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most of these errors can be corrected by referring to books or articles about her-but not the mistakes about her as yet unpublished Poema de Chile. In the numerous articles that appeared in newspapers and magazines after her death the factual mistakes about her life and writings were endless. Strongly drawn to Mistral's work as soon as she discovered it, Le Guin has been working on this translation for five years.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. Le Guin has published five volumes of her own poetry, an English version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, and a volume of mutual translation with the Argentine poet Diana Bellessi, The Twins, the Dream/Las Gemalas, El Sueno. The intelligence and passion of Le Guin's selection and translation will finally allow people in the North to hear the originality, power, purity, and intransigence of this great American voice. Le Guin includes poems from all five books in this volume, with particular emphasis on the later work.

These are included in the 'Complete' Nobel edition published in Madrid the Poem of Chile, her last book, was printed years after her death. During her lifetime Mistral published four books: Desolation, Tenderness, Clearcut, and Winepress. Translations, and even selections of her work in Spanish, have tended to underplay the darkness, the strangeness, and the raging intensity of her poems of grief and pain, the yearning power of her evocations of the Chilean landscape, the stark music of her Round Dances, the visionary splendor of her Hymns of America. The reputation of her more flamboyant and accessible friend and countryman Pablo Neruda has overshadowed hers, and she has been officially sentimentalized into a 'poetess' of children and motherhood. Famous and beloved during her lifetime all over Latin America and in Europe, Mistral has never been known in North America as she deserves to be. The first Nobel Prize in literature to be awarded to a Latin American writer went to the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral.

Selected poems of gabriela mistral