Poet, diplomat, and teacher, born in Vicuña, C Chile. A teacher from the age of 15, she taught at Columbia University, Vassar College, and in Puerto Rico, and combined her writing with a career as a diplomat and cultural minister. She established herself as a poet with Sonetos de la muerte (1914, Sonnets of Death), taking her name from Gabriele d'Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral. Her poem Dolor from the collection Desolación (1922, Desolation) is based on the suicide of her lover. She never married, and her work is inspired by a Romantic preoccupation with sorrow and death. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945.
Gabriela Mistral (April 7, 1889 – January 10, 1957) was the pseudonym of Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet, educator, diplomat and feminist who was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1945.
Life
Gabriela Mistral was born in Vicuña, where she attended primary and secondary school.
In 1904 she published some early poems, such as Ensoñaciones, Carta Íntima (Intimate Letter) and Junto al Mar, in the local newspaper El Coquimbo de La Serena, using various pseudonyms.
In 1906, while working as a teacher, she met Romeo Ureta, a railway worker, who killed himself in 1909. writing about his suicide led the poet to consider death and life more broadly than previous generations of Latin American poets.
Formal recognition came on December 12, 1914, when she was awarded first prize in a national literary contest Juegos Florales in Santiago, with the work Sonetos de la Muerte (Sonnets of Death).
In 1922 she was invited to Mexico by that country's Minister of Education, as part of a plan to reform libraries and schools, to start a national education system. A year later she published Lecturas para Mujeres (Readings for Women), a text in prose and verse that celebrates motherhood, childhood education, and nationalism.
Back in Chile, she was given the academic title of Spanish Professor by the University of Chile.
Her international stature led to lectures first in the United States and then in Europe.
The following year she returned to Latin America and toured Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.
She lived primarily in France and Italy between 1925 and 1934.
In common with many Latin American artists and intellectuals, Mistral served as a Chilean consul from 1932 until her death, working in Naples, Madrid, Petrópolis, Nice, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Veracruz, Mexico, Rapallo and Naples, Italy, and New York.
Tala appeared in 1938, published in Buenos Aires with the help of longtime friend and correspondent Victoria Ocampo.
In August 14, 1943 her 17-year-old nephew Juan Miguel killed himself. The grief of this death, as well as her responses to tensions of the Cold War in Europe and the Americas, are the subject of the last volume of poetry published in her lifetime, Lagar, which appeared in 1954. A final volume of poetry, Poema de Chile, was edited posthumously by her friend Doris Dana, and published in 1967. Poema de Chile describes the poet's return to Chile after death, in the company of an Indian boy from the Atacama desert, and an Andean deer, the huemul.
In November 15, 1945, she became the first Latin American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Poor health eventually slowed her traveling.
Some of her best known poems include: Piececitos de Niño, Balada, Todas Íbamos a ser Reinas, La Oración de la Maestra, El Ángel Guardián, Decálogo del Artista and La Flor del Aire.
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