Sherry Chandler

Gabriela Mistral

I have been reading Randall Couch’s translation Madwomen, the Locas mujeres poems of Gabriela Mistral (University of Chicago, 2008).

In his introduction to this bilingual edition, Couch says

As a channel for “the song that comes,” Mistral’s medium was ventriloquy. In the dramatic monologues of the “madwomen,” the poet plays the part of prophet or sibyl, speaking through the masks of personae. To the extent that they form a composite portrait, the poems imply a fragmented subject: as songs of experience, they question the possibility of a unitary subject—a mujer who is not loca—in the face of extreme conditions. Here, as in her earlier work, it is specifically the experience of women that exposes the costs of history and the madness of a calculus that accepts those costs.

Because I am ignorant of both South American culture and the Spanish language, I feel I was not able to read these poems well. Where I could connect best was with poems where I was familiar with the back story: Martha and Mary, Electra, Antigone, Clytemnestra, Cassandra.

From “Martha and Mary:”

Martha and Mary were born together,
lived together, ate together.
They closed the same doors,
drank from the same cistern.
The same grove watched them,
and the same light robed them.

Martha’s dishes clinked,
her porridge-pot bubbled.
Her henyard teemed with doves,
with red cocks and plover.
Coming and going, Martha
was lost in a cloud of feathers.

In a whirlwind, she would rule
over meals and linens,
the winepress and beehives,
the minute, the hour, and the day . . .

And wherever she went, all things
voiced a wounded cry to her:
crockery, latches, doors,
as to their bellwether;
and for her sister they grew hushed,
spinning tears and Ave Marias.

From “Electra in the Mist”

Now she doesn’t breathe the Aegean Sea.
Now she’s more dumb than a tumbled stone.
Now she does no good or ill. She is without works.
She names me not, loves me not, hates me not.
She was my mother, and I was her milk,
nothing more than her milk turned blood.
Only her milk and her profile, moving or asleep.

From “Clytemnestra”

The little creatures know by the air,
and the ten fountains by the great shout,
that Agamemnon cast on the pyre
like cypress-pine or common cress
the lamb that slept in my arms,
that suckled my milk like a fawn
and, from my milk, was lithe and white.

The ragged shout of the crowd came
without a breeze to these thousand doors,
when her back the color of the myrtles
fell to the flame and the flame took her.
The crowd howls against heaven
as if drunk, whipped up by the fire,
the name of its King and not that of my lamb,
it dances and belches victory shouts,
swarms like ants, deafened by drums,
belches, dances, bellowing to its gods,
and she, Iphigenia, falls, falls, falls,
while I, walled in so near the pyre,
claw at the bolted palace doors.

Possibly related posts:

Songs of Experience?

Chaucer’s cat

Mary O’Dell offers summer poetry series

William Wordsworth on his Birthday

Preacher Piney

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