Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral, a pseudonym for Lucila Godoy Alcayaga ( born April 7, 1889 in Vicuña, Chile, † January 10, 1957 in Hempstead, New York) was a Chilean poet and diplomat. In 1945 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Life

Gabriela Mistral was born Lucila Godoy as Alcayaga in a village in the Andes in a Basque- Indian family. Her father was a teacher and left the family when Gabriela was three years old. Even at sixteen began Gabriela to work as a teaching assistant to support their family financially. Soon she began to write. Your first texts were published in 1905 in the newspapers La Voz de Elqui and Diario Radical de Coquimbo. The choice of Pseuydonyms she explains: " As a child I had a deep devotion to the Archangel Gabriel, and from him I put his name to. Mistral - that's the name of the fierce Mediterranean wind. For I will always and unusually strongly attracted to the elements at all by all the forces of nature. "

In 1909, her lover Romelio Ureta took his own life after an embezzlement, which he had committed, had come to light. You processed this experience in her work. In 1914 she won the Chilean Literature Prize, which she became known throughout Latin America for Sonetos de la Muerte.

Gabriela Mistral worked from 1906 to 1922 as a teacher. In the year after Uretas death, she passed her teachers exam. Your career has taken her to La Serena, Barrancas, Traiguen, Antofagasta, Los Andes, Punta Arenas, Temuco and Santiago. In 1921 she was headmistress at one of the most prestigious schools for young ladies in Santiago de Chile. In 1922 she published her second book of poems, Desolación ( desolation ), who was taken by the international audience with enthusiasm. Like all her writings is also that of love, death and hope.

Between 1922 and 1934, Gabriela Mistral lived mainly abroad. She was invited by the Mexican Ministry of Culture to Mexico to participate at the local school reform. Then she went to the USA and Europe. In 1930 she was a visiting professor at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City and at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie.

In 1933 she joined the Chilean diplomatic service and became head of the consulate in Madrid. In the same year she adopted her nephew Juan Miguel. In the following years she represented Chile in Brazil, Spain, Portugal and the USA. During the Second World War she lived in Brazil, where she met the couple Lotte and Stefan Zweig, with whom she soon became close friends. 1942, the branch took their own lives, a year later Mistral adopted son.

In her last years her health forced ( she suffered from cancer) Gabriela Mistral, to withdraw from the public. In 1954, she returned once to Chile, where they cooked her an enthusiastic welcome. On January 10, 1957, she died at her home in New York at the consequences of their cancer.

In 1979 it was donated in honor of the Inter-American Gabriela Mistral Prize of Culture. Previous winners have included the Peruvian poet Antonio Cisneros and the British rock singer Sting.

2009 named the Chilean President Michelle Bachelet to the former headquarters of the Pinochet government in Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral. The new building of the cultural center after a fire in 2006 was handed over to its end in 2010.

Works (selection)

Mistral's work is imbued with a deep sadness. Although she was never married, emerged the desire for motherhood in many of her poems. She was a devout Catholic, but was represented by the Chilean literary criticism in an exaggerated manner as " saints." They sympathized with the rules of St. Francis, but could never bring himself to join himself a medal.

Likewise Mistral work was influenced by India: "While Tagore awakened the slumbering music in me, brought me another Indian, Sri Aurobindo, to religion. He opened my religious consecration the way. In fact, my debt to India is large, partly to Tagore, partly to Sri Aurobindo's sake. "

Along with Pearl S. Buck struck Sri Aurobindo then 1950 for the Nobel Prize in Literature before.

• Cartas de amor y desamor. Bello, Barcelona 1999, ISBN 84-89691-67-3
• Desolación. Poemas. Bello, Barcelona 2001, ISBN 84-95407-22-1 ( includes Ternura )
• Epistolario, 1957
• Escritos politicos. Fondo de Cultura Económca, Mexico City, 1994, ISBN 956-7083 -24- X
• Lagar. Edicion Bello, Santiago de Chile, 1994, ISBN 956-13-1187-9
• Lecturas para mujeres. Editorial Porrúa, Mexico City, 1988, ISBN 968-432-537-1
• Love poems and other poetry. Lamuv -Verlag, Göttingen 1994, ISBN 3-88977-364-8
• Motives of ball clay. Poetry. Reclam, Leipzig, 1989, ISBN 3-379-00401-4
• Poemas de la madre, 1950
• Recados. Contando a Chile, 1957
• Rondó del astro. Espasa Calpe, Santiago de Chile, 2000, ISBN 84-239-9019-2
• Sonetos de la muerte. Poemas. Editorial Porrúa, Mexico City 1988
• Do you feel my tenderness. Publishing the scale, Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-85966-014-4 ( prose text from Desolación )
• Tala. Poemas. Cátedra, Madrid 2001, ISBN 84-376-1943-2
• If you look up at me, I shall beautiful. Poems. Piper, Munich, 1991, ISBN 3-492-11158-0