Desolación

centennial edition

Gabriela Mistral. Translated by Alejandra C. Quintana Arocho, Inés Bellina, and Anne Freeland

Sundial House

Desolación

Pub Date: January 2024

ISBN: 9798987926437

598 Pages

Format: Paperback

List Price: $16.00

Add To Cart

Shipping Options

Add To Cart Add To Cart

Purchasing options are not available in this country.

Desolación

centennial edition

Gabriela Mistral. Translated by Alejandra C. Quintana Arocho, Inés Bellina, and Anne Freeland

Sundial House

Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1945. Mistral has fascinated scholars, writers, and artists, who have tried to piece together the variegated layers of her persona and her “emotionally outspoken verses,” as Langston Hughes described them. Sundial House’s centenary edition commemorates Mistral’s debut anthology, Desolación (1922), edited by Federico de Onís at Columbia University. This bilingual edition, featuring 37 poems translated by Langston Hughes, breathes new life into the Mistral’s first anthology and makes available in English an intimate portrait of an ardent observer of life. Desolación is an evocative collection of poems and haunting poetic prose that explore desire, grief, motherhood, childhood, nature, and spirituality with radical sensibility.
Out of love for a young man and of her desolation at his death came the first of a series of poems soon to be read throughout all Latin America. These included “Sonnets of Death,” “Prayer,” and the “Poem of the Son,” in whose stark beauty and intensity her personal tragedy lost its private character and became a part of world literature. Langston Hughes
The magnitude of these short poems has not been surpassed in our language. The torrential force of “Los sonetos de la muerte” is such that they overflowed their own history, leaving behind the heartrending core of intimacy, remaining open and shelled, like new milestones, in our American poetics. These poems are an affirmation of life. Imprecation, appeal, love, revenge and joy are the flames that illuminate the sonnets. Pablo Neruda
A banal tragedy of everyday life lost its private character and became a part of world literature. As these poems written as a memorial to death became connected with the name of a new poet, the somber and passionate verses of Gabriela Mistral began to spread throughout all South America. However, it was not until 1922 that she published in New York her greatest collection of poems, Desolación. These are the tears of a mother that fall upon a book and, in the fifteenth poem, tears that flow over the son of death, a son that never was born. From her maternal hand this poet offers us her potion, which has the savor of earth and which quenches the thirst of the heart. Hjalmar Gullberg, Member of the Swedish Academy
The strongly spiritual character of her search for a transcendental joy unavailable in the world contrasts with her love for the materiality of everyday existence. Her poetic voice communicates these opposing forces in a style that combines musicality and harshness, spiritual inquietudes and concrete images, hope and despair, and simple, everyday language and sometimes unnaturally twisted constructions and archaic vocabulary. In her poetry dominates the emotional tension of the voice, the intensity of a monologue that might be a song or a prayer, a story or a musing. Santiago Daydí-Tolson

About the Author

Gabriela Mistral was born Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga (1889-1957) in Vicuña, Chile and was the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature (1945). Mistral became a rural school teacher at the age of 15 and her literary reputation was established in 1914 when she won a Chilean prize for three “Sonetos de la muerte.” Following a lecture on her poetry in 1921, Prof. Federico De Onís proposed that the Hispanic Institute release a compilation of her poems, as a tribute to Mistral from her fellow teachers of Spanish in the United States. Her relationship with Columbia University thus began with the publication of her first book, Desolación (1922), which includes the poem “Dolor,” memorializing a love affair that ended with her beloved’s suicide. Mistral was later asked to help reform the education system in rural Mexico, which led to a life of international responsibilities as consul of Chile (1925-1957) serving in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and the United States. The publication of Lecturas para mujeres (1923) and Ternura (1924) preceded her eventual move to New York, where she taught at Barnard College. Later anthologies of her poetry include Tala (1938), Lagar (1954), and the posthumous epic, Poema de Chile (1967).

Alejandra C. Quintana Arocho holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University. She is a literary translator who has interned at The Paris Review. Alejandra will pursue graduate studies in translation at Oxford University in 2023 and doctoral studies at Columbia University in 2024. She received the 2023 Ambroggio Prize for literary translation by the Academy of American Poets.

Inés Bellina is the 2021 winner of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Emerging Voices Award and a DCASE recipient. She is also one of the co-authors of LGSNQ: Gentrification & Preservation in a Chicago Neighborhood, a photography book about the people and places that define Logan Square. Inés has performed in shows all over Chicago and her writing has appeared in Shondaland, Chicago Magazine, Wine Enthusiast, Block Club Chicago, The Takeout, and The A.V. Club.


Anne Freeland is an editor at the Modern Language Association and a member of the Sundial House Editorial Board. She is the translator of Bolivian social theorist René Zavaleta Mercado’s Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia, published by Seagull Books in 2018, as well as a number of shorter scholarly and literary works. She holds a PhD in Latin American and comparative literature from Columbia University.

James Mercer Langston Hughes (1901–1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. One of the earliest innovators of jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. His ashes are interred beneath a mosaic cosmogram in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.