No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Gabriela Mistral
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
Extract
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, the internationally known Chilean poetess who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, was born at Vicuña in the province of Coquimbo on April 6, 1889, the daughter of Gerónimo Godoy, a school teacher and minor poet, and Petronila Alcayaga. When Lucila was only three years of age her father abandoned her mother; yet she apparently remembered him with deep filial affection and did not forget the following verses he had written for her:
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1951
References
1 Figueroa, Virgilio, La divina Gabriela (Santiago de Chile, 1933), p. 42.Google Scholar
2 Most of the information here given concerning the life of Gabriela Mistral is taken from Silva, Raul Castro, Estudios sobre Gabriela Mistral (Santiago de Chile, 1935), pp. 3–9;Google Scholar the author is a distinguished Chilean scholar. Material is also taken from Rosenbaum, Sidonia Carmen, Modern Women Poets of Spanish America (New York, 1945), pp. 171–179.Google Scholar
3 Silva, Raul Castro, op. cit., pp. 231–236.Google Scholar
4 Only seven peninsular Spanish poets are represented in Lecturas para Mujeres: Gabriel y Galán, Luis de Góngora, Manuel Machado, Eduardo Marquina, Juan Ramón Jiménez (in prose selections only) and the little-known Juan Maragall and Vicente Medina. Eduardo Marquina is the favorite, with four poems. It is strange that Ricardo León is not represented in either verse or prose.
5 Raul Castro Silva, op. cit., p. 240.
6 Rioseco, Arturo Torres, The Epic of Latin America (New York, 1942), p. 120.Google Scholar
7 Raul Castro Silva, op. cit., pp. 8–9 and note.
8 Tala, edition of 1946, p. 152.
9 See “Alone,” pseudonym of Hernán Díaz Arriera, Panorama de la literatura chilena durante el siglo XX (Santiago de Chile, 1931), p. 70.
10 Raul Castro Silva, op. cit., p. 68.
11 Romera-Navarro, M., Miguel de Unamuno, novelista, poeta, ensayista (Madrid, 1928), pp. 277–284.Google Scholar On pp. 279–280 Romera-Navarro resumes the doctrines of Unamuno in the following words: “Coincide Unamuno con Tolstoy—y con los espiritualistas contemporaneos—en que la ciencia no sabe gran cosa de los problemas de la vida. No la inteligencia, sino el corazón nos dará la solución, nunca total y absoluta, de cada problema vital; y no son los valores intelectuales, sino las virtudes de la acción las que se tienen que cotizar en el mercado humano para aliviar a la humanidad de su cargo de dolor.” The dominion of love and sentiment, which have their source in the heart, over intellect and knowledge, was a doctrine supported by many philosophers and mystics, especially by the Franciscans. The doctrine is still in vogue among the Franciscans. See Menéndez y Pelayo, M., Historia de las ideas estéticas en España, vol. II (Madrid, 1950, Edición Nacional), pp. 112–113.Google Scholar Gabriela Mistral was obviously confirmed in this doctrine and belief through the reading of the poetry of St. Francis (“busqué las Florecillas de Asís, las siempre frescas”).
12 “Himno al árbol” is the first of sixteen of the poems of Gabriela Mistral translated into English by the well-known North American poetess, Alice Stone Blackwell, and published in her book, Some Spanish American Poets (Philadelphia, 1937), pp. 236–278. There are also a few prose selections from Gabriela Mistral translated into English prose.
13 Raul Castro Silva, op. cit., p. 69: “En ‘Los sonetos de la muerte,’ que más de una vez se han señalado como la culminación de la manera poética de la autora y de su inspiración mística, no se cuenta un estado de éxtasis, un transporte del alma transpasada de amor divino, sino una historia humana; la de aquel hombre a quien amó la poetisa y que bajó ‘sin fatiga a dormir,’ es decir, que se suicidó. Ni pide para él piedad o perdón, sino anuncia meramente que a su cadáver le sacará del ‘nicho helado’ para ponerle en ‘la tierra humilde y soleada.’ Al final la autora cuenta a Dios lo que ocurrió en los días inmediatamente anteriores al suicidio de su amante, y expone los motivos por los cuales ella, ella misma, pidió que muriera. Persuadida de la justicia de su causa, termina:
Tú que vas a juzgarme, lo comprendes, Señor!”
See also pp. 121–125, where Raul Castro Silva discusses again “Los sonetos de la muerte.” As a matter of fact, in “El ruego” the poetess did ask forgiveness for the suicide. See also Sidonia Carmen Rosenbaum, op. cit., p. 177.
14 For further discussion see Raul Castro Silva, op. cit., pp. 69–70 and 125–128.
15 Raul Castro Silva, pp. 100–110.
16 For a brief and excellent analysis of Tala, its artistic maturity as compared with Desolación, its choice of language and style and a discussion of its spirit of serenity and resignation, see Sidonia Carmen Rosenbaum, op. cit., pp. 195–203. Miss Rosenbaum should have stated, however, that apparently all the poems of Tala were composed after the religious crisis mentioned on p. 152 of Tala had passed.
17 Interesting notes on nature in the poems of our poetess are given in Raul Castro Silva, op. cit., pp. 83–88, but they need a little revising in view of the extraordinarily beautiful poems in Tala; they appeared after the publication of the studies made by Castro Silva.
18 Our definition of modernismo is very brief and does not do justice to the artistic contribution of Rubén Darío and his school. For a more detailed discussion see Arturo Torres Rioseco, op. cit., pp. 86–100.