The historical archive of Gabriela Mistral, Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 1945, was built by women. Correspondences, photographs and memories of the Chilean poet, educator and diplomat were kept by her secretaries – almost all of them close confidants – to later be scrutinized by researchers, such as the American Elizabeth Horan, an academic at Arizona State University and author of Mistral. A life. Only those who love me find me (Penguin Random House, 2024), the first of three volumes.
“What are secretaries? People who keep secrets. And today we are all Gabriela Mistral’s secretaries!” says Horan, who for almost 40 years has investigated the writer’s legacy, in one of the two talks he gave at the University of Valparaíso, this Friday and Saturday, with the support of the United States Embassy in Chile, within the framework of the Puerto Ideas Valparaíso 2024 Festival. Among the collaborators of the only female Nobel Prize winner in Latin America, who preserved letters and other documents, stand out Laura Rodig, the Mexican Palma Guillén, Consuelo Saleva and Doris Dana. The latter, from an aristocratic family in New York, was his executor and accompanied him during the end of his life, in 1957.
After the writer’s death, Dana dedicated herself to compiling and editing the book Poem from Chilepublished in 1967. Her niece, Doris Atkinson, who inherited the poet’s manuscripts, first editions, photographs, magnetic tapes and personal objects, finally donated them to Chile in 2007. And, in an interview with The Thirdin 2019, stressed that her aunt was not the right person to manage the work.
Elizabeth Horan during a talk at Valparaíso University, on November 9.Puerto Ideas Foundation
Perhaps the letters are the ones that occupy the most relevant space in these archives. The literary critic Hernán Díaz Arrieta, known under the pseudonym Alonewho was a friend of the writer, stated in 1962 that “Gabriela wrote letters, many letters, too many letters. If his epistolary is ever formed, it will occupy a library.”
These writings have been essential to know about his life and thoughts. Horan remembers that she learned about the poet from a Chilean friend, exiled in California during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), and was trapped with the first book by Mistral that she found in a library. Readings for women.
The American traveled to Chile for the first time in 1985, after receiving a scholarship to study the work and history of the author of Storywhose real name was Lucila Godoy Alcayala. It was a decade in which information about the writer was still incipient: “For many years Gabriela Mistral was not read.”
The Chilean writer Gabriela Mistral arrived in Genoa, Italy, aboard the SS Saturnia, on January 12, 1951.Gian Carlo Barone (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
His intimate life generated controversy for decades. When the researcher arrived in Chile, she remembers that some people asked her when they found out that she would study her life: “But, do you know that she [Mistral] Was she a lesbian?” The academic says that the poet was not only in the sexuality closet, but also in the racial closet for being mestizo: “Both are very similar.”
What Horan had detected, despite the obstacles that belonging to minorities meant for the poet, is that “Mistral is a way of getting to know Latin America. He is in the circle of the first thinkers in the region of his time. He met many important people. [Aunque no estuvo en una universidad]”She was self-taught and her language was very rich,” he explains.
Born in 1889 and raised in poverty in the Elqui Valley, in the northern region of Coquimbo, Mistral achieved international renown. The correspondence she exchanged with different intellectuals of her time, including Pablo Neruda—14 years her junior—and Alfonsina Storni, suggest that she surrounded herself with influential people. “If she had only dedicated herself to sending only letters, she would have been like an Emily Dickinson. But Mistral traveled, moved frequently, and met many relevant people. “He had a nose for understanding people.”
When he became internationally renowned, he did not forget his origins. “I was always thinking about how to help Valle de Elqui. “He had a sense of conscience, where he came from,” says his biographer.
Elizabeth Horan speaks during one of the talks given within the framework of the Puerto Ideas Valparaíso 2024 Festival.Puerto Ideas Foundation
