In 1945, Gabriela Mistral shattered the Euro-American stronghold of the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Latin American laureate and the second from the Global Majority world since Rabindranath Tagore’s landmark win in 1913. Her award marked a cultural shift, amplifying voices beyond the confines of the North Atlantic canon—yet today, Mistral’s legacy remains an unresolved enigma: Was she a modernist, as her French translator Mathilde Pomès suggested, standing shoulder to shoulder with Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío? Or was she a postmodernist like Delmira Agustini and Juana de Ibarbourou of Uruguay? Politically, too: was she an anarchist, Christian socialist democrat, or antifascist?
One aspect of Mistral’s life that remains clear, however, is her queerness. She spent her later years in New York with her partner, Doris Dana, an American children’s book author who translated some of her works and, after Mistral’s death, supervised her literary estate. Her sexuality is also affirmed by her contemporaries such as Alejandra Pizarnik and Pablo Neruda, and she even sometimes self-identified as a man in her own poetry. These complexities are further illuminated by a new centennial bilingual edition of Mistral’s Desolación (Sundial House, 2024), featuring translations by Inés Bellina, Alejandra C. Quintana Arocho, and Dr. Anne Freeland, along with thirty-seven poems translated by Langston Hughes, originally published in the 1957 collection, Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral.
In this interview, I spoke with Bellina, Quintana, and Dr. Freeland about Desolación, and the enduring queer legacy of Latin America’s first Nobel laureate.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Congratulations to the three of you on the publication on Desolación! Could you share how this book came to be? Also, while working intimately with Mistral’s first poetry collection, how did the experience of translating her transform your appreciation of her as a poet, an educator, a thinker, and a woman of her time?
Alejandra C. Quintana Arocho (AQA): Thank you so much. It’s honestly still quite a surreal thing to process for me—the publication of this edition. Not just because of how incredible of an opportunity it is to have co-translated and become so acquainted with the work of the great poet that is Mistral, but also because of how much reading, editing, and sharing her words with others feels more like an ongoing process than the end result of our collaboration. This volume marks the first full English-language of her debut poetry collection Desolación in its 1922 edition, originally published at Columbia University’s Hispanic Institute and edited by its then-director Federico de Onís—but the rest of her full-length works (despite appearing excerpted in translations of select poems, such as in Ursula K. Le Guin’s and Randall Couch’s editions) remain unpublished in English. Translator and literary critic Anna Deeney Morales is at work on a translation of Tala (1938) and Anne Freeland is working on Mistral’s last book, Poema de Chile (published posthumously in 1967), but there is much work to be done in creating and sustaining new readerships for Mistral among Anglophone, Spanish-speaking, and bilingual audiences alike. In considering the potential for Mistral to be rigorously and lovingly (re)read a hundred years after Desolación’s publication, our editor Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson was the one who came up with the idea of collaborating with a group of translators on an English rendering of the book.
Eunice asked me during my senior year of undergraduate studies at Columbia if I would be interested in working with her, Inés, and Anne on the translation. I was then actively looking for ways to develop my skills, methods, and philosophy as a translator, so when the opportunity to work collaboratively on Desolación arose, I immediately said yes. And I also incorporated the translation into my work in comparative literature and Latin American studies, deciding to investigate what it might mean to translate and recontextualize Mistral with a focus on her queerness and the (re)framing of her poetic practices. I embraced both the translation and academic project wholeheartedly, despite not being intimately familiar with Mistral’s work from the start, and I came to appreciate—and still carry with me—the sensitivity of her gaze and positionality as a poet. I still think about what it means to have maternal sensibilities as a queer person; what it means to inhabit the world with generosity towards everything that breathes and what courses through each one of us; how to deal with the memories of loved ones that are no longer with us, as well as with the traces of caring gestures on our bodies. So much of her lyricism still lingers in my mind and in the things I notice around me.
Inés Bellina (IB): It’s a project we’re all immensely proud of and I’m humbled to have played a part in helping it come to fruition.
Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson and I met when I was a PhD student at Columbia, and even when I eventually withdrew from the program, we stayed in touch during this time, and she reached out to see if I would be interested in translating sections of Desolación. The idea intrigued me for a variety of reasons; I had tackled literary translations in the past, but mostly for live readings and wanted the experience of seeing a whole book project through. The fact that it was going to form part of Sundial House’s inaugural catalog was also a draw. What made me say yes to the challenge, though, was the fact that Eunice envisioned this as a collaboration between the three of us. I felt comfortable that we could pull from each other’s strengths and expertise to honor Mistral’s work in the way it deserved.
I was familiar with Mistral’s work through my undergraduate and graduate studies, but I was by no means a scholar; my previous academic work had focused on contemporary Latin American and Latinx literature. However, I did have some lingering, superficial image of Mistral as Chile’s “Mother of the Nation,” a chaste but maternal figure that played well with institutions and social conservatism. Honestly, whenever I thought of Mistral, I thought of a schoolmarm. That was completely dispelled when I began engaging with the work as a translator. This time around, I found her concerns and approach to be much more relevant to our time than I ever remembered—as troubling and persistent as those concerns may be. Her meditations and anguish over motherhood, her examination of inhabiting not only a female body but a queer one, a bold celebration of land that felt more subversive than cloyingly folkloric—it all still speaks to today’s concerns.
Anne Freeland (AF): When Eunice first asked me if I wanted to translate some of the poems from Desolación, I declined, because I was not a scholar of Mistral and had only translated prose—an academic book and a couple of short stories. Then I started working as a translation editor for Sundial House, and I became very involved in the work on Desolación; many of the poems were so thoroughly revised in our work together that I was generously welcomed as a co-translator, even though none of the first drafts were mine. Each of the translations originated in the style of Alejandra or Inés, and I respected that style in editing them. The most conspicuous difference is probably that Alejandra chose to reproduce rhyme schemes, and Inés chose not to. Many of my revisions of the rhyming translations involved replacing a rhyming word, which of course then meant replacing the other word, which often meant reorganizing the syntax of the stanza—I found this process to be more fun than I had expected. I didn’t strictly impose a metrical scheme on any of the poems, but I did nudge them toward a more regular meter in many places, so in this, my inclination was toward mirroring the form of the original. After my pass of each part of the book, the four of us—Alejandra, Inés, Eunice, and I—met and reviewed my proposed revisions line by line, word by word. We often came up with new translations together in those meetings instead of simply accepting or rejecting a change. Some things were left unresolved, and someone would then come up with a solution and share it by email, so the conversation continued that way. It was an intensely collaborative process.
AMMD: This edition also includes thirty-seven poems which were translated by Langston Hughes for his Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral. In his introduction to that 1957 book, Hughes wrote:
I have no theories of translation. I simply try to transfer into English as much as I can of the literal content, emotion, and style of each poem. When I feel I can transfer only the literal content, I do not attempt a translation.
How does Hughes’ practice and philosophy as a translator depart from your respective co-translation process(es)?
IB: I say this respectfully, but I think Hughes is being a bit cheeky in that statement. To assert you have no theories of translation is, in a way, to put forward a theory of translation. On the other hand, what I think he might be trying to emphasize is how aesthetic sensibilities and impulses were necessary for him to connect with the work.
I would have a difficult time defining or pinpointing literal content divorced from emotion and style. On the other hand—if I’m interpreting his words correctly—I don’t know if I need to find that emotional and stylistic click with a poem from the get-go. One of the things that working on Desolación reaffirmed for me is that you can also reach an emotional and stylistic understanding of the content through that translation attempt. Working through drafts deepened my relationship to the poems.
AF: I’ll start by saying I think Langston Hughes does a wonderful job of what he set out to do, and then I want to address the question of theories of translation. Of course, Hughes articulates such a theory right after saying that he has none. It’s easy to say from our present moment that each of Hughes’s terms can be problematized: Is there literal content? Is there a fixed core of emotion inherent in a poem? How do you read the style of a poet or of a poem in relation to the broader context of its literary moment? Should these things be inseverable? Or can something worthwhile happen when you transfer “literal content” into a different style, or try attaching a different emotion to it? Or even explore some elements of “literal content” from the translator’s time and place within a rendering of a poem that speaks to that content but could not have anticipated it? I think our literary ecosystem is richer for having translations that respond to these questions in different ways.
AQA: Hughes’s claim that he has “no theories of translation” is a very provocative one. He is perhaps asserting here that the act of translation has more of a practical bent for him, but, of course, even in conceptualizing the act of translation with Mistral having a tripartite structure of “content, emotion, and style,” he is already putting forth his own theory—not just about what translation entails but also what poetry is. Can “literal content” be completely disentangled from the emotion(s) it professes, from the style it is rendered in?
As such, I really wouldn’t be able to say how much we, as co-translators, deviated or not from Hughes’s (non)theory on translation; there were moments where, in attempting to replicate, say, the “style,” we altered the “literal content.” Still, I continue to be fascinated by Hughes’s claim, and how it also contributes, anachronistically, to a growing awareness nowadays about the practicalities and realities of every translator—as well as the many factors that influence what and how we translate. I also think that scholarship on Hughes’s translations is lacking, and more work should be done on him as a poet-translator and how both of his literary practices intertwine.
AMMD: How do you view the long-overlooked queerness of Gabriela Mistral, a truth shrouded by governments, archives, critics, and the literary world, yet recognised among other writers? Benjamin Moser’s foreword to Clarice Lispector’s The Complete Stories linked Mistral to figures like Gertrude Stein in discussing women writers with “female companions,” while Pablo Neruda cast her as a misunderstood, eccentric figure in his Memoirs. In Alejandra Pizarnik’s Diarios, an entry from January 1, 1960 reads:
Gabriela Mistral y Marina Núñez del Prado, recorriendo y reviviendo América por obra de su añoranza y nostalgia materna. Ambas feas, lesbianas y voluntariosas. Enamoradas de la madre tierra.
Can you weigh in on these?
AF: I want to let Alejandra answer the bulk of this question, because she has studied Mistral and her reception with a focus on her queerness. But I’ll take this opportunity to think about Mistral’s self-presentation in her poetry in relation to gender and the body. Something that stands out to me as a reader of Mistral’s poetry is her insistence on imaginatively inhabiting bodies in a way that stresses the imaginary dimension of embodiment in general. I’m now working on a translation of her last book, Poema de Chile, in which the speaker returns to Chile and travels the country on foot as the ghost-mother of an Indigenous boy and a fawn. Much has been said about the gender-normative implications of Mistral’s designation as “madre de la patria”—metaphorical motherhood as a way of feminizing her—but I think we can instead read Mistral’s ghost-mother body as an affirmation of the fluidity of embodiment, and perhaps as a validation of her choice not to become a literal mother.
AQA: I want to note that the queerness of Mistral is a multifaceted one. I am eager to ascribe the term to her figure and her poetics, given her complex relationship to gendered language and the extent to which she deviates from heteronormative ideas about gender and sexuality, but Mistral might not have adopted it so easily. Her queerness, not to mention her racialized self-identification as a mestiza woman (as Professor Licia Fiol-Matta shows in her landmark study of Mistral), was also capitalized on by the Chilean state; to be equated with nationalistic aims, to represent the “devout” or “chaste” sensibilities of Christian women, to be the voice of rural schoolteachers—all of these are roles that Mistral has unfairly been reduced to, even if she seemed to embrace them at times, and that continues to invisibilize her complex queerness. Casting her as a “misunderstood” figure, and even as a closeted lesbian, is also a choice on the part of the literary world that makes it seem as though she wasn’t unabashedly queer in her writing and in her life—which she, in her own complicated way, undoubtedly was.
There’s more to Mistral’s biographically occluded or appropriated queerness than her relationship with Doris Dana and other female “companions,” and many of her poems in Desolación, I believe, construct a uniquely queer poetics. Some verses from the prose poem “La hermana,” which we translated as “Sister,” read:
Today I saw a woman opening a furrow. Her hips are swollen, like mine, by love, and she did her work bent over the soil.
I have caressed her waist; I have brought her with me. She’ll drink the thick milk from my same glass and bask in the shade of my passageways, pregnant with the heaviness of love.
IB: The question raises two interesting points: one about the political manipulation of national figures and another about the tension between official archives and its gaps. Even before the Pinochet regime propped her up as a spinster-yet-maternal figure and a forced guardian of social conservatism, the way Mistral’s work circulated in her country was limited and fractured. From my understanding, Chilean editorials cherry-picked poetry that would be more palatable to respectable society (for lack of a better term), like her poems for children or odes to the country that could potentially be misread as apolitical and nationalistic.
So I think her overlooked queerness speaks to the question: Who has access to the archive and who has the power to shape it? Usually it’s not your average reader, especially in a region that has had major patriarchal, democratic, and socioeconomic struggles like Latin America. While repressive regimes or social structures make their firm imprint on the official historical record, however, there do exist alternative archives that illuminate something closer to the complex, lived experience of someone like Mistral.
AMMD: I love what has been illuminated in this edition. Federico de Onís, director of Columbia University’s Instituto de las Españas, was instrumental in publishing Mistral’s Desolación in 1922, but as Alejandra points out in her translator’s note, this was in many ways problematic: de Onís referred to Mistral as an ‘unknown’ poet, echoing the Chilean state’s desexualised image of Mistral as a devout Christian schoolteacher from rural Chile who was ‘discovered’ for the benefit of US readers. He also praised Mistral’s greatness as a poet but confined it within the limitations of emotionality as a woman. What do you make of this?
AQA: I think this project granted us, as co-translators, an invaluable opportunity to reconsider how Mistral has been read, and to hopefully begin paving the way for new interpretations of her oeuvre to emerge—ones that refuse hegemonic discourses on what Latin American and queer poetry is from within the institution, while also branching outwards. Reprinting and translating her work a hundred years later with our own poetic and translatorial sensibilities allowed us to respond to, resist, or contend with the highly fraught role that the university played in 1922. A key part of our editorial and translation project was shedding light on the interactions and power dynamics between de Onís and Mistral that led to the book’s original publication, given it’s probably the first time many readers of the Spanish text would encounter this precise edition. Another choice that I think honors Mistral’s interdisciplinary approach towards her own work (she had expressed a preference for having illustrations accompany her written material in Desolación) is the inclusion of the etchings of printmaker and artist Rafael Lara and his students at Academia de Artes Islas al Sur in Chiloé, which also fittingly centered the creative expressions of children.
IB: I wouldn’t call it a corrective, exactly. It’s too strong and combative a term. But I think there was a sense of responsibility to the text, a feeling that we had the opportunity to shepherd it in a way that didn’t succumb to the moralistic and paternalistic angles that had plagued interpretations of Mistral’s poetry. What’s great about literature is that we can continue to reevaluate, even if it is entrenched in a specific historical context. In my opinion, hindsight and temporal distance were gifts that allowed us to see angles and layers in Mistral’s poetry that had remained marginalized during her time period.
AMMD: Randall Couch, who has translated Mistral’s “Locas Mujeres” poems (in Madwomen), has stated:
. . . these [Locas Mujeres] poems do not perform loss and longing in a florid or sentimental style [in contrast to Desolación]. The poet has also largely laid aside the pastoral mission that played such a large part in the growth of her influence and reputation. The tone of moral security, of tender didacticism, of speaking from safety on behalf of the childlike and vulnerable, is gone.
What do you think of this perspective?
AF: For departures from the qualities that Couch notes here in Desolación, I would point to the prose poems. There is some wonderfully strange and elaborate imagery of death—poems voiced by the dust of human remains—that break with any orthodox Christian framework and that are, I think, philosophical and full of feeling, but unsentimental.
IB: I found plenty of palpable inner turmoil in Desolación, to be quite frank. In fact, it was one of the elements of her poetry that I found most intriguing, powerful, and engaging. The “Sorrow” section, for example, is deliciously turbulent and tortured. The way she imbues religious imagery with anguish instead of reverential faith in those poems speaks to Mistral’s interest in playing with more shadowy aspects and topics. I think you can see the seeds that Couch points to fairly early on.
AQA: I think part of what our translation project revealed to me was that Mistral’s poetics have much more than meets the eye; even in the poems where she is most seemingly reverential or “florid,” there is language that hints at remarkable, interconnected sensibilities for the (un)gendered human body and natural landscapes, and an “inner turmoil” that both seeps out into and absorbs the world around her. I think this kind of “gaze” that she develops in her poetry—not just “female” but also “queer”—is one that is ever-evolving and is very much present even in a book that is understood to represent a purportedly distinct stage in her career.
AMMD: Inés and Alejandra, what did it mean for you, as translators with roots in Peru and Puerto Rico, to engage with the work of Latin America’s first Nobel laureate? Did your respective mother tongues—Peruvian Spanish and Puerto Rican Spanish—present any cultural or linguistic challenges in approaching Mistral’s poetry?
IB: Peru and Chile are neighboring countries, and both Andean countries, so I recognized certain regionalisms, geographical terms, and nature-specific lexicon. The widespread use of Catholic imagery in the continent was also an entryway that offered little friction. Nevertheless, I knew that I couldn’t make steadfast assumptions on Chilean localisms, and it made me pay more attention to each individual word. In that sense, I think any linguistic challenge ended up being an inadvertent benefit because it forced me to take that extra step and really ensure that I was fully comprehending what the text was saying in a very granular level. I think any challenge, though, came less from Chilean jargon and more from her experimentation with syntax. The way Mistral plays with grammatical structure often felt like a puzzle and there were several times where I treated it like one, poring over verses to make sure I was identifying the subject, verb, and object correctly—sometimes even writing them out in simple sentences to gain my footing.
AQA: Given Mistral’s cultural magnitude and pan-Latin American appeal (and I say this knowing it is not entirely an unproblematic characterization), I think for me there was a lot of intimacy with her work that lessened but also respected our linguistic and geographical distance. In terms of the challenges that came with translating Mistral’s Spanish and properly conveying her regionalisms and archaisms, what helped the most was to maintain an open line of communication between us, as co-translators, that consisted of consulting other work by Mistral and her contemporaries, scouring dictionaries and periodicals, and sharing our respective interpretations and findings.
AMMD: Alejandra, if you were to teach a course on ‘Gabriela Mistral as Queer Literature,’ for instance, what would you wish to include as key texts? Apart from Licia Fiol-Matta’s A Queer Mother for the Nation, can you name some books and writers that you would be inclined to incorporating to this imaginary syllabus?
AQA: This is a fantastic proposition that I can only provide a provisional answer to! It happens that I’m reminded of Mistral and her queer poetics in the most unexpected of places—be it in the work of poets from different generations, countries, or languages. Most recently, I found resonances between Mistral and the queer Italian writer Goliarda Sapienza’s collected poems.
I would probably divide the course into two different parts. The first part would explore the multilayered queerness in the work of Mistral in relation to her influences (which I would creatively trace back to Sappho and Louise Labé), and her queer contemporaries, very broadly considered, such as the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni, the Chilean artist Laura Rodig, and the Puerto Rican poet Clara Lair. And then, I would include another part that would explore and invite students to bring in the work of authors that propose their own intersections between the queer gaze, the (un)gendered body, and nature, be it Clarice Lispector or Alejandra Pizarnik.
Inés Bellina (she/her) is a writer and translator. She is a past Emerging Voices award winner from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and DCASE grant recipient from the City of Chicago. Her writing has received support from Ragdale, the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the Wedding Cake Residency. She is also the co-author of LGNSQ: Gentrification & Preservation in a Chicago Neighborhood, one of the few bilingual photography books published in the United States. You can find more of her writing in publications like The Cut, Saveur, Chicago Magazine, The A.V. Club, and other major outlets or on her newsletter, The Cranky Guide.
Alejandra C. Quintana Arocho (she/they) is a PhD student in Latin American and Iberian Cultures (LAIC) at Columbia University and a translator from Spanish. They hold a BA in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University and a MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation from the University of Oxford. She recently translated Puerto Rican poet Margarita Pintado Burgos’s Ojo en celo / Eye In Heat (University of Arizona Press, 2024), which won the 2023 Ambroggio Prize given by the Academy of American Poets. Their translation work also appears in The Paris Review and Poetry Daily.
Anne Freeland (she/her) is the translator of Towards a History of the National-Popular in Bolivia (Seagull Books) by René Zavaleta Mercado, and she is working on a translation of Gabriela Mistral’s Poema de Chile. She holds a PhD in Latin American cultures and comparative literature from Columbia University and has published articles in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, A Contracorreinte, and Historical Materialism. She has taught at Columbia University, the City University of New York, and Marymount Manhattan College at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She is an editor at the Modern Language Association and an evening student at Fordham University School of Law.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of three books of prose poetry and lyric essays including M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese, Damiá, and Swedish—appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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