Guest Author - Jordan McCollum

Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga was born in rural Chile in 1889, but the world would come to know her as Gabriela Mistral. Her mother was a seamstress and her father was the village schoolteacher until he left their family when Mistral was 3. Mistral’s older sister, Emelina Molina, taught Mistral’s school classes.

At 14, Mistral became a school teacher herself to help support her family. The following year, she began to publish her poetry in newspapers, using various pen names. During this period, she began a courtship with a local railroad employee, Romeo Ureta. Tragically, he committed suicide in 1909, which profoundly affected Mistral. Also that year, she settled on the pseudonym Gabriela Mistral.

In 1914, she won first place in a national poetry contest with her first volume of poetry, Sonetos de la muerte (Sonnets of Death). As she continued to rise in poetic prominence, Mistral also found increasing recognition within her chosen field of education. By 1921, when she was 32, she was named director of the most prestigious girls’ school in Chile. The following year, she was invited by the Mexican Minister of Education to help reform Mexico’s school system. She also published Desolacióm (Desolation), the volume of poetry which would earn her international acclaim.

From 1922 on, she spent much of the rest of her life abroad in literary and diplomatic duties. She spent significant amounts of time in France, Italy, Spain and the United States. Her experience in education also influenced her writing and those with whom she came in contact.

Her subsequent works included Ternura (Tenderness, 1924), focused on child-related themes; Tala (Tree felling, 1938), part of which was dedicated to her mother, who died in 1929; Lagar (1954), prompted by the Cold War and her beloved nephew’s 1943 suicide; and Poema de Chile (Poem of Chile, 1967), edited and published posthumously.

In 1945, Gabriela Mistral became the first Latin American woman and only the fifth woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for “her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world,” as the Nobel Foundation would put it. In 1947, the woman whose formal education ended by the time she was twelve but whose education philosophy won her international acclaim was awarded her first advanced degree, an honorary doctorate from Mills College (in Oakland, California).

In 1951, Mistral won Chile’s National Literature Prize. Shed died in 1957 in New York, but had her remains interred in her homeland.

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Read Gabriela Mistral’s emotional, moving works in English in Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin.

To study one of Gabriela Mistral’s recurring themes, try Poemas de las Madres/The Mothers' Poems, with her original Spanish poems side-by-side with the English translations.