In the Elqui Valley, in the northern lands of Chile, the sky is intensely blue during the day. Already dark, so dry, with its three hundred clear nights a year, the sky is limpid to be imbued with stars. The sound of the river that gives its name to the valley can be heard clear and accelerated. The sun hits hard, filling the vines; the abruptness of the stony mountains allows the land to be cultivated almost only where the Elqui has been conquering space. Gabriela Mistral knew and deeply loved her native land and its people. There she also learned to meet God and to admire his works.
December 10, 2020 will mark 75 years since the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American writer to receive this award (1945). Her works Desolation (1922), Tenderness (1923) y Tala (1938) are probably the ones that made her the winner of this award. Ibáñez Langlois writes: "Oblivious to fashions and manners, rooted in her own tradition - the biblical sentiment, Castilian poetry, the rural essences of the country - this little northern teacher wrote some of the most heartbreaking and tender stanzas in the language.". And, for his part, Neruda will affirm in 1954 about the Sonnets of death, published forty years earlier: "The magnitude of these short poems has not been surpassed in our language. It is necessary to walk centuries of poetry, to go back to the old Quevedo, disenchanted and rough, to see, touch and feel a poetic language of such dimensions and hardness.". We transcribe the first of these sonnets, which illustrates well the strength of the young Mistral's expression at the age of 25:
From the icy niche in which men put you,
I will bring you down to the humble and sunny earth.
That I should fall asleep in it men did not know,
and that we have to dream on the same pillow.
I'll lay you down on the sunny ground with a
a mother's sweetness for her sleeping child,
and the earth has to become softness of cradle
to receive your body as a child in pain.
Then I will sprinkle soil and rose dust,
and in the bluish and light moon dust,
the light offal will be imprisoned.
I'll walk away singing my beautiful revenge,
because in that hidden depths the hand of no one
will come down to dispute your handful of bones!
Gabriela Mistral was born in Vicuña, in the north of Chile, in a family of limited resources; she was educated very poorly, but she went far because of her talent, her persevering work and the help of people who noticed her worth. Mistral began teaching as a teacher's assistant at the age of 15 and did not stop doing so while she lived in Chile, at the same time she began to write. Her first writings date back to 1904 and she will obtain the Chilean National Poetry Prize in 1914 with her Sonnets of death. In 1922 he moved to Mexico to collaborate in the Mexican educational reform and later he will hold various consular representations of Chile in different countries of Europe and America. He died of pancreatic cancer in New York in 1957 at the age of 67. He donated the rights of his works to the promotion of the children of Montegrande, the village where he grew up.
Today's reader is impressed by Gabriela Mistral's poems not only for their sonorous musicality, but also for their deep religiosity. The poet had an intense experience of God. In the Poem from ChileFor example, as he travels through the long geography of his homeland, contemplating the desert north, he writes:
In thirsty white lands / abrasion items / the Christs called cactus / watch from the eternal.
God is present everywhere, perhaps as a counterpoint to the harshness of life, but also as the ultimate response to the beauty and sweetness found in nature. Like Pope Francis years later, Mistral was deeply captivated by the light and strength of St. Francis of Assisi. For example, in Motifs of St. Francis remembers his voice:
"How St. Francis would speak! Who would hear his words dripping like a fruit, of sweetness! Who would hear them when the air is full of dry resonances, like a dead thistle! That voice of St. Francis made the landscape turn towards him, like a countenance; it hastened the sap of love in the trees and made the rose loosen its sweetness. It was a quiet song, like the one that water has when it runs under the small sand"..
Gabriela Mistral had to face many difficulties in her life, including those of the "drynesses of which the Saint speaks". and of which it says they are "the hardest temptations" (The companions of St. Francis: Bernardo de Quintaval). Perhaps that is why his gaze was especially merciful and his attitude towards creation respectful like that of a bee: "I want, Francisco, to go through things like this, without bending a petal." (The delicacy). Devotee of il poverello of Assisi and an assiduous reader of his Little flowersbelonged to the Third Order of St. Francis. In fact, she bequeathed the medal and the parchment that accredit her Nobel Prize to the people of Chile and they are under the custody of the Franciscans in the same museum where the bible that she used to use, a rosary of ceramic beads and metal medals and a carved and polychrome wooden crucifix of hers from the XVIII century are kept. She was buried with the Franciscan habit by her express wish.
It has been 75 years since the Nobel Prize was awarded to this poet. Although in recent years there has been special interest in investigating other aspects of her personal life, it is a good opportunity to reread her texts in verse and prose, to be moved by her sensitivity and to learn from her religiousness fused "with a lacerating yearning for social justice".
