Selected Prose and Prose-Poems (review)

By the time Gabriela Mistral received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945, she had been writing for newspapers and periodicals most of her life. Her works in prose were dispersed in many publications of the Hispanic world. Although she was a well-known poet, her prose writing did not receive much critical attention until after her death, when selections of her articles and prose-poems began to appear. By issuing a bilingual edition of selected prose writings, the University of Texas Press add a much needed volume to the brief bibliography of Gabiela Mistral's works in English translation. Together with This America of Ours: The Letters of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo (2003), this anthology should be of much service to readers and researchers interested in Latin American letters and the presence and influence of women writers in the Spanish speaking world.

Stephen Tapscott, who also translated Neruda's poetry, gave careful attention to provide the reader with a representative variety of examples taken from all periods in Mistral's literary career. For the poet, the writing for periodical publications was a required task due to financial need. That Mistral made of her daily required writing such a strong expression of poetic vision, intellectual curiosity and ethical commitment to world issues should weigh considerably in the valuation of Mistral as an author of great significance in Latin America's intellectual and literary history.

The amount of Mistral's published prose available for selection is large and varied. Not even in Spanish have her works been collected in full. Having a small sample in English of such large production will help in the growing interest among non-Spanish speaking readers in a figure as complex as Mistral. Translation, however, being an almost impossible task, fails to convey the peculiarly personal voice created by her. Muffled by the English version, her voice barely sounds as her own. The accompanying original Spanish version of each text should prove helpful to those who can read the language and feel its originality. All readers will get a fairly good idea of Mistral's interests and views.

A series of "Translator's Remarks" at the end of the book serve as a basic introduction to Gabriela Mistral's work, while the "Biographical Data" at the start of the volume could have been improved by a more selective choice of information, and a correct spelling of the valley where Mistral was born and where her tomb, museum and library are now open to visitors.