In accordance with our meta agreement to have topic challenges and a later meta agreement to have topic challenges lasting for two months and overlapping by one month, it is time to announce the October–November 2024 topic challenge.
Based on the number of votes (+5), our next topic challenge will be
the works of Gabriela Mistral
What's a topic challenge?
See the meta posts linked above, and also this main Meta post. In short, during October and November 2024 you are invited to try to get hold of one or more of the works by Gabriela Mistral, read them, and ask or answer questions about them.
Participation is not obligatory in any sense, and questions on other works are more than welcome during October and November too; they just won't count as part of this topic challenge.
How can I take part?
By getting hold of one or more of the works by Gabriela Mistral and
- asking good questions about it or
- answering questions that have been posted as part of this challenge or
- submitting a book review to our Tumblr blog.
Questions about these works should be tagged gabriela-mistral and spanish-language (and a tag for any book-length work). We'll keep a list of all such questions in an answer to this meta post.
Below is Clara Díaz Sanchez's presentation:
The works of Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957)
Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin-American author, and the only female Latin-American, to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although famous in Spanish speaking countries, she was rather overshadowed by her near-contemporary and close friend, Pablo Neruda, and is considerably less well-known in the rest of the world.
In her lifetime she published four books of poetry: Desolation, Tenderness, Clearcut, and Winepress, and a fifth, The Poem of Chile, was published posthumously. As the Poetry Foundation page notes:Mistral defended the rights of children, women, and the poor; the freedoms of democracy; and the need for peace in times of social, political, and ideological conflicts, not only in Latin America but in the whole world. She always took the side of those who were mistreated by society: children, women, Native Americans, Jews, war victims, workers, and the poor, and she tried to speak for them through her poetry
Universal themes, of especial relevance to the difficult times we are currently living in.
Ursula K. Le Guin was strongly drawn to the poems of Mistral, and spent five years on a labour of love, preparing a selection of Mistral's poems and personally translating them into English. Le Guin described the result as:There is no other voice in poetry like Mistral’s, from the miraculous clarity of her rounds and lullabyes, to the fiery rage of her love poems, to the dark complexity and visionary power of her late work. I hope this book may begin to restore this amazing poet to the recognition she deserves. Most of all I hope it comes to the hands of readers who will love her.
What's next?
- Vote for the next topic challenge or propose your own!
