Buzz over Chilean icon’s private papers

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She was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for literature (1945), though today her fellow Chilean poet (and former student) Pablo Neruda has wider international fame.

But Gabriela Mistral remains an icon, her stern visage adorning Chile’s 5,000 peso note. Now, the Chilean literary world is abuzz with news of the imminent opening of Mistral’s long-closed archive, sealed for 50 years in the United States (where she died in 1957).

As many as 300 unpublished poems are found Mistral’s voluminous private papers, Luis Vargas Saavedra, a professor at Catholic University in Chile, told the daily El Mercurio, outlining plans for a new book. The archive also contains correspondence, photographs, tapes, prose pieces and other papers of Mistral (born Lucila Godoy Alcayaga), who was also a noted educator, prolific journalist and longtime Chilean diplomat.

An agreement has been reached to return the originals to Chile and make copies available to researchers.

‘This really means we’re going to have to sit back and reconsider Mistral’s entire career,’’ said Elizabeth Horan, a Mistral expert at Arizona State University who is working on a new biography.

Horan is also co-editor of a collection of letters between Mistral and Victoria Ocampo, the late Argentine literary figure and feminist, that is to be published in Buenos Aires in October.

Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell in Buenos Aires