography

Arce de Vázquez, Margot. Gabriela Mistral, the Poet and Her Work. Translated by Helene Masslo Anderson, New York UP, 1964. Biography and critical study of Mistral and her work. Includes bibliographical references.

Castleman, William J. Beauty and the Mission of the Teacher: The Life of Gabriela Mistral of Chile, Teacher, Poetess, Friend of the Helpless, Nobel Laureate. Exposition Press, 1982. A biography of Mistral and her life as a teacher, poet, and diplomat. Includes a bibliography of her writing.

Marchant, Elizabeth A. Critical Acts: Latin American Women and Cultural Criticism. UP of Florida, 1999. A reevaluation of Latin American women writers during the first half of the twentieth century that recognizes their overlooked contributions to the public sphere. Marchant reconsiders some representative poems, focusing on the dichotomy between Mistral’s theories and practices and the female intellectual’s alienation from the public sphere. While Mistral refused a traditional societal role for herself, she advocated it for her readership.

Taylor, Martin C. Gabriela Mistral's Struggle with God and Man: A Biographical and Critical Study of the Chilean Poet. McFarland, 2012. A volume of combined biography and critical evaluation, organized thematically into "the secular" and "the sacred."