Desolación
centennial edition
Sundial House
Desolación
centennial edition
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