Poetic enigmas and intrigue.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: Book Review

Selected Prose and Prose-Poems, by Gabriela Mistral. Ed. and Trans., Stephen Tapscott. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002 (Bilingual).

Unfortunately, Gabriela Mistral is not a household name in the English-speaking world. Although some Anglophone readers do know her as a Nobel Prize winner (literature, 1945), relatively few are familiar with the breadth of her work. Aside from specialists, most of Mistral's North American admirers are acquainted mainly with her poetry, which is why Stephen Tapscott's beautifully translated edition of her prose and prose poems is a particularly welcome addition to the growing corpus of Spanish American literature in English.

Critics have focused on Mistral's feminism, her political activity on behalf of children, her views on education, her attachment to her native Chile, and her spirituality. Reams have been written on the themes of maternity, faith, and death in Mistral's poetry, as well as on her use of traditional "children's" musical forms such as the ronda and the lullaby. Tapscott writes in his "Remarks" that Mistral won the Nobel Prize because after World War II, "the world seemed to need an icon of healing, devout, even oddly virginal `maternity'." And yet, as the translator points out, Mistral's writing is more complicated than this limited perception suggests. Both her life and her oeuvre were full of enigmas, contradictions, and nuances.

Certainly, Mistral's prose poems and essays offer endless examples of the familiar themes. Maternity is a dominant thread just as it is in her verse, and her poetic evocation of pregnancy in "Poems of the Mothers" is exquisite: "And now I feel in my own breathing an exhalation of flowers: all because of the one who rests inside me gently, as the dew on the grass." Her prose "Lullabies" differ little structurally and thematically from those in verse: "Little fleece of my flesh--that I wove in my womb,--little shivering fleece, --sleep connected to me!"

Beauty and emotional pain are also prominent themes. She writes in "Spiritual Readings": "All the beauty of the Earth can be a bandage for your wound." These prose-poems offer magnificent examples of Mistral's imagery, her gift for metaphor, and her musicality, all of which Tapscott captures admirably in his translation.

They also highlight her ability to discern beauty in the mundane and to diverge from conventional associations. For example, in "The Tortoise" she celebrates the "lovely slowness" of the amphibian, so often an example of lumbering ineptitude. In glass, frequently a symbol of coldness or cruelty, she sees delightful surprises, since glassblowers never know exactly what they will produce, and enduring childhood, since glass objects never grow ("In Praise of Glass"). In sand, a traditional symbol of impermanence, she sees smoothness and purity ("Second Praise-Song for the Sand").

However, Tapscott's new collection highlights less-known aspects of Mistral's writing as well. Some of her rarely anthologized stories are truly delightful--full of poignant humor and gentle irony. In "Why Bamboo Canes are Hollow," all of the earth's plants, embracing social revolution and its resultant equality, lose their individuality and become the size of oaks. Unable to sustain their height, one by one they die. Bamboo cane, the insurgent leader, empties its marrow and turns hollow in order to remain tall, but soon even it falls. When Nature graciously returns things to normal, she punishes cane by leaving it void. In fables such as this Mistral mocks the modern propensity...