2023-08-13 05:05:57
The Chilean Embassy in Argentina recently released a four and a half minute video that was intended to be a tribute to the poet Gonzalo Rojas, who died in 2011. The video caused a small scandal because it was riddled with errors: biographical (it said that the poet was born in 1914 instead of 1916), bibliographic (he assigned two works that actually belong to the Mexican Alí Chumacero) and orthographic. But what was most striking was that when the poet’s voice was heard reading his poem “I see a fast river shine like a knife”, the actress on the screen read Poema de Chile by Gabriela Mistal. Leaving aside the reasons for the misunderstanding –we are not interested: poetry is a beautiful country, but this is a matter that Chileans have to settle–, it is at the same time understandable, I would even say reasonable, that the name of Gabriela Mistral has risen positions in such an equivocal and violent way, almost as if in Chile reading a book of poetry was synonymous with reading Mistral, or as if Chileans read Mistral even when they read Gonzalo Rojas.
A secret modesty leads me not to believe that the reason for this fanaticism is that the first president of Chile, the young Gabriel Boric, once said that he was his favorite poet. That a president is responsible for the impulse given to a poet is something that sounds shameful even for those who feel the same interest in poetry as in the sexual life of clams. So that explanation is ruled out from the start. What happens is something else. Let’s see if we can unravel something.
Like Pablo Neruda, Mistral used a pseudonym. His real name was Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, and hers was Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga. Like Neruda, Mistral was involved in politics and was a diplomat. And just like Neruda won the Nobel Prize, only twenty-six years before him, in 1945.
I don’t know what Mistral is like as a poet, I no longer inhabit those places, but I know that the Pinochet dictatorship, during the 70s and 80s, took care of spreading a wrong image of her. Pinochet took power in 1973, and by then Neruda was something of the national poet, only an atheist and communist national poet, which meant that the new regime needed a new national poet, and Mistral was a better fit.
The poet had died sixteen years before and was not well known. Taking advantage of this ignorance of her, the dictatorship was able to promote a somewhat distorted image of her, insisting on certain aspects of her biography more than others, particularly her work as a rural teacher and her Catholic faith. She appeared on the 5,000-peso bills, where she appeared as an old woman, with a serious and stern expression (nobody ever laughs on the bills), and her poems began to appear in school textbooks, ignoring her political essays, her pacifist orientation and feminist, and skipping some aspects of her private life. It is always convenient for the mothers of the country to be spinsters, and above all it is not convenient for them to be lesbians.
But something happened in the 1990s: Mistral’s image began to mutate, especially after 2007, when the epistolary exchange she had with Doris Dana, an American writer thirty years her junior who for many years was hers, was published. in presenting herself as a “benefactor” of the poet. Today the figure of Mistral, her poetry and her writings are well known, and she became a symbol for many feminists and for the Chilean Lgbtq + community. It is so well known that her books appear where Gonzalo Rojas’s books should be.
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