Gabriela Mistral

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Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral , 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 as Lucila Godoy Alcayaga in a village in the Andes into a Basque Indian family. Her father was a teacher and left the family when Gabriela was three years old. At the age of sixteen, Gabriela started working as an auxiliary teacher to support her family financially. Soon she began to write. Her first texts were published in 1905 in the newspapers La Voz de Elqui and Diario Radical de Coquimbo . She explained the choice of her pseudonym as follows: “As a child I had a deep devotion to the Archangel Gabriel and it was from him that I took the name. Mistral - this is the name of the violent Mediterranean wind. Because I am always and unusually strongly attracted by the elements, generally by all the forces of nature. "

In 1909, her lover Romelio Ureta committed suicide after an embezzlement he had committed came to light. She processed this experience in her work. In 1914 she won the Chilean Literature Prize for Sonetos de la Muerte , which made her known throughout Latin America.

Gabriela Mistral worked as a teacher from 1906 to 1922. The year after Ureta's death, she passed her teacher’s exam. Her professional activity took her to La Serena , Barrancas , Traiguen , Antofagasta , Los Andes , Punta Arenas , Temuco and Santiago . In 1921 she became the headmaster of one of the most renowned schools for senior daughters in Santiago de Chile . In 1922 her second volume of poetry, Desolación (Desolation) was published. Like all of her writings, this one is about love, death, and hope.

Between 1922 and 1934 Gabriela Mistral lived mainly abroad. She was invited to Mexico by the Mexican Ministry of Culture to participate in the school reform there. She then went to the USA and Europe. 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 entered the Chilean diplomatic service and took over the management 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 stayed in Brazil, where she met the couple Lotte and Stefan Zweig , with whom she soon became a close friend. The Zweig committed suicide in 1942, and Mistral's adopted son the following year. In 1943 she was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

In the final years of her life, her health (she suffered from cancer) forced Gabriela Mistral to withdraw from the public eye. In 1954 she returned to Chile, where she received an enthusiastic welcome. On January 10, 1957, she died in her New York home of complications from cancer.

In 1979 she received the Inter-American Gabriela Mistral Prize for Culture in honor of her . Previous winners have included the Peruvian poet Antonio Cisneros and the British rock singer Sting .

In 2009, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet renamed the former headquarters of the Pinochet government to Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral . The new building of the cultural center after a fire in 2006 was put into operation at the end of 2010.

Works (selection)

Bust of Gabriela Mistral in Stuttgart-Haigst

Mistral's work is steeped in a deep sadness. Although she had no biological children herself, the longing for motherhood appears in many of her poems. She was also a devout Catholic, but was portrayed as a "saint" in an exaggerated way by the Chilean literary criticism. She sympathized with the rules of St. Francis , but could never bring herself to join an order herself.

Mistral's work was also influenced by India : “While Tagore awakened the dormant music in me, another Indian, Sri Aurobindo, brought me to religion. He opened the way for my religious consecration. Indeed, my debt to India is great, partly for Tagore, partly for Sri Aurobindo's sake. "

Together with Pearl S. Buck , she proposed Sri Aurobindo for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950 .

  • Cartas de amor y desamor . Bello, Barcelona 1999, ISBN 84-89691-67-3
  • Desolación. Poemas . Bello, Barcelona 2001, ISBN 84-95407-22-1 (also 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
  • Motifs of pottery 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 . Verlag die Waage, Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-85966-014-4 (the prose text from Desolación )
  • Tala. Poemas . Cátedra, Madrid 2001, ISBN 84-376-1943-2
  • When you look at me, I become beautiful. Poems . Piper, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-492-11158-0

literature

  • Irene Ferchl : You should produce your work like your child, with the blood of a thousand days , in Charlotte Kerner : Not just Madame Curie. Women who got the Nobel Prize . Belz Verlag, Weinheim 1999, ISBN 3-407-80862-3
  • Satoko Tamura: Sonetos de la muerte de Gabriela Mistral . Gredos, Madrid 1998, ISBN 84-249-1881-9
  • Gertraude Wilhelm (Hrsg.): The literature award winners. A panorama of world literature in the 20th century , Econ, Düsseldorf 1983, ISBN 3-612-10017-3
  • Karin Hopfe: mother tongue, foreign language. On the poetics of Gabriela Mistral . In: Claudius Armbruster, Karin Hopfe (Hrsg.): Horizont -verschiebungen. Intercultural understanding and heterogeneity in Romania. Gunter Narr, Tübingen 1998, pp. 437-448
  • Hans Rheinfelder : Gabriela Mistral. Motifs of her poetry (= meeting reports of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, phil.-hist. Class , born 1955, issue 8), Munich 1955

Web links

Commons : Gabriela Mistral  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. Quoted from the newspaper "El Mercurio", Santiago de Chile, from September 6, 1954 by Hans Rheinfelder: Gabriela Mistral. Motifs of her poetry , Munich 1955, p. 9.
  2. Honorary Members: Gabriela Mistral. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 16, 2019 .