Non-fiction. Latino/a Studies. Edited by Marjorie Agosin & Jacqueline C. Nanfito. Best known for her Nobel-Prize winning poetry, Gabriela Mistral also wrote prose, including the recados in this collection. These brief essays were, for the most part, first published in newspapers in Latin America. Mistral intended for them to be a kind of letter destined for a larger and more inclusive readership than that reached by her poetry. Writing about the women she admired, these recados provide a glimpse into Mistral's private world and reveal the strong emotional ties she had to women, as well as her feelings on equality and feminism.

A unique anthology of short stories and poetry by feminist contemporaries of Virginia Woolf, who were writing about work, discrimination, war, relationships and love in the early part of the 20th Century. Includes works by English and American writers Zelda Fitzgerald, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Radclyffe Hall, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf, alongside their recently rediscovered 'sisters' from around the world. This book offers a diverse and international array of over 20 literary gems from women writers living in Bulgaria, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Italy, Palestine, Romania, Russia, Spain and Ukraine.

A schoolteacher whose poetry catapulted her to early fame in her native Chile and an international diplomat whose boundary-defying sexuality still challenges scholars, Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last century. The "Locas mujeres" poems collected here are among Mistral's most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self "in extremis"--poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning.
From disquieting humor to balladlike lyricism to folkloric wisdom, these pieces enact a tragic sense of life, depicting "madwomen" who are anything but mad. Strong and intensely human, Mistral's poetic women confront impossible situations to which no sane response exists. This groundbreaking collection presents poems from Mistral's final published volume as well as new editions of posthumous work, featuring the first English-language appearance of many essential poems. "Madwomen" promises to reveal a profound poet to a new generation of Anglophone readers while reacquainting Spanish readers with a stranger, more complicated "madwoman" than most have ever known.

"With his new translations . . . Stephen Tapscott makes great strides toward redefining Mistral, her work, and her life for the North American reader. This collection denies the critical urge to allow Mistral's most celebrated poetry to trump her multifaceted achievements and broad intellectual interests. For the anglophone Mistral aficionado, Selected Prose and Prose-Poems is a breath of fresh air from a window on unexplored terrain." -- Bloomsbury Review "Tapscott's volume includes a rich variety of short texts-- literary profiles, essays, stories for children, prose poems, biographies of religious figures, small fables extolling the romance of ordinary things, and writings on education and current events-- and provides an excellent introduction to Mistral's prose. . . . [His] translations of Mistral's 'prose as tight as verse' are both lyrical and precise." -- Women's Review of Books

The first Latin American to receive a Nobel Prize for Literature, the Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) is often characterized as a healing, maternal voice who spoke on behalf of women, indigenous peoples, the disenfranchised, children, and the rural poor. She is that political poet and more: a poet of philosophical meditation, self-consciousness, and daring. This is a book full of surprises and paradoxes. The complexity and structural boldness of these prose-poems, especially the female-erotic prose pieces of her first book, make them an important moment in the history of literary modernism in a tradition that runs from Baudelaire, the North American moderns, and the South American postmodernistas. It's a book that will be eye-opening and informative to the general readeras well as to students of gender studies, cultural studies, literary history, and poetry.

This Spanish-English bilingual volume gathers the most famous and representative prose writings of Gabriela Mistral, which have not been as readily available to English-only readers as her poetry. The pieces are grouped into four sections. "Fables, Elegies, and Things of the Earth" includes fifteen of Mistral's most accessible prose-poems. "Prose and Prose-Poems from Desolacio n / Desolation [1922]" presents all the prose from Mistral's first important book. "Lyrical Biographies" are Mistral's poetic meditations on Saint Francis and Sor Juana de la Cruz. "Literary Essays, Journalism, 'Messages'" collects pieces that reveal Mistral's opinions on a wide range of subjects, including the practice of teaching; the writers Alfonso Reyes, Alfonsina Storni, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Pablo Neruda; Mistral's own writing practices; and her social beliefs. Editor/translator Stephen Tapscott rounds out the volume with a chronology of Mistral's life and a brief introduction to her career and prose.

Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo were the two most influential and respected women writers of twentieth-century Latin America. Mistral, a plain, self-educated Chilean woman of the mountains who was a poet, journalist, and educator, became Latin America's first Nobel Laureate in 1945. Ocampo, a stunning Argentine woman of wealth, wrote hundreds of essays and founded the first-rate literary journal Sur. Though of very different backgrounds, their deep commitment to what they felt was "their" America forged a unique intellectual and emotional bond between them. This collection of the previously unpublished correspondence between Mistral and Ocampo reveals the private side of two very public women. In these letters (as well as in essays that are included in an appendix), we see what Mistral and Ocampo thought about each other and about the intellectual and political atmosphere of their time (including the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the dictatorships of Latin America) and particularly how they negotiated the complex issues of identity, nationality, and gender within their wide-ranging cultural connections to both the Americas and Europe.

Lucila Godoy Alcayaga (1889-1957) fue suplantada literiamente por Gabriela Mistral. El titulo Tala alude al necesario despojo para emprender la escritura, definido por el corte y la carencia. Lagar (lugar donde se pisa la uva) figura como tropo de produccion poetica que se nutre de restos experienciales.