In 1945, Gabriela Mistral became the first Latin American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. I recently picked up Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, a collection of her work published in 2002. Works in the book appear both in the original Spanish and translated into English by Stephen Tapscott. I wished the book had dated the work. I would have been interested in learning when in her life each piece was written and what else was being written around the same time.
Mistral is best known for her poetry, and it probably would have made the most sense for me to pick up a collection of her poetry, but this was the only Mistral the public library had available, so I went for it. My first impressions were of sensual writing about ordinary things. The first few pieces in the book are short prose-poems about animals, bread, glass, and sand. Pregnancy and motherhood are strong motifs. The way she wrote about pregnancy especially, I was surprised that she had no biological children, though she did adopt a nephew who died in his teens. (One of the reasons I wish the book dated the work was to put together where some of them fit into those events in her life.)
My impression was that Mistral’s work deliberately highlights the female and feminine, but as the translator’s note says, it’s probably not quite right to try to project it onto modern American feminism. There were definitely places that made me feel uncomfortable, such as the writing she did about teaching that has some advice about equality and respect in the classroom that I would very much take to heart tossed together with admonitions about women teachers dressing too immodestly. I wonder how she would feel about that if she were alive today.
The poem (or prose-poem) that struck me the most began “All the beauty of the Earth can be a bandage for your wound.” In the poem, the beauty of the Earth is natural beauty, but when I read it I was immediately transported back about two weeks prior when I had just been in a car accident and was a bit shaken up, physically and emotionally. (Don’t worry; everyone involved was more or less fine. I was the least fine, and I was able to walk about a mile to the clinic I went to for treatment a few hours after it happened.) Two days after the accident, I went to a rehearsal for a small singing ensemble, and it was incredible how tangibly I felt like the music was healing me.
Mistral’s line, beauty as bandage, really resonates with me. It is a beautiful idea, and it makes me want to seek beauty more frequently and intentionally for my well-being and help create more beauty in this world.
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