The distinguished Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1945, died in Hempstead, Long Island, on January 10, 1957, of cancer. In the numerous articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines after her death the factual mistakes about her life and writings were endless. Although her critics have not been careful to separate myths from facts, most of these errors can be corrected by referring to books or articles about her—but not the mistakes about her as yet unpublished Poema de Chile. For this reason I have assembled these notes about the Poema de Chile taken from conversations with Gabriela during the last four years of her life which she spent for the most part working on the Poema and on her Lagar poems. Part of the Lagar poems she published in 1954. The rest of her Lagar poems will be published posthumously by her literary heir, Doris Dana.¹ These will probably appear before the unfinished Poema de Chile because of the difficulties inherent in the preparation of the Poema for publication.

Let me quote two sentences, full of errors, from an article describing the Poema written by Carlos Santana:

Gabriela Mistral alcanzó a completar antes de morir lo que pudiera ser su obra poética cumbre, “Recado de Chile”, pero la dejó escrito lápiz. … Según Miss Doris Dana, la abnegada amiga de Gabriela en los últimos años, la gran poetisa completó la corrección de los originales del “Recado de Chile” en los dos años finales de su vida, a pesar de que su salud estaba ya seriamente quebrantada y de que el trabajo, por lo mismo, le era difícil.²

The source of this information, Doris Dana, is authoritative. Santana must have misunderstood her. It is true that Gabriela spent the last years of her life correcting this poem but at the time of her death it was far from finished. The fact that he says it was written in pencil would be proof of this because a great deal of correcting intervened between the first rough draft that Gabriela always wrote in pencil and the final printed version. Only the “legendary” Gabriela wrote those perfect first drafts that needed no correction … in a moment of “inspiration.” It was Gabriela's modus operandi in all her poetry, not only in the Poema, to correct her rough draft until the corrections began to menace legibility; the corrected draft would then be copied on a typewriter, this in turn would be corrected. The correcting would continue on subsequent copies until Gabriela felt she could no longer improve upon the poem. At the time of Gabriela's death most of the Poema had been typed out and arranged alphabetically in loose leaf notebooks. A subject index referred to each part. This was just an interim arrangement to enable the person working with Gabriela to find the section she wanted.

Santana calls the Poema the Recado de Chile. Gabriela usually called it the Poema de Chile, although sometimes, she would refer to it as the Recado de Chile or the Recado sobre Chile. In the Pequeña antología de Gabriela Mistral³ two fragments of it are published: “Bío-Bío”⁴ and “Selva austral.”⁵ These she calls “Trozos del poema Viaje imaginario por Chile (Lagar).” Apparently this title was rejected. I never heard her use it. She says here it is from Lagar because in 1950 when the Pequeña antología … was published Gabriela intended to publish all the poetry she had written since Tala (1938) in Lagar. But in 1953, after an index had been made of most of her unpublished poetry, and after one typewritten copy of each of her poems had been placed in a loose-leaf notebook—hitherto they had been scattered—Gabriela realized for the first time that she had enough poems for two volumes. She therefore decided to publish the Poema de Chile separately. There was really material for more than two volumes but two volumes was Gabriela's estimate. Although the Poema is quite distinct from the rest of the poems of Lagar, Gabriela had decided to publish them both together just for the sake of bulk. She had an aversion to publishing thin books. Her generosity of spirit would not countenance meanness. To her a thin book signified a lack of generosity.

By the time Lagar was published in Chile (December, 1954), less than half the poems that were originally destined for it had been corrected and were ready for publication. What was published was only the first volume. Gabriela always found correcting very onerous and often would say: “Tomorrow you have to make me correct this,” and she would put crosses next to the lines or the words that didn't please her. Usually tomorrow took some time to arrive. Perhaps it is this distaste that made her very early decide not to collect her poetry and publish it in a book, a decision which another side of her nature easily melted: in Gabriela's code of honor as in that of Santa Teresa de Avila the first commandment was to be agradecida: to respond generously to the generosity of others. Often Gabriela had nothing else to give but her poetry. Gathering it together, correcting and eliminating was such hard work that she called it a tala, a chopping down of trees in a huge forest. The circumstance that moved her to make her first tala was a plea from some teachers of Spanish in the United States. They had read some of her poetry in newspapers and magazines and to express their admiration for the poetry of a fellow school teacher they offered to defray the cost of publication of a collection of her poetry.⁶ This plea was rewarded by Desolación (1922). Sixteen years later her second tala resulted in Tala (1938). The proceeds from this book were to go to the Basque children left homeless as a result of the Spanish Civil War.⁷ The result of her final tala sixteen years later was Lagar (1954) which she published in Chile in gratitude for the hero's welcome her country generously extended to her. This tala was the most difficult because her usually robust health was undermined already by cancer. Her time had run out and an immense unpruned poem, the Poema de Chile, remained behind.

The Poema describes a journey Gabriela makes through Chile in the company of a little Chilean boy of Indian extraction (mi niño atacameño) and a baby fawn. It takes place after her death when her spirit returns to Chile for its last journey on earth. In the northern province of Atacama she adopts the little boy to whom she intends to show the wonders of his native Chile. To everybody but the boy and the fawn she is invisible.

This lyrical explanation of the world to a child recalls her “La cuentamundo” in Tala. Here a mother describes to a child the meaning of air, light, larks, mountains, water, animals, butterflies, fruit, pine trees, fire, the home, mother earth, the rainbow, strawberries, pineapples, Argentine wheat, and God's carriage. In “La cuenta-mundo” it is the child who appears without having come from anywhere:

(Niño pequeño aparecido
que no viniste y que llegaste
te contaré lo que tenemos
y tomarás de nuestra parte.)(8)

In the Poema de Chile, which might be called La Cuenta-Chile, it is Gabriela. But the Poema is different in other respects: the narrator is not just any mother but Gabriela herself—it is full of autobiographical details; the personality of the boy is developed through dialogue; the humanization of nature has gone much further.

With the development of the boy's personality through dialogue Gabriela solves more than one problem. The boy stands for common sense, a very necessary foil for a gay, disembodied spirit. Gabriela's world, although he enjoys it when he allows himself to be seduced by it, is very strange to him. He's very glad that she is invisible to everybody else because he becomes uncomfortable when he thinks of what people will say about this queer companion.

—Claro, tuviste el antojo
de regresar así en fantasma
para que no te conozcan
las gentes alborotadas.
Casi pasas las ciudades
corriendo como azorada,
y cuando tienes diez cerros
paras, ríes, cuentas, cantas.
—Tapa tu boca que tú
no les pones mala cara
y gritas cuando los Andes
con veinte crestas doradas
y rojas hacen señales
como madres que llamaran.
Yo te gano la profía
indito frente taimada.
¿Cómo vas a convencer
a una criada en sus sombras
y de ellas catequizada?

(“Flores”)⁹

The boy constantly takes Gabriela to task and chides her for the disproportion between her lofty ideas and her actual state. When Gabriela talks to him about grace he wants to know how a poor thing in rags like her would know anything about grace:

—¿Qué llama la gracia, mama,
pobrecilla que no llevas
sobre ti cosa que valga?
—La gracia es cosa tan fina
y tan dulce y tan callada
que los que la llevan no
pueden nunca declararla
porque ellos mismos no saben
que va en su voz o en su marcha
o que está en un no sé qué
de aire, de voz o mirada.
Yo no la alcancé, chiquito,
pero la vi, de pasada,
en el mirar de los niños,
de viejo o mujer doblada
sobre su faena o ———(10)
en el gesto de una montaña

(“Flores”)

Gabriela here, as in real life, is a nomad in a sedentary world. Her patiloquismo, the word she coined for this malady, has its compensation in discovering grace in her travels, grace which, she often lamented, had passed her by. However, in the Poema, as a disembodied spirit she loses the gravity which in her life and in her other poetry worked against her attaining gracia.

This friendly bickering between Gabriela and the boy she called “chacota con el niño” and often complained of the strain it was to compose in this narrative genre in which she had little training. But this chacota she hoped would give the poem a sabor criollo: “Una conversación con un niño pobre no puede estar demasiado bien hablada … yo quiero suprimir el bonitismo en este Poema.” Most attempts, she lamented, to attain a true sabor criollo, had failed and had turned out to be either vulgar or forced and unnatural.¹¹

Gabriela's poetry from its very beginning is marked with a nearness to animate and inanimate things. Her personal vision of the world is unique in its penetration into man himself through the humanization of matter. Like St. Francis, Gabriela

felt near to the beasts, the birds, and the flowers. For him it was a most natural thing to befriend a wild animal, to protect the life of a bee, to converse with a falcon. When he sang his glowing tributes to the sun, to water, to fire—to all inanimate things, he desired only to show his kinship with the earth. This he considers somehow divine because our Lord, Jesus Christ, deigned to live on it when He came to regenerate us by His blood and His grace.¹²

Man is intimately tied to the materiality of things, he penetrates them but is not lost in them. As the Poema developed this closeness to matter is intensified. Nature is humanized by Gabriela's fresh, colorful strokes: the mountains wave welcome to the travellers; the trees are inns that beckon them to approach; the metals blink. Everything moves as if it suddenly were endowed with human form. This religious closeness to nature with which Gabriela was born is remarkable because of its intensity. Palma Guillén de Nicolau, who accompanied Gabriela in Mexico, describes how surprised she was when she met Gabriela for the first time in 1923: “… cómo me sorprendía y me admiraba aquel sentimiento religioso que en ella despertaban las cosas y aquella oración que le subía a los labios con las desnudas palabras de Job o de David.”¹³ And it is to impart this feeling to the boy that she has descended. He must learn to love the land, to cultivate it. When they come to the boldo tree she tells him to cut some leaves:

Corta, pónlas contra el pecho
aunque son recias son santas
te irán ellos respondiendo
con tacto y bocanada.

(“Boldos”)

They both sleep beneath it:

Aquí se duerme sin pena
doblando la trebolada.
Agradece, cara al cielo,
sombra, cobijo y fragancia.
¡Qué mal duermen los hombres
en el hondón de sus casas!
Se desperdician las hierbas
y la ancha noche estrellada.

(“Boldos”)

The beauty of the night is constantly extolled:

Tanto fervor tiene el cielo,
tanto ama, tanto regala,
que a veces me quiero más
la noche que las mañanas.

(“Noche andina”)

As they approach Lake Llanquihue the boy is told to approach this water which is quiet and secretive, only for swans:

Yo me sé un agua escondida
que no camina ni canta
y aunque es tan hermosa nadie
se la busca ni se la ama.
Es el agua de los cisnes,
verde, secreta, extasiada.
Es tu lago Llanquihue
la más dulce de tus aguas.
Parece que está adorando
sólo cuchichea, no habla.
Pero se tiene un respiro,
una hablilla, una monada.
No haber miedo de allegarse
recibirle la mirada.
Nadie te miró tan dulce
y con tan larga mirada.

(“Cisnes”)¹⁴

The section “Viento norte” is very similar to “El aire” of the marvelous Materias section of Tala:

Porque yo me envicié en él
como quien se envicia en vino
trepando por los faldeos
siguiéndolo por el grito.
Yo no era más, era sólo
su antojo y su monojillo
y me gustaba este ser
su jugarrete(15) de niño
en donde estoy todavía
lo llamo a voces, mi niño.

(“Viento norte”)

                    Gira redondo en un niño
desnudo y voltijeante,
y me toma y arrebata
por su madre.
                    Mis costados coge enteros
por cosas de su donaire,
y mis ropas entregadas
por casales(16) …

(“El aire,” Tala)

The wind has another toy: the palm tree:

Todos los aires la buscan
por su resonar de velas
que cantan y que murmuran
o rezongan comadreñas.

(“Las palmas”)

There are constant references in the poem to the moment Gabriela will take leave of her unenthusiastic disciple. In “Despedida,” after describing the call of her Master she repeats her reasons for descending to earth:

Ya me voy porque me llama
un silbo que es de mi Dueño,
llama con una inefable
punzada de rayo recto.
Yo bajé para salvar
a mi niño atacameño
y por recorrer la Gea
que me crió contra el pecho
y acordarme volteándola
su trinidad de elementos.

(“Despedida”)

In “Las flores de Chile” she laments not being present for the boy's wedding:

—Qué pena mía no verte
con novia encocoradada,
y la iglesia ardiendo en luces
y oir gritos y campanas
—Cuando hablas así de loca,
mama mía, me atarantas.
Mejor te callas y tomas
las manzanillas cortadas.
—Gracias, sí, mi niño, pero
no me gustan de cortadas.
Se doblan sus cabecitas
y en poco, no valen nada.

(“Las flores de Chile”)

Another autobiographical detail¹⁷. … Gabriela did not like cut flowers for the reason she gives here.

In another reference to her departure she confesses the failure to impart her enthusiasm for earth's “trinity of elements”:

Cuando mañana despiertas
no hallarás a la que hallabas
y habrá una tierra extendida
grande y muda como el alma.

(“Flores”)

The earth will be mute because there will be nobody to translate its language.

Although there are many parts entitled “Despedida,” and many allusions to the final departure throughout the poem, this does not mean that the poem, even the first rough draft, was completed. If Gabriela had lived a decade longer this poem might not be ready for publication. Hardly a day passed without Gabriela's remembering some Chilean phenomena that had been overlooked. Because of her love for the underdog, simply because he was an underdog, she was especially repentant when what she had forgotten was some insignificant shrub, tree, fish, or bird. Her Chilean encyclopedia was not to restrict itself to fauna and flora, although these would predominate; there was also the history of Chile to be considered. There is even a part that begins: “Qué será Chile en el cielo?”

The poem is very uneven because some of it remains in rough draft, some parts have a few corrections and other parts have undergone quite a thorough pruning. A special difficulty presented itself with the Poema: instead of working with one rough draft, of correcting it and copying the corrections until it was finished, Gabriela would often begin a new version that would run roughly parallel to the other. It would be hard to say how many versions of “El mar” she wrote without referring to previous ones.

Nor did Gabriela have a clear outline in her head of the organization of the poem. Since it was a journey from northern Chile to southern Chile (there was even a moment when she considered south to north) the general plan of a travelogue could be followed but even this had many problems of transitions … to O'Higgins, to garzas, to palm trees, palm trees in general and specific types of palm trees, to insignificant fish and algae, to mention a few. The final decision after much meditation and consultation on the subject of organization was usually to wait until all the parts were finished and then put them together … perhaps this shouldn't be called a decision—it was the only thing to do.

In the Poema the sea represents eternity. In the presence of the sea, the true lover, all the others pale: Her Gaea, Mother Earth, is inferior because she sings the same old song over and over again. She can speak only with poplars and cedars and her silence is sullen. She spits the dust of the dead into the eyes of the traveller, makes his hair white and his face wooden—he is always burnt by the sun and out of breath on her highways. The hardy sailors who embark have chosen the better half: they will never know hunger or thirst; their eyes will shine as they did at birth. They will be regaled eternally by the sea's ever changing song, a song for heroes, the song of King David, Homer, and the archangels. They will be united with their loved ones who are dead:

Ya me cansé de la ruta
que me enseñó su jadeo
y su polvo innumerable
y su taimado silencio.
Ya bostezo de la Gea
que no canta como Homero,
menos como los Arcángeles,
menos como el Rey Hebreo.
A la tierra no me di
sólo me di al Violento
porque nunca él es el mismo
y nunca fué prisionero
y es cantador sin fatiga
con mi labios eternos.
Nunca a la Tierra me di
sólo le presté mi cuerpo.
No es cual la tierra mama
que repite el mismo cuento.
Me voy a embarcar un día
para otro gran viaje sin término,
sin costa, sin desembarco,
viaje sin puertos, eterno.
Mi boca tendrá el sabor
de un loco viaje sin puertos
y recobrarán mis ojos
el color de su nacimiento.
¿A qué me cuentan historias
de costas que no deseo
donde nunca fué feliz
y blanquearon mis cabellos
y vi morir a los míos
sólo por no haber su aliento.

Each of these quotes is from a different rough version of “El mar.” Gabriela enjoyed writing about her husband, the sea, and laughed at the violence of this passion which caused her to be so unfaithful to the earth.

In “La Cuenta-Mundo” it is the rainbow, not the sea, that makes the bridge to eternity:

El puente del Arco Iris
se endereza y te hace señas …
Estaba sumida el puente
y asoma para que vuelva.
Te da el lomo, te da la mano,
como los puentes de cuerda …
¡Ay, no mires lo que miras
porque de golpe te acuerdas …!
¡Vuélvele la cara al puente;
deja que se rompa, deja …!

(“El arco-iris,” Tala)¹⁸

Intimations of immortality might make us impatient for this last trip but one has to wait for the “Carro del cielo” to descend and when it does:

Entonces sube sin miedo
de un solo salto a la rueda
¡cantando y llorando de gozo
con que te toma y que te lleva!

(“Carro del cielo,” Tala)¹⁹

At one point in the Poema Gabriela explains that she has descended to teach the boy also friendship for the dead.

Another autobiographical note in the Poema is the triumph of the country over the city. Gabriela flies quickly over Santiago—one can not hope to find a warm reception there, the natives will send their dogs at you—and shows nothing but disdain for the artificial life of the citadinas and their pride in this artificiality. The city gardens are full of proud flowers that are aseñoreadas and who refuse to doncelear with the campesinas rasas.

Casi pasas las ciudades
corriendo como azorda,
y cuando tienes diez cerros
paras, ríes, cuentas, cantas.

(“Flores”)

If one must travel he should keep off the highways:

Nada hay más triste, chiquito,
que rutas sin compañeros
parecen bostezos blancos,
jugarreta(20) de hombre ebrio.
Preguntadas no responden
al extraviado ni al ciego.
Parecen unas mujeres
que jugasen a perdernos.
Pero tú sabes de rutas,
mallicias y culebreos.
No las tomes, no las sigas
que suelen ser mataderos
Bien escogiste y tomaste
basquecillos y entreveros.

(“Hallazgo”)

Gabriela considered the years she spent as a child in Montegrande, very close to nature, the happiest of her life. The feeling that life close to the soil lifts man morally never left her. But man must be able to call the land his own. She was interested therefore in the passage of the Agrarian Reform Law²¹ which she hoped would distribute the land more equitably and wipe away absenteeism. In the poem she constantly refers to this happy future when the poor boy accompanying her will own a parcel of land. She assures him that there is no greater joy than the cultivation of the land.

If one were to trace the genesis of the Poema, like that of most of the poetry of Gabriela, it could be found in Desolación, her first collection. As she matures her themes develop but do not change. A glance at the table of contents in her books—she always arranged her poems according to theme—show the same themes constantly recurring. Nor does her style change fundamentally: “Su manejo de idioma … es ya de mano maestra desde que empieza a escribir … Milagro igual no ocurre ni aun con Rubén Darío.”²² Therefore the differences between Desolación, Tala, and Lagar are difficult to describe. Some critics have considered Lagar closer to Desolación than to Tala especially because of those poems in Lagar that describe her desperation at the death of her nephew—whom she had been raising as her son—under very tragic circumstances:

                    Todavía los que llegan
me dicen mi nombre, me ven la cara;
pero yo que me ahogo me veo
árbol devorado y humoso,
cerrazón de noche, carbón consumado,
enebro denso, ciprés engañoso,
cierto a los ojos huído en la mano.
                    En una pura noche se hizo mi luto
en el dédalo de mi cuerpo
y me cubrió este resuello
noche y humo que llaman luto
que me envuelve y me ciega.
                    En lo que dura una noche
cayó mi sol, se fué mi día,
y mi carne se hizo humareda
que corta un niño con la mano.

(“Luto,” Lagar)²³

Of these poems Margot Arce says:

Lo anecdótico tiene tanta importancia aquí como en los libros anteriores, aunque se recata tras un velo de alucinación y ensueño. La realidad biográfica está presente, pero siempre al borde del desvarió; siempre entre lo real y lo soñado … Por momentos parece haber traspasado el límite, no saberse muerta o viva; y comienza a dialogar con sus fantasmas. …²⁴

In reading over these poems in Lagar the intensity of this “delirio,” as Gabriela called it, reminded her of some of her early “gritos” in Desolación: “It's just as violent as Desolación, but at the same time it's not Desolación; it's quite different.” The detachment that Gabriela wished for so often came to her along this very bitter path. She had gone out so far that “arrows can't reach me.”²⁵ But this wound made her see things as never before, or rather see through things as never before. This freer, less inhibited imagination of Gabriela had two sides: one pessimistic, the other optimistic. Most of Lagar is black with the pain caused by the sword's thrust.²⁶ The Poema de Chile, or, to be more exact that part of it written or corrected after 1944²⁷ is bright in this new light as Gabriela, a happy, disembodied spirit, makes her last trip through Chile. It is remarkable how tame and sedate the “Cuenta-Mundo” is when placed beside the best parts of the Poema de Chile.

Besides the difficulty Gabriela experienced with the dialogue in the Poema, she complained of being bored by the monotony she imposed upon herself when she chose one form for the whole poem. For some reason she felt it should have formal unity as well as unity of content. Therefore she had to do some violence to her spirit when a part of the poem came to her already enveloped in a rhythm which was not that of the poem. Her last decision was to write the poem in traditional ballad meter, the romance: eight syllables to the line, no fixed stanzaic length, with even lines rhyming in asonancia. However a large part of the poem had already been written in a nine syllable line and Gabriela left it that way or corrected it sporadically.²⁸ The versions I saw her write usually had eight syllables and the corrections I saw her make were usually from a nine to an eight syllable line. The change from nine to eight syllables may have occurred between 1938 and 1945: the five parts that were added to the “Cuenta-Mundo” in Ternura (1945) have eight syllables while the earlier parts in Tala (1938) have nine.²⁹

But it must be remembered that Gabriela did not adhere strictly to isosyllabism. For instance, in twenty verses of nine syllables there might be one with eight or ten. An occasional break such as this in isosyllabism can not constitute free verse (Gabriela also wrote in free verse). For some reason quasi-isosyllabism is not recognized by most of Gabriela's critics, if critics they can be called. They wrote these occasional breaks off as carelessness. It was far from that. Gabriela distinguished very carefully between breaks of this kind which were dictated by a very fine ear and those that needed correction. Next to these latter she would put a mark to call her attention to the need of correction. This she also did when reading the poetry of others. But there were the critics—“pavorosos” Gerardo Diego calls them—³⁰ who had read carefully the preceptivas and retóricas written for ignorant students—any deviation was severely criticised by them. What was originally written to be perceptive for the neophyte only was taken to be perceptive also for genius, for those creative writers who were making the norms of the future. In the face of this unjust criticism Gabriela defended her deviations by referring to them as prosaismos voluntarios. These breaks are certainly not prosaic but Gabriela was not interested enough in criticism to bother very much about terminology. She even agreed with them about her ear: “Yes,” she said, “it is desatento y basto,” and she continued to make very good use of it.³¹

Notes

1. I should like to express my thanks here to Doris Dana for permission to quote excerpts from the Poema de Chile.

2. “Recado de Chile,” Diario las Américas (Miami), January 15, 1957.

3. (Santiago, 1950). “Cuatro tiempos del huemul” (pp. 86–95) is also part of the Poema de Chile although it is not cited here as a fragment.

4. Pp. 96–100.

5. Pp. 101–109.

6. Desolación (New York, 1922), p. ii.

7. Tala (Buenos Aires, 1938), p. 271.

8. Poesías completas de Gabriela Mistral, ed. Margaret Bates (Madrid, Aguilar, 1958), p. 287. This I will refer to as Poesías completas.

9. Each part of the Poema has a title.

10. The manuscript has a blank space here. Gabriela often left spaces if the word didn't come to her immediately and went on.

11. Gabriela was repeating in 1955 something that she had said earlier—almost with the same words. In Zig-Zag (July 6, 1918) Gabriela had praised Carlos Acuña's Vaso de arcilla: “Creo que no hay nada más difícil que hacer poesía criolla. Es tan fácil caer en la grosería y en la insipidez.” Raúl Silva Castro, “Producción de Gabriela Mistral de 1912 a 1918,” Anales de la Universidad de Chile, año 115, no. 106 (1957), p. 248.

12. “Versicle of Peace” delivered by Gabriela Mistral on receiving the Serra Award of The Americas for 1950. (The Americas, VII, 3 [January, 1951], 282.)

13. I quote from the typescript of a lecture given by Palma Guillén de Nicolau at the Universidad Femenina, Mexico, D. F., April 30, 1957, p. 4. It has no title.

14. After Gabriela's death I discovered that she had published in Sur (November, 1939, pp. 17–18) a very inferior version entitled “Lago Llanquihue.” It would seem to me to be a rough draft published in a weak moment at the insistence of some friend. Gabriela calls the water “tierna y vieja” but the tenderness is not as well expressed as in this excerpt I quote from the Poema.

15. Gabriela sometimes uses this word, as well as “jugarreta,” with its New World meaning. The suffixation does not always give the word the pejorative sense of “mala pasada.”

16. Poesías completas, p. 451. In this first edition there are many misprints. Here casuales should be read casales. In the second edition the misprints will be corrected.

17. Most of Gabriela's poetry is autobiographical. This does not cause difficulties in the Poema de Chile because the circumstances of the poem, that fact that she is talking to a child, keep her away from the psychological complexity of Lagar, for instance, which is written parallel chronologically to the Poema. Even “the right kind of reader” sometimes misinterprets some of the poems of Lagar because of the predominance of autobiography, autobiography of a very unique and original personality:

    “Encontrarse cara a cara por primera vez con un ser tan peculiar como Gabriela, con una personalidad tan cautivadora, es un acontecimiento que sigue siempre gravitando en nuestra vida.”

    (Victoria Ocampo, “Gabriela Mistral y el premio Nobel,” Testi-monios; tercera serie [Buenos Aires, 1946], p. 173.)

    According to Palma Guillén de Nicolau, an intimate friend, Gabriela's writings only give a fragmentary portrait of her:

    “Era uno de los seres a los que hay que conocer personalmente para darse cuenta de la multiplicidad de sus dones. Gabriela no se dijo entera a si misma en sus mejores poesías. Su obra no ha entregado sino muy fragmentariamente lo que ella fué.”

    (Typescript of a lecture on Gabriela Mistral given April 26, 1957, at the Facultad de Derecho, Universidad Nacional de México, p. 9.)

    Gabriela's poetry poses a special problem for those critics who say, and for very good reasons, that one should not go beyond the text, that one should not read things into poetry by making use of information extrinsic to the poem. For most writers this is the best method because of the normalcy of the experiences described by them but if this method is used with Gabriela Mistral often something will be lacking in the understanding of the poem.

18. Poesías completas, pp. 291–292.

19. Poesías completas, p. 308.

20. See note 15.

21. Agrarian Reform only is mentioned in the Poema. But that was second best. Gabriela's ideal was common ownership of the land and equitable sharing of its fruits, a truly Christian community. And it wasn't in books that Gabriela had discovered this ideal. She had experienced the joy of such a society as a child in Montegrande. In this Andean valley division of the land was simply a formula; the land belonged to everybody. In this patriarchal setting generosity was expected and not applauded as something exceptional. Gabriela, as she grew older, realized more and more how rare this truly Christian communism of her childhood was, and how impossible it was to restore it. The hard-headed Sancho who accompanied her on her journey certainly would laugh at such fantastic ideas. The Agrarian Reform was something he could accept. Much to Gabriela's chagrin these ideas sometimes caused a “Communist Legend” to grow up around her (“Alone” [Hernán Díaz Arrieta] discusses this in: “Gabriela Mistral y el comunismo,” La tentación de morir [Santiago, 1954], p. 100). The social justice she worked for was a Christian social justice. She was constantly looking for practical ways of solving the problem of the poor Chilean farmer working someone else's land, without training and without tools and proper equipment. Sometimes she would send seeds back to Chile, other times, technical publications. The best solution she saw in television as an educational instrument and one of diversion—this, she thought, might be powerful enough to cure the plague of alcoholism that resulted from the frustrations of a hard, sub-human, unrewarding life.

22. Dulce María Loynaz, “Gabriela y Lucila,” Poesías completas, p. cxix.

23. Poesías completas, p. 712.

24. Margot Arce de Vázquez, Gabriela Mistral, persona y poesía (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1958), pp. 93–94.

25. “La desasida,” Poesías completas, p. 604: “… que de haber ido tan lejos / no me alcanzan las flechas.”

26. In some of the poems of Lagar there is a feeling of peace and happiness as Gabriela sees again her loved ones who are separated from her by death. In Tala she had called to them in vain. One of her purposes in returning to earth in the Poema was to teach the boy the importance of the friendship of the dead. Separation by death does not cause her the anguish it did in Tala. Her belief in immortality had become stronger.

27. This is a surmise on my part. Gabriela's typescripts are seldom dated.

28. The poem “Lago Llanquihue” (see note 14) is an example of an intermediate version, I would surmise. It has a predominance of nine syllable verses (14 out of 26). There are 4 verses of eight syllables; 3 verses of nine or eight, 5 verses of ten.

29. The “Cuenta-Mundo” section (Poesías completas, pp. 287–313) consists of an introduction and 17 poems. In the five poems that were published for the first time in Ternura, 1945 (“La piña,” “La fresa,” “Trigo argentino,” “Carro del cielo,” “El arco iris”) the eight syllable verse predominates. Already in Tala (1938) in “La tierra” (pp. 221–222) the “niño” has become “niño indio”: “Niño indio, si estás cansado, / tú te acuestas sobre la Tierra. …”

30. “Imperfección y albricia,” Homenaje a Gabriela Mistral (Madrid, 1946) p. 37. What intrigues Gerardo Diego is the “rhythmical elasticity” of Gabriela. He is exasperated at the pedantry of critics like Julio Saavedra Molina who call “imperfection” what to Diego is “necessary abnormality.” But what is even more curious is

    “… de tales escrúpulos y casi remordimientos llega a contagiarse el propio poeta. Abundan en las confesiones de Gabriela Mistral alegatos de silvestre rudeza y excusas de autodidáctica, e incluso rubores de la nativa y no vencida limitación y bastedad. Ni ella ni sus aristarcos tienen razón”

    (pp. 38–39).

    This problem I have referred to in “Apropos An Article on Gabriela Mistral,” The Americas, XIV, 2 (October, 1957), 145–151.

31. A proof of her sensitivity, in spite of all her confessions in regard to her ear, is her attitude to the reading of her own poetry. This has also been discussed in my “Apropos An Article …” (note 30). What I said there has since been corroborated by Dulce María Loynaz in “Gabriela y Lucila,” Poesías completas, p. cxxxix. Dulce María Loynaz, realizing how difficult it was to read aloud the poetry of Gabriela, rehearsed beforehand with Gabriela: “Leía yo ante una Gabriela entredormida, bajos los párpados, inmóviles los músculos del rostro. Pero bastaba el salto de una coma, el titubeo de un acento, o simplemente que la inflexión no fuese la esperada por ella, para verla ya incorporada en el asiento, atajándome el verso con mano ligera como firme.” Dulce María Loynaz read in Gabriela's place since Gabriela realized that “su voz no era la más indicada para ello …” (p. cxxxix). Those who have heard the recordings of Gabriela reading her own poetry would hardly agree.