July 25, 2019 • 43 mins
Friend of the show Yves stops by for another rendition of Female Firsts, this time to discuss Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American to win Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha, and welcome to stuff.
I've never told your prediction of I heart radios have
to works. And today we're super excited to do another
edition of Female First. And that means our friend Eaves
(00:25):
is here. Hello, thank you so much for joining us
as always. Yes, I always have a great time when
I'm here, so we do as well. We do as
these moments. Yes, and um, you can you can hear
Eves on this day in history class and on unpopular
She does all kinds of cool stuff, all the cool things,
and so we're very glad that you take the time
(00:48):
to join us and educate. Is about a female first
the amazing thing. Education is a good thing. Yes, um,
for all of us. I like we all learn here. Yes, hey,
yes we try. Question mark, I don't seem to be
at the end of that one. I'm not quite sure
(01:10):
what do you do? Actually, I accidentally said that to
someone once in a conversation and it was so embarrassed.
I didn't mean it to come out that way. I
was just confused about their actual job. Well, yeah, I
mean that's the thing like that I'm really weird about.
Like when you're in social spaces, kind of the first
thing you go to is well, what do you do?
(01:30):
Those were very like impersonal and very robotic, and that's
kind of like a weird I don't know if that's
an American thing or what, but that makes me very
uncomfortable and I try not to do that. Noted well,
I love talking to like people in my family, older
people and like, what do you do? And I'm like
podcast today saying what is that? Like, it's this radio
(01:50):
thing that's not on the rais on the internet. Just
give me this look like that. Yeah. My parents were like,
huh okay, what you talk on the radio? No? No, no, no,
no no no get occasion dude, right. I love that question. Fortunately,
I don't know how but the one when I get
a lot it's like, oh, like really like officially they
(02:13):
like not you know, in your own exactly. No shade
people who do that, because this can be really good
and very famous. A couple of friends who do it.
They are great at it. Yeah, better than I am. Oh,
don't say that. Okay, so you're in the self deprecation team.
That's my things. I'm trying to steal my thing eaves.
(02:35):
I'll share. Yes, yeah, we're we're we like to share
around here. Um, so who who is on your mind today? Eves?
Who did you bring us? So today we're going to
talk about Gabriela Mistral. So we're gonna we're gonna test
my Spanish out today. I can't promise that it's going
to be perfect. It's not gonna be perfect. I'll just
say that up front, but I'm gonna try my best
(02:56):
and I'm going to do my best. And yeah, so
Gabriella Mistral, she was the first Latin American poet to
receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. So that's the first
that we're going to talk about today. Yes, Um, I'm
excited to try my Spanish as well. And this I
I'm really glad. Um. This is someone I had not
(03:20):
heard about. And then when I was researching her, Um,
it gave me a wonderful opportunity. I haven't read poetry
in a long time. Yeah, and um, you know, it's
always kind of not the same when you translate it,
but it's still I just was it felt good some
some poetry. Yeah, I really wanted to. I know in
(03:40):
the in our past episodes, we've talked about a lot
of American people, so I wanted to bring I'm glad
that you hadn't heard of her, because I wasn't familiar
with her work either. And you know, we get the
opportunity to talk about somebody from a different country, and
I thought it was, you know, good to talk about
her as well, because she is the first Latin American
(04:01):
poet in general, not just the first female to to
to get that award. Yeah, and she has done a lot.
Oh my gosh, Yes, her story reads like uh, plain
itinerary basically. I mean, she's been so many places and
(04:22):
lived in so many places. I'm just like, okay, and
then she went here, and then she went here, and
then she went here. I'm like, oh my gosh, yes
it is. She's dark, heartbroken kind of person. Yeah, my
kind of my my email poetry. I will bring it
in one day, I'll do it. Yes, there are a
(04:42):
lot of pictures of fairies, but you have pictures on
your poet. Yes, they have a lot of multi tells
apparently sad and dark and just why just why, just why?
So so I guess I'm out of the loop here.
I was never a big like poetry um writer. I
(05:02):
usually wrote prose yeah, yeah, I wrote a lot of poetry. Um.
I loved coming. It's one of my favorites. Um, I
just love the dark and death. But E Commings wasn't
necessarily dark and death. But you know what I mean,
I love I loved his nonsense. Anyway, keep going. Oh
my god, now let's go deep dive into our poetry
(05:22):
one day. Oh no, no, no, no, absolutely not, absolutely not.
But yeah, this was a wonderful reminder to me because
I also used to write poetry, and uh, I just
hadn't had the chance to experience it, um in a
long time. So let's let's get into the story here,
because there was a lot of ground to cover. There's
(05:43):
a lot. Yeah. So she also, in addition to her poetry,
was a humanist. She was also a diplomat, and she
was an educator. Those were all things that were huge
parts of her life. So she was born with the
name Lucilla god Alka Yaga on April seventh, eight eighty nine,
and that was in the province of Cocimbo in Vigunya, Chile,
(06:04):
which is a small town in northern Chile's Elki Valley,
and so her parents were also school teachers. Her father's
name was he Villa Nueva, and he was a payador,
which was a musical performer who composed songs for festivals
and sang with other village musicians. So he wasn't in
her life for that long. He abandoned the family when
(06:26):
she was about three, and when he was around, he
wasn't around that much. UM, but her heritage was also
of note, so both of her parents also had Basque
and Native roots. So before her father left, though, he
did read poetry to her, so that was a way
that she had that kind of poetry influence in her life.
So she was raised in Vicuna and also in nearby
(06:49):
Monte Grande by her mother and her mother's daughter from
an earlier marriage, was fifteen years older than her UM,
but she was also around and she had some tough
times in her younger years. She was falsely accused of theft. Yeah,
she was scolded by her school teachers and stoned by
classmates and yeah and um, and at nineteen o one
(07:16):
the family moved to Las Angea. UM. She eventually applied
for admission to the normal school while she was there,
but she was denied permission to enroll there. UM with
no explanation, but she later said that the reason was
because the reason she was rejected because the school knew
about her publications and her support of like liberalizing education
(07:39):
and giving people of all classes access, and that kind
of wasn't viewed favorably. Um, But school would become a
huge part of her life regardless of that fact. So
when she was fifteen, she began working as a primary
school teachers assistant in a remote town in the Andian Mountains,
(08:00):
and so she spent a lot of time visiting her
paternal grandmother, Isabel Villa Nueva, who would encourage her to
learn a lot more about the Bible. She like encouraged
her to recite from memory passages from the Bible. And
so Christianity and religion in spirituality, which we'll talk about
a little bit more, were like huge parts of Gabriella's
(08:23):
story and like what she what influenced her in writing
her poetry and all the themes in her poetry. So
she around this time had been sending a lot of
contributions to like newspapers, regional newspapers like Lavos de Elki
and Viguna and el Cokimbo in las Arangia and around
this time she also started to write poetry in addition
(08:45):
to the articles she was writing for newspapers, And so
early on she was already like imbued with this spirit
of like caring about education and specifically about like girls
and women's education. So yeah, in the in the nineteen
oh six article lin which is the education of women,
(09:05):
she said, let women be educated. Nothing in them requires
that they be set in a place lower than men.
And she started teaching secondary school in La Canteta in
nineteen o six, and by nineteen o nine she had
also taken on administrative rules in the schools. In nineteen
o eight when she first started using the pen name
Gabriela Mistral, and she was contributing to newspaper still in
(09:29):
literary magazines, just like a ton of work. And by
nineteen thirteen she had kind of like began using Mistral
as her pseudonym, just regularly basically and not using her
own name in her writing right. And her pen name
is said to have come from the names of two
different poets, are from the archangel Gabriel and the northerly wind,
(09:52):
the Mistral from southern France. And so she fell in
love with a a world employee named Rome Leo, and
he died by suicide in nineteen o nine, and that
greatly affected her in her poetry, at least according to critics.
(10:12):
A lot of critics said that that was that had
a huge impact on her poetry, and all that sorrow
that she had in grief that she had after the
death affected her. Although there have been people who said
that her sonnets which she wrote later, which we'll get to,
some people have said that he was the subject of
those while others have like a kind of said that
(10:35):
that he wasn't the subject of of those poems. They've
questioned it, they've questioned it, and um, we'll get to
that later. I won't even tease it. Um. So in
nineteen times she got her teaching certification, even though she
hadn't followed a normal course of study. UM. And over
(10:56):
the next few years she went on to become a
secondary school professor, an inspector general, and a school director.
She was um. She she worked her way up in
this school that like a lot of people were jealous
that she got into a big high school for girls
in Santiago. UM and so it would be it would
(11:17):
be exhaustive to like go through all of the schools
that she went to. She worked in a lot of
rural schools in today, and all of the work that
she did, um, but all those jobs gave her the
opportunity to know her country better and then many other
people who stayed there because she traveled so much and
worked with students so much, and you know, she had
(11:38):
this knowledge of the country and the geography and the
people's and those kind of became the basis for her
interest in national values and that, you know, all that
knowledge that she had coincided with the political and intellectual
knowledge about the country as a whole. And so when
she was twenty one, she met the minute stear of
(12:00):
Education Prota, who later became the President of Chile, and
so he would go on to help her expand the
reach of her poetry. Wow, So she remained, she kept teaching,
and she was dedicated to that and dedicated to education
and her whole life and promoting that. But she also
(12:23):
started getting into poetry at this time. So her name
became really wildly familiar because a lot of them were
included in a primary school reader that was used all
over the country and in Latin America. And she was
also an active member of the Chilean Theosophical Association and
adopted Buddhism as her religion at a certain point, though
she later returned to Catholicism. And so when I teased
(12:47):
earlier the sonnets, um, those are the sonnets on death,
and she wrote those in nineteen fourteen, and for that
this is kind of a defining moment in her life.
She won the Auegos Florads contest, and this poem is
like it helped her define her voice, and people began
(13:09):
viewing her narrative voice as her voice, like her autobiographical voice. Um.
And that was one marked a bolic sadness, loneliness, despair, passion, jealousy,
kind of all of those fields. Um. And throughout the
period of nineteen eighteen and nineteen twenty two she was
(13:31):
still working. She worked in three different schools, and about
the early nineteen twenties her poetry was published in a
lot of different magazines and literary journals. And so her
first book with desa Lacion, which was a collection of
poems that were previously published in newspapers and magazines, and
so Columbia University professor Ferico de Anice introduced her work
(13:52):
to high school teachers looking to expand Spanish language classes
in New York City, and a committee for that worked
on producing her book of poems that could be used
in US classrooms, and so, with a grant from the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace UM, the Instituto deles Aspanes
published the book in New York. So not Chile UM,
(14:16):
which we'll get to her story. Like she wasn't um
super widely recognized in Tila during her time she was,
but like she got a lot of international attention instead.
And so death, suffering, sadness, as you can tell by
the title desolation, you show up a lot inson and
(14:37):
so yeah, like I said, she was getting all this
international She was getting more and more international attention for
her poetry, which she had already had for her journalism
and her public speaking. UM. So she has a ton
of poems. And one of the things that was notable
about her poems was that they were very simple and understandable,
and that was a big reason they were used in
schools and people were drawn to them in on Spanish
(15:00):
speaking UM places that use them for education. UM. But
they're also still full even though they were simple of
emotion and they were warm, and so her poetry contained
all these things of love, death, childhood, maternity, religion. It
was lyrical but still unpretentious, and it had these religious
(15:23):
under and overtones, as she was a devout Christian. And
so in the University dot de Chile granted her the
professional title of the Teacher of Spanish and recognition of
her professional and literary contributions, and that same year, the
President of Mexico asked her to assist in the country's
(15:44):
education and reform effort, which is a project under the
direction of Education Minister Jose Vasconcellos, and she helped planning
and reorganizing the rural education in the country. And at
the same time she was learning about the people in
the country and the culture of the country. And so
while she was in Mexico, in nineteen twenty three, she
(16:06):
published a collection of essays called or Readings for Women
that included the works of classic and contemporary writers, including herself.
And after two years in Mexico, this is where we
get to the really traveling part. After two years in Mexico,
she traveled to Europe and the United States and she
was kind of welcomed warmly their officials and um she
(16:27):
was a featured speaker in nineteen four at the Pan
American Union headquarters. And this is another aspect of her life,
her pan Americanism and in Washington. So she was walking
to those headquarters in Washington when she was in the
United States, and so she championed pan Americanism, which is
a movement for the advocacy of close cooperation between the countries,
(16:48):
the member countries of North and South America. And she
said this in her address. She said, I believe that difference,
in the case of humanity as well as in nature,
is a merely another form of enrichment. In this way,
what is Latin, even in its sharpest contrast, when a
face to face with Anglo Saxonism is a kind of
(17:10):
strength through different virtues, through other modes of living, but
in no sense the occasion of inevitable discord. And she
went on to say, friendship of the different people's sought
by the Pan American Union would be easily attained if
we were all imbued to the farthest limit of consciousness
with the concept of dissimilarity without inferiority. So that kind
(17:30):
of gives a good view of like how she felt
about all her travels. What was like imbued in her work, Um,
how she felt about relations between people, and we know,
I mean, this was the nineteen twenties, what was going on.
And I only know about the United States of America
because you know, this is where I live, and but like,
we know what was going on here in the United
States of America, and everything wasn't like butterflies and rainbows.
(17:54):
Everybody wasn't getting along well you know. Um So it
does seem like very optimistic to me. But I think
a lot of that showed up in her poetry and
in her writing. Um so she also emphasized like how
important it was and how important she felt it was
(18:15):
to approach these ideals of continental unity through the application
of like Christian faith and value, so that religion showing
back up. And so years later, in N one, the
Pan American Union also commissioned her to write a pledge
for students to stay in the classrooms of all the
member states, and the players kind of said that North
and South Americans had this common destiny by way of
(18:38):
geographic unity. Um yeah, yeah, you have thoughts about that.
I wish it were true. I know, I know, I know,
because it's like at the same time, there was a
lot of imperialism going on from the United States itself,
and let's talking about you know that, and here specifically
(18:59):
directed to a lot American countries to like Cuba. UM.
But she also emphasized in the Pledge the right of
nations to self determination, and she was kind of anti imperialist.
So the list of titles and credits and a war
list of all of that goes on for her. Um.
She was appointed an executive member of the Institute of
(19:20):
Educational Cinematography in Rome, and so she kept writing poetry
as well. So her next book was which included poems
for children, was called Terra NeuRA or Tenderness, and that
was published in Madrid, and that contained themes of motherhood,
of childhood, of the world, and of nature. And so
(19:41):
she wanted the book to be and this is our quote,
poetry for school that does not cease to be poetry
because it's saturated of things of the heart, more affected
by the breath of the soul. I just love that.
Like I feel this is probably very stereotyping, but I
feel like poets always talking like speed poetry as well,
even when they're not writing poetry, or I like to
(20:03):
imagine that at least always a poet always do to
know exactly, but only the non self deprecating poets, because
self deprecating poets probably just cry, yeah, we're like my stuff,
or don't you know it's gonna burn anyway, It's true.
(20:26):
There is a lot more to this story, but first
we're gonna pause for a quick break or word from
our sponsor, and we're back. Thank you sponsored. So she
(20:49):
returned to ul A and and there she formally retired
from the country's education system, but throughout her whole life
she would receive a pension um so as the government
that the government at this time granted her retirement due
to her years of service and her contribution to the culture,
but she depended on that pension for the rest of
her life. And so she also returned to Catholicism around
(21:11):
this time, and she was a follower of Saint Francis
of Assisi, and she entered the Franciscan Order as a
member of Laity. And so she was appointed the country's
representative to the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation WHOA, which is
a part of the League of Nations. And in nineteen
six she moved to France. Um, which Annie you know well, yes, yes,
(21:38):
probably not as well as she did. Okay, are you
trying to get me to speak French? Oh no, leave
that to you. We'll see. My name is deceiving because
I'm really bad at speaking French. Um. You know, you
just gotta give it a go. Yeah. So, while one
(22:01):
language at a time. And while she was there, she
started the publication of a series of Latin American literary
classics in French translation. And she gave lectures and toured
around the United States around Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, Brasil, Uruguay,
and Argentina, among other places. And she lived mostly in
(22:22):
Italy and France from nineteen to nineteen thirty two. In
the ninety the Chilean Teachers Association sent her as its
delegate to the Congress of Educators at Locarno and more
more things, more accolades. She represented Chile and Ecuador at
the International University Federation in Madrid. And um, here's an
(22:46):
interesting personal part of her story. When she was living
in Provence, a brother that she didn't know that she had,
her father's son. Um left. His son was her as
his mother had just died. And you know, he became
a part of her life. Her Her mother died in
(23:07):
ninet so not long after that, and she wrote a
series of eight poems where at the Demi Madre about
you know, influenced by that. And so in nineteen thirty
the government suspended her retirement benefits and she began doing
more journalistic writing to make up for that lack of finances.
(23:31):
She's the suspended them. Yeah, she got it back. Though,
she got it back. Okay, I'm like worried for this person.
She made it through, you know. Yeah, she lived a
full life. She didn't and another thing she did to
you know, keep those finances following During that time, she
did a lot of um. She went to a lot
(23:51):
of universities. She was at Barnard College of Columbia University
from nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty one. She worked at
Middlebury College, a Vassador College and teen thirty one, and
she gave conferences and wrote at the University of Puerto
Rico ad Rio pier Ras. In the nineteen thirty two,
she became to Land consul and two years later Chilean
(24:14):
Congress named her the country's Soul Life Counsul. Yeah, so
this is also where a lot of her travel comes in.
She was in Naples, Madrid, Lisbon, Niece, Petropolis, Los Angeles,
Santa Barbara, Racruz, Rapayo, and New York and as a
(24:36):
consul she interacted with Pablo Naruta, who is a well
known poet and also a diplomat and a politician. And
when she was in when Gabriela was in Temuca in
southern Chile, when she was teaching, that's where Naruta grew up,
(24:58):
and so she had actually give in him books and
encouraged his talent um in Chula when he was younger.
So there is like Pablo Neruda's more of a probably
at the time more recognized into La for his work,
whereas she did a lot. She was very recognized internationally.
(25:20):
So she's widely quoted form in which she said this,
we are guilty of many errors and many faults, but
our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain
of life. Many of the things we need can wait,
the child cannot. Right now is the time his bones
are being formed, his blood is being made, and his
(25:42):
senses are being developed. To him, we cannot answer tomorrow.
His name is today. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's too
real today, too real, too real. Yeah so. In her
book tala Are Felling in English was publish in Buenos
Aires by the writer and critic Victoria Ocampo, and Gabriella
(26:05):
donated her author's rights for the book to Spanish children
who were displaced and orphaned by the Spanish Civil War.
And the book includes poems inspired by her mother's death
that that has showed up before and also poems divided
into three sections that weren't matter um verse about britt
saltwater and air land of Chile and America and after
(26:29):
World War Two, she also served as to Land delegate
to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women
until her death in nineteen fifty seven. So uh. She
also suffered more loss in her life of people who
are close to her, and nineteen forty two her friend
(26:52):
Stefan Zvik and his wife they died by suicide, and
in nineteen forty three her nephew, the the boy who
that she had adopted and raised as her son, who
I mentioned earlier, he died from arsenic poisoning and that
was ruled as a suicide, but um mr All believed
(27:14):
that he was murdered. Oh really, Yeah, that's rough. Yeah,
that is barely rough. And it was two years after
that ninety five when she became the first Latin American
to get the Nobel Prize in Literature. And she was
awarded the Nobel Prize for her lyric poetry, which inspired
(27:37):
by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of
the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world. M
her lyric poetry. What a year to get it too.
So near the end of her life she was writing
Poema de Chile, which was a long narrative poem that
she worked on but she never finished it. Um. And
(27:59):
she also in it she explored musical poetry for children
and poetry of nature. In the nineteen fifty one she
was awarded the National Literature Prize in tu l and
going back to talking about the Pablo Neruta thing, he
had already won the National Literature Prize into a years earlier. Um.
So Gabrielle's last book was leagd Or Wine Press, and
(28:20):
that was published in nineteen fifty four, her last book
during her lifetime, because she did have stuff published posthumously. Um.
She went back to Santiago in nineteen fifty four as well,
which was the first time she had been back to
Chile since nineteen thirty eight, So she didn't go back
to Chile much when she started. When she left, she
was like, I'm gone check out all these things. Yeah.
(28:41):
And she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in nineteen
fifty six. UM and the last years of her life
she lived in Rosalind, New York. She had diabetes and
she had also had heart issues, and she died in
Long Island of pancreatic cancer in January of nineteen five
d seven, when she was sixty seven years old. So
(29:03):
during her lifetime she published around eight hundred essays of
magazines and newspapers, and Ascessar earlier, she wasn't much celebrated
in Chile. Um and there were a lot of things
that were published posthumously for her. So Lanks and Hughes,
which who was a friend of hers, prepared the first
volume of her poetry translated into English, and that was
(29:25):
published in ninety seven, shortly after her death. Um And
she she also had schools and libraries named after her.
Her images on the five thousand to Land Paso bankonnote,
which is cool. Yeah, right, you want your money, your
your face on money, don't just right. There was this
(29:48):
image that formed of of Gabriela Mistral after she she died.
She had public success as a figure in the US
when she was alive, although a lot of people were
invoking her name and image in a certain way, as
little of her work appeared in English when she was alive,
and she criticized the US policy, and that could have
(30:11):
had something to do with the lack of placement of
her work in the US press because of this image
of like American, this pan americanism, this image of American
unity that she became a symbol of in a way,
and people also uplifted her image as being a figure
(30:33):
of national sentimentality. This conservative kind of said, you know, depressed,
lonely woman who kind of bent to the will of
the patriarchal state and exalted motherhood. Um and like this
this image of her being is a ver virgin Christian,
pure life of like maternal service. Thinking about all the
(30:57):
education that she was involved in during her lifetime and
the themes of her work itself kind of diametrically opposed
to this idea or these ideas of this image of
Pablo Neruda, who is atheist. You know, a lot different. Um.
But there has been since debate of her sexuality, with
(31:20):
a lot of people saying that she was a lesbian
and wasn't out about it, and even though she herself
denied it, she wrote that she was not a lesbian
and that the rumors were unfounded. They were silly American
doroth Dana, who was her friend and had inherited Garbadriella's
estate and they sent letters to each other that were
(31:40):
published after Dana died. Um, she's an executive her estate,
but after she died they were published in Spanish and
then later in English, not that long ago in English,
and they expressed a lot of love for each other
in these letters. And there's a there's a film out
there about Gadriella and her lesbianism. Um. Yeah, so that's
(32:04):
something that Okay, even though she is kind of one
of those said not said things. Um, it's something that's
still contested like whether she I don't think we need
to spend too much time on that, whether she was
a lesbian or not, but it is something that's been
brought up about her life. She was bisexual, and they
were just missing representing her altogether. Yeah, she would say
(32:26):
she was not just a straight lesbian. Yeah, well so
it did come up, how you know in her poems. Well,
thinking about the guy who died by suicide was the
subject of her poetry. Um A lot of the times
we can put hittero sexuality on a poem because that's
how we read it. So or that's the assumptions that
(32:47):
we make based on the paechriarchal system that we are
influenced by, brainwashed by. Um. So re kind of re
contextualizing everything that she wrote and instead of assuming that that, Okay,
maybe this relationship that she had with Doris Dana and
(33:08):
maybe with other people were um, you know, romantic relationships,
and for that reason we can reinterpret, you know, the
way her poetry was written. She wasn't this lonely, sad,
depressed woman who was like subject to the whims of
the patriarchy. And it's something that's still debated and contested,
(33:33):
but still her her work speaks for itself. This is
from one of her poems, and Fassando el frio grande
los mari posts and guilto Ian el adre amigo las
hostel Romeo helsine fasoltadas huelo, And that means as soon
(34:01):
as the big cold left, the butterflies returned. And in
the air, my friend is a sweet charmer and the
Rosemary leaves sway under their light. Angel and angel all
painted as if it were for real or just for play.
That's lovely, lovely and very excellent job. Yeah. I love
(34:23):
how she had a lot of her work was characterized
by you know, darkness and death and all this stuff.
But despite the things that she had gone through, she
still had this very it seems like hopeful streak and
and this desire to to help children or be there
for people who didn't have a voice, and she was
(34:45):
writing that voice. She's one of those who, much like me,
the people who consistently are in battle mode have to
let out their darkness somehow, so much like that gathers
within them because they're fighting a system, which she was
a fighter, seemingly with a social us this point as well,
and for children and for education and for women, and
so part of this poetry is to let out her
(35:08):
grief in the parts that she doesn't have to she
can't talk about consistently when she's in the middle of
trying to advocate for others, that's what it seems. Yeah,
and she saw it, and she saw so much in
her travel as well that it was a really turbulent time.
And I it was she lived a life of service essentially,
was a life of service. And so yeah, just her
(35:33):
her story as an inspiration for women and and for
poise and for writers and for people who want to
contribute to the world the things that they have to
give to the world, what they have to offer. And
it's very inspirational. It absolutely, she's very inspirational. She women
contained multitudes, and she contained many multitudes. She she accomplished
(35:58):
a lot. And yeah, we you would highly recommend going
finding her poetry and reading it checking it out. We
have some more for you listeners, but first we're going
to pause for one more QUICKI for to our sponsor.
(36:27):
Now we're back, Thank you sponsorb. Is that Do you
have anything else you want to add before we come
to an end? No, I want grace people with UM. Yeah,
I know that's all. Thank you. Oh, thank you so much.
(36:49):
That was yeah, awesome, awesome, um and uh oh yeah,
I'm just so glad to have learned about her. I
hope that let's nerds are as well. Um also just
behind the scenes side note, Eves and I bonded over SpongeBob,
swear pants and ad break and I feel very very
(37:10):
old as I was listening to the two of you
enjoy life and SpongeBob. Thank you. There shall be a
poem about that about SpongeBob. We can do maybe finding
joy and SpongeBob. Maybe we should this. I don't want
to take credit for this. This is a joint, you know,
a team effort, and then we'll do a dramatic reading
of it. Yes, for the office. We're not going to
tell them we're gonna do it. We're just gonna do
(37:32):
it like the joys of SpongeBob. Just occasionally there is
just a mic out in our like open areas, so
next time, yes, But it's usually like for meetings or something,
so next time. So why I The question is why
aren't we doing office talent shows? That is an excellent question, Eves.
(37:53):
I've actually thought about what talent I would do. Do
you ever worry about that kind of thing? But He's like,
it must perform at a talent show, and I'm like,
I have no talents, like I have no talents and
all that happened, it might at any minute. Movies tell
me that it could happen. We have to save the
world by singing a song you have. Yeah, well, it's
(38:15):
very important to your reputation unless your world that you
perform well at whatever talent show. I don't think i've
ever No, I've definitely competed in the talent show. I
did tap dancing. Can you tap dance? Still? I have
a really an embarrassing story about the talent show. Okay,
it's not that embarrassing. I feel like it's a normally
embarrassing story. Um, when I was in elementary school. When
(38:43):
I was in elementary school, we had a talent show,
and do you remember the song by LLL couj and
Jennifer Lopez. Um, you're laughing before. If you get it out,
it's okay, Andy. It was embarrassing. Um, I'm not going
to sing it now. But there was a song um
by j Lo and Llo Couja, and I was go, okay,
(39:05):
I'll see it. She was like, it's such a shame
that I'm leaving. Can'ta the way you mistreated me that song?
I'm not gonna keep sinking and Um, I think I
had Llo Couja's part and the girl who I was
performing with had j Loo's part, and she I'm pretty
sure was that way. It may have been the other way,
(39:26):
but I knew both parts anyway, Okay, so yeah, and
then she just totally flowed and forgot her works and
just like was stuck in the middle of the performance
and I had to like pick it up for her.
But and I did it, but I was crying in
the car after her, and I was so embarrassed. And
(39:49):
then a girl that I knew that I'm pretty sure
she was like a great older than me. But anyway,
a girl who was also I think she's also in
the UM in the Talent show knocked on my window
and she said, I will never her get her face
and she said, she like motioned putting her I'm putting
my fingers like as if there were two tears running
down my face, and like this is gonna be in
(40:09):
the show anything. Oh, now it is, And she was like,
I was crying too for you, No, not for me.
That would have been really nice. Um, but it was
pretty embarrassing. But I still know that my heart did right.
And you just felt embarrassed. I mean, I guess yeah,
but like when you were a kid, everything words. I
(40:31):
did a talent show and I sang a Maria Carry song,
which by the way, I did not hit that note,
just so you know. But then I performed with a
girl who it was just like three or four of us.
There's not even that many of us to do this
talent show. And she had her whole it was a
little mermaid song. She had a set, she had the
costume and everything. And I came in with my one
(40:52):
bad tape of the Mariah Carrey songs. I really messed up.
So that's my memories. I'm like, I'm sing Maria Carry again.
It feels what you're saying exactly. We're going to do it.
And curious, this is your redemption story. I see you
want to call j j Lo and you're gonna do
my partner. Though I never really messed at the top dancing.
(41:14):
Oh yes, I did fall off the stage once, but
that was a different that was a different thing. Never
falling off stage. Well, it's the sound people make when
a young child falls off the stage. I won't soon
(41:36):
forget it. And I broke my ankle. Oh but now
everyone is up to speed on what we're going to
do at the talent show. Uh, and our SpongeBob home
will keep everybody up to date on that SpongeBob songs.
But in the meantime, Eve, thanks again for joining us.
Where can listeners find you? Hear you? You can hear
(42:00):
me on this day in history class as well as unpopular,
and you can find both of those on all the
social media things Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Yeah yeah, and highly
recommend checking them out. Can't wait until you come back? Yes, Um,
he just do this twice a month, get this once
(42:22):
a month. He's just like we do. Here's the media.
We just do the one person split up in two
with all of our side bits attitude. You've got something there,
I mean some content. We could have a segment that's
called just just the Bits. I like it all right,
Well look out for that or maybe don't. It sounds
(42:46):
like it could be sexual, yeah a little. You know
people like de blon thunder Right. It won't be sexual
because it won't exist, but you know what does exist.
Our email address you can find us at Steff Media
mom stuff at iHeart media dot com, or on Instagram
at stuff I've Never told you are on Twitter at
(43:06):
mom Stuff podcast. Thanks as always to our super producer
Andrew Howard, and thanks to you for listening Stuff I've
Never told you the production of I Heart Radio's how
Stuff First Promore podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, orrever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha, and welcome to stuff.
I've never told your prediction of I heart radios have
to works. And today we're super excited to do another
edition of Female First. And that means our friend Eaves
(00:25):
is here. Hello, thank you so much for joining us
as always. Yes, I always have a great time when
I'm here, so we do as well. We do as
these moments. Yes, and um, you can you can hear
Eves on this day in history class and on unpopular
She does all kinds of cool stuff, all the cool things,
and so we're very glad that you take the time
(00:48):
to join us and educate. Is about a female first
the amazing thing. Education is a good thing. Yes, um,
for all of us. I like we all learn here. Yes, hey,
yes we try. Question mark, I don't seem to be
at the end of that one. I'm not quite sure
(01:10):
what do you do? Actually, I accidentally said that to
someone once in a conversation and it was so embarrassed.
I didn't mean it to come out that way. I
was just confused about their actual job. Well, yeah, I
mean that's the thing like that I'm really weird about.
Like when you're in social spaces, kind of the first
thing you go to is well, what do you do?
(01:30):
Those were very like impersonal and very robotic, and that's
kind of like a weird I don't know if that's
an American thing or what, but that makes me very
uncomfortable and I try not to do that. Noted well,
I love talking to like people in my family, older
people and like, what do you do? And I'm like
podcast today saying what is that? Like, it's this radio
(01:50):
thing that's not on the rais on the internet. Just
give me this look like that. Yeah. My parents were like,
huh okay, what you talk on the radio? No? No, no, no,
no no no get occasion dude, right. I love that question. Fortunately,
I don't know how but the one when I get
a lot it's like, oh, like really like officially they
(02:13):
like not you know, in your own exactly. No shade
people who do that, because this can be really good
and very famous. A couple of friends who do it.
They are great at it. Yeah, better than I am. Oh,
don't say that. Okay, so you're in the self deprecation team.
That's my things. I'm trying to steal my thing eaves.
(02:35):
I'll share. Yes, yeah, we're we're we like to share
around here. Um, so who who is on your mind today? Eves?
Who did you bring us? So today we're going to
talk about Gabriela Mistral. So we're gonna we're gonna test
my Spanish out today. I can't promise that it's going
to be perfect. It's not gonna be perfect. I'll just
say that up front, but I'm gonna try my best
(02:56):
and I'm going to do my best. And yeah, so
Gabriella Mistral, she was the first Latin American poet to
receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. So that's the first
that we're going to talk about today. Yes, Um, I'm
excited to try my Spanish as well. And this I
I'm really glad. Um. This is someone I had not
(03:20):
heard about. And then when I was researching her, Um,
it gave me a wonderful opportunity. I haven't read poetry
in a long time. Yeah, and um, you know, it's
always kind of not the same when you translate it,
but it's still I just was it felt good some
some poetry. Yeah, I really wanted to. I know in
(03:40):
the in our past episodes, we've talked about a lot
of American people, so I wanted to bring I'm glad
that you hadn't heard of her, because I wasn't familiar
with her work either. And you know, we get the
opportunity to talk about somebody from a different country, and
I thought it was, you know, good to talk about
her as well, because she is the first Latin American
(04:01):
poet in general, not just the first female to to
to get that award. Yeah, and she has done a lot.
Oh my gosh, Yes, her story reads like uh, plain
itinerary basically. I mean, she's been so many places and
(04:22):
lived in so many places. I'm just like, okay, and
then she went here, and then she went here, and
then she went here. I'm like, oh my gosh, yes
it is. She's dark, heartbroken kind of person. Yeah, my
kind of my my email poetry. I will bring it
in one day, I'll do it. Yes, there are a
(04:42):
lot of pictures of fairies, but you have pictures on
your poet. Yes, they have a lot of multi tells
apparently sad and dark and just why just why, just why?
So so I guess I'm out of the loop here.
I was never a big like poetry um writer. I
(05:02):
usually wrote prose yeah, yeah, I wrote a lot of poetry. Um.
I loved coming. It's one of my favorites. Um, I
just love the dark and death. But E Commings wasn't
necessarily dark and death. But you know what I mean,
I love I loved his nonsense. Anyway, keep going. Oh
my god, now let's go deep dive into our poetry
(05:22):
one day. Oh no, no, no, no, absolutely not, absolutely not.
But yeah, this was a wonderful reminder to me because
I also used to write poetry, and uh, I just
hadn't had the chance to experience it, um in a
long time. So let's let's get into the story here,
because there was a lot of ground to cover. There's
(05:43):
a lot. Yeah. So she also, in addition to her poetry,
was a humanist. She was also a diplomat, and she
was an educator. Those were all things that were huge
parts of her life. So she was born with the
name Lucilla god Alka Yaga on April seventh, eight eighty nine,
and that was in the province of Cocimbo in Vigunya, Chile,
(06:04):
which is a small town in northern Chile's Elki Valley,
and so her parents were also school teachers. Her father's
name was he Villa Nueva, and he was a payador,
which was a musical performer who composed songs for festivals
and sang with other village musicians. So he wasn't in
her life for that long. He abandoned the family when
(06:26):
she was about three, and when he was around, he
wasn't around that much. UM, but her heritage was also
of note, so both of her parents also had Basque
and Native roots. So before her father left, though, he
did read poetry to her, so that was a way
that she had that kind of poetry influence in her life.
So she was raised in Vicuna and also in nearby
(06:49):
Monte Grande by her mother and her mother's daughter from
an earlier marriage, was fifteen years older than her UM,
but she was also around and she had some tough
times in her younger years. She was falsely accused of theft. Yeah,
she was scolded by her school teachers and stoned by
classmates and yeah and um, and at nineteen o one
(07:16):
the family moved to Las Angea. UM. She eventually applied
for admission to the normal school while she was there,
but she was denied permission to enroll there. UM with
no explanation, but she later said that the reason was
because the reason she was rejected because the school knew
about her publications and her support of like liberalizing education
(07:39):
and giving people of all classes access, and that kind
of wasn't viewed favorably. Um, But school would become a
huge part of her life regardless of that fact. So
when she was fifteen, she began working as a primary
school teachers assistant in a remote town in the Andian Mountains,
(08:00):
and so she spent a lot of time visiting her
paternal grandmother, Isabel Villa Nueva, who would encourage her to
learn a lot more about the Bible. She like encouraged
her to recite from memory passages from the Bible. And
so Christianity and religion in spirituality, which we'll talk about
a little bit more, were like huge parts of Gabriella's
(08:23):
story and like what she what influenced her in writing
her poetry and all the themes in her poetry. So
she around this time had been sending a lot of
contributions to like newspapers, regional newspapers like Lavos de Elki
and Viguna and el Cokimbo in las Arangia and around
this time she also started to write poetry in addition
(08:45):
to the articles she was writing for newspapers, And so
early on she was already like imbued with this spirit
of like caring about education and specifically about like girls
and women's education. So yeah, in the in the nineteen
oh six article lin which is the education of women,
(09:05):
she said, let women be educated. Nothing in them requires
that they be set in a place lower than men.
And she started teaching secondary school in La Canteta in
nineteen o six, and by nineteen o nine she had
also taken on administrative rules in the schools. In nineteen
o eight when she first started using the pen name
Gabriela Mistral, and she was contributing to newspaper still in
(09:29):
literary magazines, just like a ton of work. And by
nineteen thirteen she had kind of like began using Mistral
as her pseudonym, just regularly basically and not using her
own name in her writing right. And her pen name
is said to have come from the names of two
different poets, are from the archangel Gabriel and the northerly wind,
(09:52):
the Mistral from southern France. And so she fell in
love with a a world employee named Rome Leo, and
he died by suicide in nineteen o nine, and that
greatly affected her in her poetry, at least according to critics.
(10:12):
A lot of critics said that that was that had
a huge impact on her poetry, and all that sorrow
that she had in grief that she had after the
death affected her. Although there have been people who said
that her sonnets which she wrote later, which we'll get to,
some people have said that he was the subject of
those while others have like a kind of said that
(10:35):
that he wasn't the subject of of those poems. They've
questioned it, they've questioned it, and um, we'll get to
that later. I won't even tease it. Um. So in
nineteen times she got her teaching certification, even though she
hadn't followed a normal course of study. UM. And over
(10:56):
the next few years she went on to become a
secondary school professor, an inspector general, and a school director.
She was um. She she worked her way up in
this school that like a lot of people were jealous
that she got into a big high school for girls
in Santiago. UM and so it would be it would
(11:17):
be exhaustive to like go through all of the schools
that she went to. She worked in a lot of
rural schools in today, and all of the work that
she did, um, but all those jobs gave her the
opportunity to know her country better and then many other
people who stayed there because she traveled so much and
worked with students so much, and you know, she had
(11:38):
this knowledge of the country and the geography and the
people's and those kind of became the basis for her
interest in national values and that, you know, all that
knowledge that she had coincided with the political and intellectual
knowledge about the country as a whole. And so when
she was twenty one, she met the minute stear of
(12:00):
Education Prota, who later became the President of Chile, and
so he would go on to help her expand the
reach of her poetry. Wow, So she remained, she kept teaching,
and she was dedicated to that and dedicated to education
and her whole life and promoting that. But she also
(12:23):
started getting into poetry at this time. So her name
became really wildly familiar because a lot of them were
included in a primary school reader that was used all
over the country and in Latin America. And she was
also an active member of the Chilean Theosophical Association and
adopted Buddhism as her religion at a certain point, though
she later returned to Catholicism. And so when I teased
(12:47):
earlier the sonnets, um, those are the sonnets on death,
and she wrote those in nineteen fourteen, and for that
this is kind of a defining moment in her life.
She won the Auegos Florads contest, and this poem is
like it helped her define her voice, and people began
(13:09):
viewing her narrative voice as her voice, like her autobiographical voice. Um.
And that was one marked a bolic sadness, loneliness, despair, passion, jealousy,
kind of all of those fields. Um. And throughout the
period of nineteen eighteen and nineteen twenty two she was
(13:31):
still working. She worked in three different schools, and about
the early nineteen twenties her poetry was published in a
lot of different magazines and literary journals. And so her
first book with desa Lacion, which was a collection of
poems that were previously published in newspapers and magazines, and
so Columbia University professor Ferico de Anice introduced her work
(13:52):
to high school teachers looking to expand Spanish language classes
in New York City, and a committee for that worked
on producing her book of poems that could be used
in US classrooms, and so, with a grant from the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace UM, the Instituto deles Aspanes
published the book in New York. So not Chile UM,
(14:16):
which we'll get to her story. Like she wasn't um
super widely recognized in Tila during her time she was,
but like she got a lot of international attention instead.
And so death, suffering, sadness, as you can tell by
the title desolation, you show up a lot inson and
(14:37):
so yeah, like I said, she was getting all this
international She was getting more and more international attention for
her poetry, which she had already had for her journalism
and her public speaking. UM. So she has a ton
of poems. And one of the things that was notable
about her poems was that they were very simple and understandable,
and that was a big reason they were used in
schools and people were drawn to them in on Spanish
(15:00):
speaking UM places that use them for education. UM. But
they're also still full even though they were simple of
emotion and they were warm, and so her poetry contained
all these things of love, death, childhood, maternity, religion. It
was lyrical but still unpretentious, and it had these religious
(15:23):
under and overtones, as she was a devout Christian. And
so in the University dot de Chile granted her the
professional title of the Teacher of Spanish and recognition of
her professional and literary contributions, and that same year, the
President of Mexico asked her to assist in the country's
(15:44):
education and reform effort, which is a project under the
direction of Education Minister Jose Vasconcellos, and she helped planning
and reorganizing the rural education in the country. And at
the same time she was learning about the people in
the country and the culture of the country. And so
while she was in Mexico, in nineteen twenty three, she
(16:06):
published a collection of essays called or Readings for Women
that included the works of classic and contemporary writers, including herself.
And after two years in Mexico, this is where we
get to the really traveling part. After two years in Mexico,
she traveled to Europe and the United States and she
was kind of welcomed warmly their officials and um she
(16:27):
was a featured speaker in nineteen four at the Pan
American Union headquarters. And this is another aspect of her life,
her pan Americanism and in Washington. So she was walking
to those headquarters in Washington when she was in the
United States, and so she championed pan Americanism, which is
a movement for the advocacy of close cooperation between the countries,
(16:48):
the member countries of North and South America. And she
said this in her address. She said, I believe that difference,
in the case of humanity as well as in nature,
is a merely another form of enrichment. In this way,
what is Latin, even in its sharpest contrast, when a
face to face with Anglo Saxonism is a kind of
(17:10):
strength through different virtues, through other modes of living, but
in no sense the occasion of inevitable discord. And she
went on to say, friendship of the different people's sought
by the Pan American Union would be easily attained if
we were all imbued to the farthest limit of consciousness
with the concept of dissimilarity without inferiority. So that kind
(17:30):
of gives a good view of like how she felt
about all her travels. What was like imbued in her work, Um,
how she felt about relations between people, and we know,
I mean, this was the nineteen twenties, what was going on.
And I only know about the United States of America
because you know, this is where I live, and but like,
we know what was going on here in the United
States of America, and everything wasn't like butterflies and rainbows.
(17:54):
Everybody wasn't getting along well you know. Um So it
does seem like very optimistic to me. But I think
a lot of that showed up in her poetry and
in her writing. Um so she also emphasized like how
important it was and how important she felt it was
(18:15):
to approach these ideals of continental unity through the application
of like Christian faith and value, so that religion showing
back up. And so years later, in N one, the
Pan American Union also commissioned her to write a pledge
for students to stay in the classrooms of all the
member states, and the players kind of said that North
and South Americans had this common destiny by way of
(18:38):
geographic unity. Um yeah, yeah, you have thoughts about that.
I wish it were true. I know, I know, I know,
because it's like at the same time, there was a
lot of imperialism going on from the United States itself,
and let's talking about you know that, and here specifically
(18:59):
directed to a lot American countries to like Cuba. UM.
But she also emphasized in the Pledge the right of
nations to self determination, and she was kind of anti imperialist.
So the list of titles and credits and a war
list of all of that goes on for her. Um.
She was appointed an executive member of the Institute of
(19:20):
Educational Cinematography in Rome, and so she kept writing poetry
as well. So her next book was which included poems
for children, was called Terra NeuRA or Tenderness, and that
was published in Madrid, and that contained themes of motherhood,
of childhood, of the world, and of nature. And so
(19:41):
she wanted the book to be and this is our quote,
poetry for school that does not cease to be poetry
because it's saturated of things of the heart, more affected
by the breath of the soul. I just love that.
Like I feel this is probably very stereotyping, but I
feel like poets always talking like speed poetry as well,
even when they're not writing poetry, or I like to
(20:03):
imagine that at least always a poet always do to
know exactly, but only the non self deprecating poets, because
self deprecating poets probably just cry, yeah, we're like my stuff,
or don't you know it's gonna burn anyway, It's true.
(20:26):
There is a lot more to this story, but first
we're gonna pause for a quick break or word from
our sponsor, and we're back. Thank you sponsored. So she
(20:49):
returned to ul A and and there she formally retired
from the country's education system, but throughout her whole life
she would receive a pension um so as the government
that the government at this time granted her retirement due
to her years of service and her contribution to the culture,
but she depended on that pension for the rest of
her life. And so she also returned to Catholicism around
(21:11):
this time, and she was a follower of Saint Francis
of Assisi, and she entered the Franciscan Order as a
member of Laity. And so she was appointed the country's
representative to the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation WHOA, which is
a part of the League of Nations. And in nineteen
six she moved to France. Um, which Annie you know well, yes, yes,
(21:38):
probably not as well as she did. Okay, are you
trying to get me to speak French? Oh no, leave
that to you. We'll see. My name is deceiving because
I'm really bad at speaking French. Um. You know, you
just gotta give it a go. Yeah. So, while one
(22:01):
language at a time. And while she was there, she
started the publication of a series of Latin American literary
classics in French translation. And she gave lectures and toured
around the United States around Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, Brasil, Uruguay,
and Argentina, among other places. And she lived mostly in
(22:22):
Italy and France from nineteen to nineteen thirty two. In
the ninety the Chilean Teachers Association sent her as its
delegate to the Congress of Educators at Locarno and more
more things, more accolades. She represented Chile and Ecuador at
the International University Federation in Madrid. And um, here's an
(22:46):
interesting personal part of her story. When she was living
in Provence, a brother that she didn't know that she had,
her father's son. Um left. His son was her as
his mother had just died. And you know, he became
a part of her life. Her Her mother died in
(23:07):
ninet so not long after that, and she wrote a
series of eight poems where at the Demi Madre about
you know, influenced by that. And so in nineteen thirty
the government suspended her retirement benefits and she began doing
more journalistic writing to make up for that lack of finances.
(23:31):
She's the suspended them. Yeah, she got it back. Though,
she got it back. Okay, I'm like worried for this person.
She made it through, you know. Yeah, she lived a
full life. She didn't and another thing she did to
you know, keep those finances following During that time, she
did a lot of um. She went to a lot
(23:51):
of universities. She was at Barnard College of Columbia University
from nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty one. She worked at
Middlebury College, a Vassador College and teen thirty one, and
she gave conferences and wrote at the University of Puerto
Rico ad Rio pier Ras. In the nineteen thirty two,
she became to Land consul and two years later Chilean
(24:14):
Congress named her the country's Soul Life Counsul. Yeah, so
this is also where a lot of her travel comes in.
She was in Naples, Madrid, Lisbon, Niece, Petropolis, Los Angeles,
Santa Barbara, Racruz, Rapayo, and New York and as a
(24:36):
consul she interacted with Pablo Naruta, who is a well
known poet and also a diplomat and a politician. And
when she was in when Gabriela was in Temuca in
southern Chile, when she was teaching, that's where Naruta grew up,
(24:58):
and so she had actually give in him books and
encouraged his talent um in Chula when he was younger.
So there is like Pablo Neruda's more of a probably
at the time more recognized into La for his work,
whereas she did a lot. She was very recognized internationally.
(25:20):
So she's widely quoted form in which she said this,
we are guilty of many errors and many faults, but
our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain
of life. Many of the things we need can wait,
the child cannot. Right now is the time his bones
are being formed, his blood is being made, and his
(25:42):
senses are being developed. To him, we cannot answer tomorrow.
His name is today. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's too
real today, too real, too real. Yeah so. In her
book tala Are Felling in English was publish in Buenos
Aires by the writer and critic Victoria Ocampo, and Gabriella
(26:05):
donated her author's rights for the book to Spanish children
who were displaced and orphaned by the Spanish Civil War.
And the book includes poems inspired by her mother's death
that that has showed up before and also poems divided
into three sections that weren't matter um verse about britt
saltwater and air land of Chile and America and after
(26:29):
World War Two, she also served as to Land delegate
to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women
until her death in nineteen fifty seven. So uh. She
also suffered more loss in her life of people who
are close to her, and nineteen forty two her friend
(26:52):
Stefan Zvik and his wife they died by suicide, and
in nineteen forty three her nephew, the the boy who
that she had adopted and raised as her son, who
I mentioned earlier, he died from arsenic poisoning and that
was ruled as a suicide, but um mr All believed
(27:14):
that he was murdered. Oh really, Yeah, that's rough. Yeah,
that is barely rough. And it was two years after
that ninety five when she became the first Latin American
to get the Nobel Prize in Literature. And she was
awarded the Nobel Prize for her lyric poetry, which inspired
(27:37):
by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of
the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world. M
her lyric poetry. What a year to get it too.
So near the end of her life she was writing
Poema de Chile, which was a long narrative poem that
she worked on but she never finished it. Um. And
(27:59):
she also in it she explored musical poetry for children
and poetry of nature. In the nineteen fifty one she
was awarded the National Literature Prize in tu l and
going back to talking about the Pablo Neruta thing, he
had already won the National Literature Prize into a years earlier. Um.
So Gabrielle's last book was leagd Or Wine Press, and
(28:20):
that was published in nineteen fifty four, her last book
during her lifetime, because she did have stuff published posthumously. Um.
She went back to Santiago in nineteen fifty four as well,
which was the first time she had been back to
Chile since nineteen thirty eight, So she didn't go back
to Chile much when she started. When she left, she
was like, I'm gone check out all these things. Yeah.
(28:41):
And she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in nineteen
fifty six. UM and the last years of her life
she lived in Rosalind, New York. She had diabetes and
she had also had heart issues, and she died in
Long Island of pancreatic cancer in January of nineteen five
d seven, when she was sixty seven years old. So
(29:03):
during her lifetime she published around eight hundred essays of
magazines and newspapers, and Ascessar earlier, she wasn't much celebrated
in Chile. Um and there were a lot of things
that were published posthumously for her. So Lanks and Hughes,
which who was a friend of hers, prepared the first
volume of her poetry translated into English, and that was
(29:25):
published in ninety seven, shortly after her death. Um And
she she also had schools and libraries named after her.
Her images on the five thousand to Land Paso bankonnote,
which is cool. Yeah, right, you want your money, your
your face on money, don't just right. There was this
(29:48):
image that formed of of Gabriela Mistral after she she died.
She had public success as a figure in the US
when she was alive, although a lot of people were
invoking her name and image in a certain way, as
little of her work appeared in English when she was alive,
and she criticized the US policy, and that could have
(30:11):
had something to do with the lack of placement of
her work in the US press because of this image
of like American, this pan americanism, this image of American
unity that she became a symbol of in a way,
and people also uplifted her image as being a figure
(30:33):
of national sentimentality. This conservative kind of said, you know, depressed,
lonely woman who kind of bent to the will of
the patriarchal state and exalted motherhood. Um and like this
this image of her being is a ver virgin Christian,
pure life of like maternal service. Thinking about all the
(30:57):
education that she was involved in during her lifetime and
the themes of her work itself kind of diametrically opposed
to this idea or these ideas of this image of
Pablo Neruda, who is atheist. You know, a lot different. Um.
But there has been since debate of her sexuality, with
(31:20):
a lot of people saying that she was a lesbian
and wasn't out about it, and even though she herself
denied it, she wrote that she was not a lesbian
and that the rumors were unfounded. They were silly American
doroth Dana, who was her friend and had inherited Garbadriella's
estate and they sent letters to each other that were
(31:40):
published after Dana died. Um, she's an executive her estate,
but after she died they were published in Spanish and
then later in English, not that long ago in English,
and they expressed a lot of love for each other
in these letters. And there's a there's a film out
there about Gadriella and her lesbianism. Um. Yeah, so that's
(32:04):
something that Okay, even though she is kind of one
of those said not said things. Um, it's something that's
still contested like whether she I don't think we need
to spend too much time on that, whether she was
a lesbian or not, but it is something that's been
brought up about her life. She was bisexual, and they
were just missing representing her altogether. Yeah, she would say
(32:26):
she was not just a straight lesbian. Yeah, well so
it did come up, how you know in her poems. Well,
thinking about the guy who died by suicide was the
subject of her poetry. Um A lot of the times
we can put hittero sexuality on a poem because that's
how we read it. So or that's the assumptions that
(32:47):
we make based on the paechriarchal system that we are
influenced by, brainwashed by. Um. So re kind of re
contextualizing everything that she wrote and instead of assuming that that, Okay,
maybe this relationship that she had with Doris Dana and
(33:08):
maybe with other people were um, you know, romantic relationships,
and for that reason we can reinterpret, you know, the
way her poetry was written. She wasn't this lonely, sad,
depressed woman who was like subject to the whims of
the patriarchy. And it's something that's still debated and contested,
(33:33):
but still her her work speaks for itself. This is
from one of her poems, and Fassando el frio grande
los mari posts and guilto Ian el adre amigo las
hostel Romeo helsine fasoltadas huelo, And that means as soon
(34:01):
as the big cold left, the butterflies returned. And in
the air, my friend is a sweet charmer and the
Rosemary leaves sway under their light. Angel and angel all
painted as if it were for real or just for play.
That's lovely, lovely and very excellent job. Yeah. I love
(34:23):
how she had a lot of her work was characterized
by you know, darkness and death and all this stuff.
But despite the things that she had gone through, she
still had this very it seems like hopeful streak and
and this desire to to help children or be there
for people who didn't have a voice, and she was
(34:45):
writing that voice. She's one of those who, much like me,
the people who consistently are in battle mode have to
let out their darkness somehow, so much like that gathers
within them because they're fighting a system, which she was
a fighter, seemingly with a social us this point as well,
and for children and for education and for women, and
so part of this poetry is to let out her
(35:08):
grief in the parts that she doesn't have to she
can't talk about consistently when she's in the middle of
trying to advocate for others, that's what it seems. Yeah,
and she saw it, and she saw so much in
her travel as well that it was a really turbulent time.
And I it was she lived a life of service essentially,
was a life of service. And so yeah, just her
(35:33):
her story as an inspiration for women and and for
poise and for writers and for people who want to
contribute to the world the things that they have to
give to the world, what they have to offer. And
it's very inspirational. It absolutely, she's very inspirational. She women
contained multitudes, and she contained many multitudes. She she accomplished
(35:58):
a lot. And yeah, we you would highly recommend going
finding her poetry and reading it checking it out. We
have some more for you listeners, but first we're going
to pause for one more QUICKI for to our sponsor.
(36:27):
Now we're back, Thank you sponsorb. Is that Do you
have anything else you want to add before we come
to an end? No, I want grace people with UM. Yeah,
I know that's all. Thank you. Oh, thank you so much.
(36:49):
That was yeah, awesome, awesome, um and uh oh yeah,
I'm just so glad to have learned about her. I
hope that let's nerds are as well. Um also just
behind the scenes side note, Eves and I bonded over SpongeBob,
swear pants and ad break and I feel very very
(37:10):
old as I was listening to the two of you
enjoy life and SpongeBob. Thank you. There shall be a
poem about that about SpongeBob. We can do maybe finding
joy and SpongeBob. Maybe we should this. I don't want
to take credit for this. This is a joint, you know,
a team effort, and then we'll do a dramatic reading
of it. Yes, for the office. We're not going to
tell them we're gonna do it. We're just gonna do
(37:32):
it like the joys of SpongeBob. Just occasionally there is
just a mic out in our like open areas, so
next time, yes, But it's usually like for meetings or something,
so next time. So why I The question is why
aren't we doing office talent shows? That is an excellent question, Eves.
(37:53):
I've actually thought about what talent I would do. Do
you ever worry about that kind of thing? But He's like,
it must perform at a talent show, and I'm like,
I have no talents, like I have no talents and
all that happened, it might at any minute. Movies tell
me that it could happen. We have to save the
world by singing a song you have. Yeah, well, it's
(38:15):
very important to your reputation unless your world that you
perform well at whatever talent show. I don't think i've
ever No, I've definitely competed in the talent show. I
did tap dancing. Can you tap dance? Still? I have
a really an embarrassing story about the talent show. Okay,
it's not that embarrassing. I feel like it's a normally
embarrassing story. Um, when I was in elementary school. When
(38:43):
I was in elementary school, we had a talent show,
and do you remember the song by LLL couj and
Jennifer Lopez. Um, you're laughing before. If you get it out,
it's okay, Andy. It was embarrassing. Um, I'm not going
to sing it now. But there was a song um
by j Lo and Llo Couja, and I was go, okay,
(39:05):
I'll see it. She was like, it's such a shame
that I'm leaving. Can'ta the way you mistreated me that song?
I'm not gonna keep sinking and Um, I think I
had Llo Couja's part and the girl who I was
performing with had j Loo's part, and she I'm pretty
sure was that way. It may have been the other way,
(39:26):
but I knew both parts anyway, Okay, so yeah, and
then she just totally flowed and forgot her works and
just like was stuck in the middle of the performance
and I had to like pick it up for her.
But and I did it, but I was crying in
the car after her, and I was so embarrassed. And
(39:49):
then a girl that I knew that I'm pretty sure
she was like a great older than me. But anyway,
a girl who was also I think she's also in
the UM in the Talent show knocked on my window
and she said, I will never her get her face
and she said, she like motioned putting her I'm putting
my fingers like as if there were two tears running
down my face, and like this is gonna be in
(40:09):
the show anything. Oh, now it is, And she was like,
I was crying too for you, No, not for me.
That would have been really nice. Um, but it was
pretty embarrassing. But I still know that my heart did right.
And you just felt embarrassed. I mean, I guess yeah,
but like when you were a kid, everything words. I
(40:31):
did a talent show and I sang a Maria Carry song,
which by the way, I did not hit that note,
just so you know. But then I performed with a
girl who it was just like three or four of us.
There's not even that many of us to do this
talent show. And she had her whole it was a
little mermaid song. She had a set, she had the
costume and everything. And I came in with my one
(40:52):
bad tape of the Mariah Carrey songs. I really messed up.
So that's my memories. I'm like, I'm sing Maria Carry again.
It feels what you're saying exactly. We're going to do it.
And curious, this is your redemption story. I see you
want to call j j Lo and you're gonna do
my partner. Though I never really messed at the top dancing.
(41:14):
Oh yes, I did fall off the stage once, but
that was a different that was a different thing. Never
falling off stage. Well, it's the sound people make when
a young child falls off the stage. I won't soon
(41:36):
forget it. And I broke my ankle. Oh but now
everyone is up to speed on what we're going to
do at the talent show. Uh, and our SpongeBob home
will keep everybody up to date on that SpongeBob songs.
But in the meantime, Eve, thanks again for joining us.
Where can listeners find you? Hear you? You can hear
(42:00):
me on this day in history class as well as unpopular,
and you can find both of those on all the
social media things Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Yeah yeah, and highly
recommend checking them out. Can't wait until you come back? Yes, Um,
he just do this twice a month, get this once
(42:22):
a month. He's just like we do. Here's the media.
We just do the one person split up in two
with all of our side bits attitude. You've got something there,
I mean some content. We could have a segment that's
called just just the Bits. I like it all right,
Well look out for that or maybe don't. It sounds
(42:46):
like it could be sexual, yeah a little. You know
people like de blon thunder Right. It won't be sexual
because it won't exist, but you know what does exist.
Our email address you can find us at Steff Media
mom stuff at iHeart media dot com, or on Instagram
at stuff I've Never told you are on Twitter at
(43:06):
mom Stuff podcast. Thanks as always to our super producer
Andrew Howard, and thanks to you for listening Stuff I've
Never told you the production of I Heart Radio's how
Stuff First Promore podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart
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