"Give me your hand" / "Dame la mano"
Women in Translation: Gabriela Mistral by way of Langston Hughes, Ursula K. Le Guin, & Samuel Beckett; Soledad Acosta de Samper, Clarice Lispector, & Antonieta de Barros; news!
August is Women in Translation Month, one of the best online literary gatherings when it comes to discovering exciting work and connecting with other readers. For an overview of the celebration’s purposes and activities, check out last August’s Bulletin, or this short little video.
This month, we are looking into the translation history of one writer who holds the distinction of being an internationally beloved Nobel laureate and an underappreciated writer at the same time: Gabriela Mistral. From there, we induct three more writers from outside the English language into the Cita Canon, and share some news and opportunities.
Gabriela Mistral & Her Translators
Chilean poet, educator and diplomat Gabriela Mistral (Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, 1889-1957) was one of the most widely celebrated poets of the twentieth century. She achieved mononymic status—known by many as simply Gabriela—and her face adorns banknotes in Chile. In 1945, she became the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world.” Today, she remains the only Latin American woman writer to have been awarded.1 She began her career as an educator and became internationally known for her work as a lecturer, journalist, and diplomat in addition to her poetry.
Mistral’s work has not been as widely translated as that of male contemporaries like Pablo Neruda, who was her mentee and a fellow poet-diplomat/Nobel laureate. Her first full-length poetry collection, Desolación, came out in 1922 to great acclaim, yet no collection of her work appeared in English until 1957 (the year of her death and over a decade after she won the Nobel Prize). Today, there are only three extensive collected works in English; they came out in 1957, 1961, and 2002. Two bilingual editions of Desolación been published in the last decade. In contrast, around thirty book-length collections of Neruda’s work have appeared in English since 1966.
Despite this relative scarcity, Mistral’s legacy in translation boasts some pretty incredible collaborators. Of the three major selected works in English, two were translated by writers who were literary legends in their own right. (The third was translated by Doris Dana, Mistral’s literary executor and last romantic partner.) At least one other Nobel laureate has translated her work, too.
Let’s dig into how three icons became Gabriela’s translators:
1949: Samuel Beckett
The legendary Irish writer Samuel Beckett translated Mistral twenty years before he would follow in her footsteps and accept the Nobel Prize in Literature. Coming out of World War II, Beckett found himself in financial need and took on work for the newly-formed United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The then Director-General of UNESCO, Mexican poet Jaime Torres Bodet, oversaw a new program called “Translation of Great Books” that sought to bring international writers—and citizens—together through literature. In 1949, the program published book meant to highlight “what the human mind can accomplish when its desire for knowledge…is combined with the power of understanding” by celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Goethe.2
Mistral contributed a poem, “Recado terrestre,” to the collection. Beckett translated it under the title “Message from Earth.” His approach to the work, including choices he made that somewhat shifted the tone of its homage to Goethe, can be seen as a bridge between his earlier translations of James Joyce and himself and his longer UNESCO Spanish-English project for Anthology of Mexican Poetry (edited by Octavio Paz, 1958).
Y vuela el aire un guiño de respuesta un sí-es no-es de albricias, un vilano, y no hay en lo que llega a nuestra carne tacto ni sacudida que conturben, sino un siseo de labio amoroso más delgado que silbo: apenas habla. And in the air a stir of answer trembles, a quiver of good news, a thistle-down, and never a hint in what assails our flesh of roughness or of hurt, nought but a whispering of loving lips, less than a hiss: scarce a breath.
From “Recado terrestre” / “Message from Earth” by Gabriela Mistral, translated by Samuel Beckett (1949)
1957: Langston Hughes
Hughes—the famous “Poet Laureate of Harlem”—was also a translator for poets working in French and Spanish. He curated and translated the first collection of Gabriela Mistral’s poetry in English in 1957. In his introduction, Hughes explains that the book is long overdue given Mistral’s literary significance. “Since her poetry is so intensely feminine, however, I hesitated to attempt translation myself, hoping that a woman would do so,” he admits. When approached by Indiana University Press in 1956, he decided to go ahead “for the simple reason that [he] liked the poems.”
Hughes’ work was not universally well-received, in large part due to racist assumptions about who is qualified to take on the art of translation. Hughes defended his choice to take on the project, again highlighting the dearth of available translations:
“I can only say that – since no one else at all, over a period of more than thirty years, tried to make a volume of Mistral poems in our language – as humbly, sincerely, and honestly as I knew how, I tried…So fine a poet as [Gabriela Mistral] deserves many translations.”
In 2023, Columbia University Press published a new bilingual edition of Desolación translated by Alejandra C. Quintana Arocho, Inés Bellina, and Anne Freeland that also features thirty-seven of Hughes’ translations.
2003: Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin, best known for her classic science fiction, spent years translating poems from all five of Mistral’s books. Her goal was to produce a major anthology that would do justice to the complexity and sophistication of the work, thus pushing back against the popular image of Mistral as a “poetess” writing simple, sentimental verses about children and mothers. In her framing of the work, Le Guin, like Hughes, points to the lack of available translations of Mistral’s work:
“There is no other voice in poetry like Mistral’s, from the miraculous clarity of her rounds and lullabyes, to the fiery rage of her love poems, to the dark complexity and visionary power of her late work. I hope this book may begin to restore this amazing poet to the recognition she deserves.”
Le Guin’s Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral was published in 2003 and again in 2011.
Cita Canon Spotlight
This month’s canon entries include two significant feminist writers about whom there is relatively little information available in English. Their work is barely available in translation, if at all, and they deserve recognition and a wider international readership. In contrast, the third entry is an example of a feminist writer who has been the subject of a wide-reaching translation project. More, please!
Colombian writer Soledad Acosta de Samper (1833-1913) is an icon of Latin American feminism. In 1878, she founded La Mujer, a magazine for and by women. She wrote prolifically, producing more than twenty novels alongside works of history and sociology. Her 1895 book La mujer en la sociedad moderna collects essays calling for expanded options for women—in work and in life. The Biblioteca Digital Soledad Acosta de Samper, a project of the Universidad de los Andes and the National Library of Colombia, is a repository bringing together nearly 600 texts related to her amazing life and work.
Antonieta de Barros (1901-1952), the first Black woman elected to a legislative position in Brazil, was also a writer. In 1937, she published hybrid work of journalism and memoir called Farrapos de Idéias (Chronicles of Ideas) under the pen name “Maria da Ilha,” or “Maria of the Island.” In it she weaves together personal and collective memory to chronicle gender and social issues she observed in her work as a journalist and educator. Though her legacy lives on in Brazil and especially in her home state of Santa Catarina— a medal in her name is awarded each year to an activist fighting for women’s rights—very little of her work is available in English.
Brazilian fiction writer Clarice Lispector (Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector, 1920-1977) was born in Ukraine and immigrated with her family as toddler to escape pogroms. Once called “one of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century,” Lispector built an international reputation that has grown in the decades since her death. Within Brazil, devoted fans call themselves claricianos; around the world, people celebrate her birthday as Hora de Clarice. Translation has been key to nurturing her unique legacy. Poet Elizabeth Bishop was one of her earliest translators, and in recent years her work has been translated by academics, writers, performance artists and others who all have varying relationships to Portuguese and the practice of translation. [“The Many Souls of Clarice Lispector’s Translators” in LARB; “Check out every New Directions cover for Clarice Lispector’s work,” Literary Hub]
Cita News & More
Boston friends! Visit Ulises: Assembly at Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG)’s Grossman & Anderson Galleries from now through November 10, 2024. The items on display are in rotation, but we’re part of the collection! If you’re interested in participating in the exhibition, answer the call: "What do you do?"
Cita collaborator Daniel Saldaña París has a new book of essays out! Planes Flying over a Monster explores the author’s many lives lived in cities around the world, and the art that helped him make sense of them.
Happy Labor Day! Explore some of the long relationship between feminist lit/art and labor with this past Bulletin: "¡Querer es poder! / Wanting is doing!"
Stay tuned for new Cita books coming soon — in English and in Spanish!
Coming soon…
Dame la mano
Dame la mano y danzaremos; dame la mano y me amarás. Como una sola flor seremos, como una flor, y nada más. El mismo verso cantaremos, al mismo paso bailarás. Como una espiga ondularemos, como una espiga, y nada más. Te llamas Rosa y yo Esperanza; pero tu nombre olvidarás, porque seremos una danza en la colina y nada más.
Gabriela Mistral, from Tenura (“Tenderness,” 1924)
Give me your hand, let's dance, we two, give me your hand as before. Be a single flower, me and you, a single flower, and nothing more. We will sing the selfsame way, the same dance steps explore. Like a spring of grain we'll sway, a single sprig, and nothing more. Your name is Rose, Hope am I, but in a name let's take no store, for we will be on a hilltop high, just a dance, and nothing more.
Translated by Langston Hughes, 1957.
Give me your hand and give me your love, give me your hand and dance with me. A single flower, and nothing more, a single flower is all we'll be. Keeping time in the dance together, singing the tune together with me, grass in the wind, and nothing more, grass in the wind is all we'll be. I'm called Hope and you're called Rose: but losing our names we'll both go free, a dance on the hills, and nothing more, a dance on the hills is all we'll be.
Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, 2003
Sources & Further Reading, Mistral
Carrera, María José. “Samuel Beckett’s Translations of Latin American Poets for UNESCO: Gabriela Mistral and Miguel de Guevara.” Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui 31, no. 1 (2019): 53–65. (available to read for free for independent researchers)
Daydí-Tolson, Santiago. “Gabriela Mistral.” Poetry Foundation.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Notes from Ursula” and Excerpts from Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral. 2003 and 2011.
“Translation as Poetry: Langston Hughes & Gabriela Mistral.” Local History Collection, The Bryant Library. February 27, 2023.
Listen to audio samples of Gabriela Mistral read her own poetry via the Internet Archive.
Explore the history of the Nobel Prize in Literature as it pertains to women writers through Cita’s collection Voices Around Me: Nobel Prize Lectures.
“UNESCO salutes Goethe's memory,” The UNESCO Courier, 1949.