Paula Bloom

Thesis Proposal

Fall 2000

Gender Masks in Translation: Delmira Agustini and Gabriela Mistral

Mask: noun (1) : a cover or partial cover for the face used for disguise

2 : something that serves to conceal or disguise : PRETENSE, CLOAK

b: something that conceals from view

Myth: noun 2 a : a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone; especially : one embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society

b: an unfounded or false notion

(Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition)

Introduction.

This proposal was born of a desire to combine my interests in translation, gender issues, and poetry. It began with a serendipitous reading of Luise von Flotow's Translation and Gender, in which she recounts how gender has become and continues to be a significant issue in translation studies, ending with a thought-provoking chapter that suggests projects for future study. Among these proposed projects, the one I found particularly interesting is the re-examination of translations of women's writing. This struck me because it recalled an essay I had read recently by Sylvia Molloy, which discusses a strategy used by many twentieth-century Latin American women writers and their critics in the pursuit of acceptance (or acceptability) by a predominantly male literary community (Molloy, 1991). Citing a process termed by Joanna Russ "Denial by False Categorizing" (1983:49-61), Molloy describes a tendency by Latin American critics to identify women authors through the dramatization of their personal characteristics. Therein lies the origin of the "myths" tied to two twentieth-century Latin American writers, Delmira Agustini and Gabriela Mistral: Agustini as the lustful virgin, and Mistral as the spiritual mother. Whereas these epithets were presumably intended by the ruling male community to distract the reader from the text and draw attention to the image, the woman writer adeptly appropriated these "masks" in order to create, subconsciously or not, a persona through which she gains access to and acceptance by the dominant social and creative circles of her time.

In her discussion, Molloy mentions, among others, Delmira Agustini and Gabriela Mistral as two writers who clearly adopted this strategy: Agustini as "La Nena" and Mistral as "The Schoolteacher of America." What is intriguing about these writers is not so much their conscious posturing as is the apparent discrepancy between their masks and their poetry. The "virginal" Agustini wrote erotic, overtly sensual verses, while the "exemplary" Mistral wrote what have recently been interpreted as expressions of her unspoken lesbianism.

Reading these two essays within a short period of time caused me to question whether translations of Agustini and Mistral's writing have been influenced in any way by both the masks utilized by the poets and the myths perpetuated by their critics. Have translators been affected by the perceptions of these two writers such that certain word choices and anthology selections perpetuate their respective personae, and thus ensure their survival? By probing the masks and myths associated with Agustini and Mistral, I do not mean to suggest that there is necessarily a clear-cut division between the mask and the writer, or the woman and the myth, and therefore assume that they constitute a deliberate, willful "performance". Especially in the case of Mistral, this is almost impossible to know, and is in any case irrelevant. I mean only to put forth the idea that both subtle and overt discrepancies between persona and poem, between mask and text, may have skewed to some degree not only the way they have been portrayed in their native culture and language, but how we have received them in translation.

The thesis will consist of a lengthy, more detailed introduction than the one found here, in which I discuss the possible links regarding masks and texts in translation. I will also discuss this phenomenon more specifically with regard to Mistral and Agustini. Since gender issues in translation studies are central to this project, I will devote the first chapter to a discussion of gender and its effect on translation theory. In this section I will establish a theoretical framework within which to formulate my discussions of Agustini and Mistral in the subsequent chapters. I will base this framework on a combination of (feminist) literary and translation theories. Poetry has been theorized as a multiplicity (Paz, 1971), as has "women's language" (based on the theory that Ôwoman' cannot be limited to one fixed notion, that of being man's Ôother') (Irigaray, 1977), and recently translation has undergone its own theoretical revision. Whereas translators historically have been assumed or expected to "remove" themselves from their work, I take as a fundamental premise that translation practice is always a political activity (see De Lotbinie-Harwood, 1991). The second chapter will concentrate on Delmira Agustini and the marked dissemblance between her public persona and her writings. I will then evaluate several anthologies of translations of her poetry, including prefaces that introduce the poet to the reader, and attempt to establish a link between the myths and the editions of the translations analyzed. Gabriela Mistral will be the focus of the third chapter. This section will deal with the very public persona Mistral appears to have constructed carefully, as well as the kinds of poems she produced and those for which she is most famous. Contrasted alongside this picture will be some alternate readings of her poems that take into account the forceful nature of much of her poetry and her often overlooked lesbianism offered by recent scholarship, both of which would appear to contradict her identity as the delicate, modest Spiritual Mother. Here, too, I will attempt to draw a connection between past translations of her poetry as well as the stories of her life which often accompany them, and the myths on which her mask is based. Finally, in the last chapter titled "Future Perspectives", I suggest alternative translations to those discussed in the previous two chapters, wherein I will question past translations as well as traditional anthology selections according to feminist translation theories and practices. This chapter will consist of translations informed by a "gender-interrogated" (see Maier, 1992) approach in which I seek to challenge those myths so consistently perpetuated by popular folklore.

Chapter I. Gender in Translation and Feminist Translation Theory

The issue of gender as an important analytical category has its roots in the women's movement that began in the late 1960's in North America and Western Europe and gained momentum with other protest movements of the same time. Feminists began to examine the socio-cultural processes that determined woman's inferior status in society. Early use of the term "gender" referred to the socialization of woman as opposed to her biologically determined "sex" and gender as an analytical tool became increasingly highlighted in various fields during the 1970's. Many important feminist works, such as He Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1976) were crucial in shifting the focus from social, political, or psychoanalytical subjugations of women, to examinations of the ways language itself is a means by which women have been relegated to an inferior status, silencing their artistic expression. The study of language as a political tool helped to elucidate the "constructed" female role, an idea put forth by Simone de Beauvoir when she declared "On ne na pas femme, on le devient" in her pioneering feminist work of 1949, Le deuxie sexe. The notion that women are socially conditioned to act, think, and function in a patriarchal culture by means of external factors sought to debunk the traditional belief that women possess "essential" feminine qualities.

The discussion of woman's traditionally subordinated role in society, and the ways in which patriarchal oppression of women has been expressed, implemented, and sustained in culture, eventually expanded the inquiry of "woman" to include "man". Feminism, therefore, was extended to embrace debates not only of female roles in society, but of gender roles in general. These discussions were intended to elucidate the difference between sex and gender, the "performance" of our specific male and female roles, and how these performances have affected and continue to affect all aspects of human development and production (see Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, 1990).

Given that these gender debates called into question the use of language as a political tool, patriarchal language became an important topic of scrutinization. During the 1970's, the work of many feminist theorists, such as Mary Daly, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, studied how language reflects and contributes to women's inferior social status as well as to psychological disorders (Irigaray, 1977). Elaine Showalter studied women's limited access to writing, publishing, and the public influence granted by these activities (Showalter, 1986). Throughout all of these debates concerning patriarchal language, gender issues were a main theme.

Translation deals with language transfer, thus issues of gender have necessarily impacted the field of translation studies. Since feminism and the subsequent gender issues it introduced sought, among other things, to problematize the use of language and its use as a means (or cause) of repression, it is hardly a coincidence that translation practices began to be questioned and approaches revised at about the same time as feminism was becoming an increasingly polemicized issue in and out of Academia. The role of the translator, classically considered to be invisible or inferior to that of the original writer, was soon highlighted and questioned as to the extent that it has been and continues to be used as a politically charged instrument in gender representation.

The repercussions of gender as an analytical category in translation have been extensive. The most general manifestation has been a proliferation of prefaces by the translator, explaining his or her approach to translation and the criteria involved in making certain language choices. These explanations reflect perhaps a certain level of discomfort caused by the scrutinization of their role. Some translators have attempted to resolve their anxiety by intervening in the text, interspersing footnotes and asides in order to include the original passage alongside its translated version, or to explain the difficulty in translating certain words or expressions in footnotes. Carol Maier, upon translating the work of Octavio Armand (1985), and Suzanne Jill Levine, faced with translating that of Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1983, 1991), have reevaluated their roles as female translators of work containing sexist language, and confronted the discomfort it provokes in them. Levine has engaged in some "corrections" of what she considers male writing denigrating to women, justifying her re-writing as an act of feminist reinvindication (1983). However, more extreme results of gender issues in translation are seen in so-called "radical" feminist translation, such as those by Susanne de Lotbinie-Harwood. She ascribes to a strict feminist code in her translations, engaging in "feminist translation intervention" and translating solely the work of women authors. In her book, The Body Bilingual: Translation as Rewriting in the Feminine, de Lotbinie-Harwood maintains that no act of translation is neutral; that translation is necessarily a political endeavor. She deliberately draws attention to her interventionist method of "rewriting in the feminine," the purpose of which is to make women visible in language. Some of her tactics include "feminizing" those generic, masculine forms in French which refer to both men and women; she inverts word order and creates neologisms which reflect "non-sexist grammatical transcription[s] comprising both genders" (1989: 25). This type of interventionist feminist translation reflects the broadly-termed "radical" approach to gender-bias in language in that it views language as a cause of oppression, rather than as a symptom.

Another result of the problematization of gender in translation has been the re-examination of past translations of women's writing. How have translators historically negotiated the texts of women writers? Are they translated differently? These types of issues have created new critical readings of the translations of women writers. For example, Barbara Godard (1991b) focuses on conventional translations of important women's work, criticizing in particular the English translation of Luce Irigaray's Speculum de l'autre femme, completed by Gillian Gill in 1985 and published by an American university press. Godard claims that by molding the text to fit into the ideological and behavioral models of the target language, the result was a Ômonosemic' text, which effectively erased the multiple layers of feminist meaning expressed by Irigaray's use of language, such as in word-play. Margaret Simons (1983) and Luise von Flotow (1997) recount the case of Simone de Beauvoir's Le deuxie sexe, translated as The Second Sex by Howard Parshley, an American professor of zoology, in 1952. In his translation, Parshley omitted entire sections detailing a lineage of influential women in history; he left out references to lesbianism and other cultural taboos; discussions regarding the tedious routine of women's daily lives were deleted. This gross mistranslation in turn affected the book's critical reception: without comment by the translator and thus read as if it were the original text, de Beauvoir was criticized by some feminists for perpetuating clich of female sexuality and for including incoherent arguments. This is the same English translation widely available today.

Exposure of these kinds of mistranslations of women writers' work is an important point of departure for feminist translators today. It has forced translators to reconsider the role of gender in the translation process and the ways they do so. Carol Maier, in her article "Issues in the Practice of Translating Women's Fiction" points out that many feminist translators employ the terms "woman" and "feminism", unconcerned with their definitions (Maier, 1998: 95). Maier advocates a translation practice that remains open to continuous interrogation and re-definitions of gender identities, "to counter the restrictions of a gender-based identity by questioning gender as the most effective or the most appropriate point of departure for a translator's practice" (Maier, 1998: 102). To this end, she proposes a "woman-interrogated" approach, requiring the translator to constantly throw "woman" into question. I believe one possible point of departure in striving to accomplish this is the examination of the ways translators have approached women's writing in the past, and of the methods employed today. Have male translators, who historically have cast themselves as "guardians" of the "purity" of the text (see Lori Chamberlain's "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation" [1988/1992]), extended this metaphor to the women writers they translate? Do they unwittingly seek to protect the woman writer's "virtue"? How might feminist translators today, more aware of their identities as gendered rewriters, address misconceptions or mistranslations of women writers through their own approaches to translation?

The task of feminist translation theorists is to examine the processes through which translation sustains and stimulates gender constructs. This may be done by addressing issues such as those mentioned here (reevaluation of translations, interventionist methods, interrogation of gendered terms and linguistic constructions, etc.) and by seeking ways to transform historically clich translation practices. "Gender awareness in translation practice," states Von Flotow, "poses questions about the links between social stereotypes and linguistic forms, about the politics of language and cultural difference, about the ethics of translation, and about reviving inaccessible works for contemporary readers. It highlights the importance of the cultural context in which the translation is done" (1997:14). I am interested in taking this concept of gender awareness in translation one step further, to the cultural context in which the texts originate, in order to ponder the extent to which the power of an female icon affects translation practice.

How might this kind of gender awareness elucidate readings of the translations into English of Delmira Agustini and Gabriela Mistral? Theirs are not clear-cut cases of patriarchal oppression of feminine expression. Both writers were well-known in their time, especially Mistral who in 1945 won the Nobel Prize. Yet it is precisely the public recognition of their work and the problematic nature of their own participation in creating their public image that make their cases so intriguing. Due to the complexity of their self-representation as well as the public perception of both of these Latin American women poets, I believe there is value in revisiting the ways in which translators have approached their work. Yet before broaching the subject of translation and what I see as the conditions ofpossibility for translations of their work, it is necessary first to account for the complexity of these poets' personae, the reasons they have been problematic for their readers, and finally why they may have been so, as well, for their translators.

Chapter II. Delmira Agustini: "La Nena"

Delmira Agustini stunned the Montevideo literary community when she published her first book, El libro blanco, in 1907. Her collection contained verses which would only increase in intensity in her later publications, Cantos de la mana in 1910 and Los cices vacs in 1913: erotic, ominous, at times vampirish verses - certainly not expected of an upper middle-class, fiercely sheltered young woman of her day. In an effort to accept this brazen kind of poetry from a young woman, she was repeatedly subjected to what Sylvia Molloy terms "animiento" (Molloy, 1984). This process began early in her literary career: the publication of her first poem in a journal in 1902 was accompanied by a description of her as "una ni de 12 as" when in fact Agustini was 16 years old (Rodruez Monegal, 1969). The next year in another publication, she was described as "una verdadera joya, un 'bijou'", going on to depict her as "delicada", "una virgen", "un palo de rosa" with "manecitas de muca". This deliberate portraiture of Agustini as "La Nena" as she was known, had as its primary motivation the patronizing, condescending desire of her patriarchal milieu to ensure her position as an naive and virginal (read inferior) girl, who by strange happenstance, produced erotic poetry. Rub Dar - the principal ideologue of modernismo and Agustini's "precursor" (see Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, 1973) - participated in this process, for in his Ptico to her collection Los cices vacs, Dar describes Agustini's "inocencia", calling her "esta ni bella" (Agustini was 26 years old), attributing her verses to the result of her "fantas".

"Fantasy" was one of the ways Agustini's readers tried to explain the explicit eroticism of her verses. Another was the attempt to attribute it to "metaphysical" musings (Zum Felde, 1945). Her contemporaries chalked it up to a split personality, believing she was schizophrenic (Rodruez Monegal, 1969). This need to find explanations for her verses shows that there was a clear gulf between her image, as La Nena, and her verses. Even Miguel de Unamuno was compelled to comment on "esa extra obsesi que tiene usted de tener entre las manos, unas veces la cabeza del amante, otras veces la de Dios" (cited in Molloy, 1984). It was rumored that during her writing sessions, she would enter a trance-like state, in which not a sound would be tolerated while she produced her verses, and that when finished, she would return to her normal, "nenita" personality (Rodruez Monegal, 1969).

This is not to say that Delmira Agustini fulfills a neat paradigm of victim/oppressor. There is ample evidence to suggest that she played an active role in cultivating her image as La Nena, that she strove to portray herself as an ingenue in life, while portraying another, contradictory image in her verses. The research on her correspondence reveals that she deliberately wrote in a childlike way, signing her letters "La Nena", and addressed her fiancand later husband, Enrique Job Reyes, "Papito" (Molloy, 1984). Testimonies of her teachers reveal that she was fiercely sheltered by a neurotic, controlling mother who schooled her at home and accompanied her daughter when she left the house. Others attest to the dramatic change in Delmira's behavior when her mother left the room (Rodruez Monegal, 1969). These accounts, whether or not they are completely accurate, have contributed to the aura of mystery associated with Agustini. Further adding to the intrigue are the events leading to her violent death. Agustini left her husband two months after their wedding and became one of the first to make use of the newly passed divorce law in Uruguay. In a letter to Manuel Ugarte, she describes herself as having reluctantly thrown herself into the dark abyss of marriage. What remains confusing is that during the divorce proceedings, she apparently continued to meet Reyes, and it was during one of these meetings that Reyes murdered her and then shot himself, when Agustini was 28 years old.

Considering the drama associated with the events of her life, one could argue that Delmira Agustini's poetry was an attempt to create a space outside the socially acceptable norms, and that the erotic verses served to subvert her repressive personal and cultural circumstances. Considering Agustini's complex public image and her own involvement in the creation of her mask, I wonder how her readers and translators have attempted to resolve the persona with the poetry. Has the problematic relationship between her poetry and her self-representation affected the way translators have interpreted her work, and if so, how?

IIa. Selection of Anthologies to be studied.

Swan, Cygnets, and Owl: An Anthology of Modernist Poetry in Spanish America of 1956 contains translations by Mildred E. Johnson, including poems by Agustini. A brief introduction to the poet attributes some of her verses to "beautiful fantasy," effectively passing on the myth first put forth by her contemporaries (p. 130). My presumption is that the informed reader (and I presume that in order to translate well one should be an informed reader) must take into account the "irreconcilability" of Agustini's myth and verses, and that this irreconcilable notion must, to some extent, color the manner in which a translator chooses to present Agustini to the English-speaking reader. Furthermore, her poetry is unilaterally derided as inferior to those of her Modernista counterparts:

While the lyric quality of Agustini's poetry is undeniable, it must be admitted that her expression is very narrow as to subject matter. All of her poems are the product of her own frustrated love. In all fairness to the poet, it should be noted that these verses are the expression of a very youthful person who had hardly had time to develop a breadth of vision even if she had the ability. Agustini's poems have the disadvantage of losing identification with the reader, who is inclined to interest himself in what the poems reveal about Agustini's life, rather than allow his own poetic being to communicate with her. Certainly one would not find fault with the poetry as artistic expression. One might find fault with the intensely personal quality of it (1956:28)

On the one hand, this interpretation unquestioningly assumes that all of Agustini's verses are necessarily autobiographical in nature ("all of her poems are the product of her own frustrated love") - a faulty assumption about a writer whose poetry, beyond revealing solely erotic inner musings, could also be an expression of the creative experience (see Chaves Abad's "Delmira Agustini: La Nena"). On the other, this assumption is the basis of the conclusion that Agustini is an inferior writer, since the personal nature of her writing distracts the reader (an opinion which assumes that an intensely personal expression is an undesirable quality in poetry). Finally, the statement that Agustini was too young to develop her talents, "even if she had the ability" leaves little doubt in the reader's mind as to the quality of her writing.

Emir Rodruez Monegal's edition of The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature of 1977 certainly falls into the trap of "the myth of innocence" associated with Delmira Agustini. He is extremely careful to emphasize that the sensuality expressed in her verses was in no way based on "real" experience, instead attributing her passions to "dreams of sensuality." Most authoritatively, he pronounces that

...she did not know that much. Her eroticism was, like Leonardo's concept of painting, una cosa mentale. She borrowed her experience from poetry, not from real life. (his emphasis)

The rest of the introduction - which refers to the poet as Delmira, opting to continue the practice begun by the critics of her time - continues to focus primarily on her biographical as well as physical characteristics. The first reason given for Rub Dar's interest in Agustini is that "...he was fascinated by her beauty (she was fair and had the pink fleshiness men adored in those days)," tacking on thereafter, almost as an afterthought: "and liked her poetry very much." Monegal postulates that Agustini continued to see her ex-husband clandestinely, "because she finally realized that erotic dreams had little to do with real sex," and concludes:

What we know is that all the eroticism she was capable of was (and is) her poetry. There, like volcanic lava petrified forever, one would find a poetic imagination that dwelt in emptiness and fire, in thirst and anguish, in unrequited metaphorical passion.

Here one clearly sees the myth at work: Agustini is presented to the English-speaking reader as "La Nena," as the childish ingenue whose erotic poetics are unquestionably rooted in fantasy, metaphor, and dreams. The reader of this anthology has no choice but to read her verses as such, having been given little else to focus on but her physical characteristics and sexual fantasies.

The sole poem chosen for inclusion the anthology, "My Loves" from "Mis amores," translated by Donald Walsh, supports the image held up by the editor. It exalts an abundance of fetishized, imagined lovers "to all, all of them, I managed to link a dream". The lover for whom the poet searches among many others is described as "the dark head that I have never touched..." thus effectively bearing out the premise of the editor that this eroticism is a product of fantasy, and is therefore acceptable from a young female writer. One must wonder whether a male poet would undergo similar scrutiny with regard to"real" sexual experience.

An anthology of a different tone is found in The Defiant Muse: Hispanic Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present. A compilation of over thirty-five Hispanic female authors, this collection from 1986 highlights the literary production of women throughout the ages. Given its scope, the attention paid each author is necessarily limited. Nevertheless, framing these writers as "feminists" offers a new perspective to the English-speaking reader regarding Hispanic women writers. The very brief introduction to Agustini's work by the editors, Angel Flores and Kate Flores, takes a small yet important step towards a new reading of the poet:

Delmira Agustini [...], probing the essence of female passion and finding an elemental need for an intellectual and spiritual content, rejected purely physical love as incapable of generating the "new breed" she longed for.

Ommiting biographical details and focusing on her poetic motivation, this excerpt succeeds in granting Agustini an intellectual element to her poetics, which is often overlooked when its erotic nature is read as purely autobiographical. Yet it fails to go any further, perhaps for lack of space. But the "new breed" mentioned in reference to Agustini's famous "Otra estirpe" might have been interrogated as to its possible demand for another "lineage", as opposed to "breed". That this writer in search of another lineage is a woman, considering her historical, social, and literary milieu, suggests a more problematic reading of her search than does the attribution of her desire for "otra estirpe" solely to the influence of Nietzsche (see John R. Burt's "Agustini's Muse").

Chapter III. Gabriela Mistral: "The Spiritual Mother of America"

The case of Gabriela Mistral is similarly intriguing. Although critics have only recently begun to propose new types of readings, her poetry has been traditionally lauded as models for maternal and children's literature. Mistral, to a greater extent than did Agustini but perhaps for similar reasons, created for herself a specific, socially acceptable persona. She promoted herself as "The Schoolteacher of America", and as "Spiritual Mother" of all children of Latin America. The difference between Agustini's poetic production, and that of Mistral, is that many of Mistral's verses and essays clearly support this image. For example, her collection of verses directed toward female schoolchildren, Lecturas para mujeres, is intended as required reading in the hopes of producing a "good (female) national subject" (Licia Fiol-Matta, 1995). Mistral tailored her discourse specifically towards women, but not necessarily towards feminist purposes. While some feminist critics have seen in Mistral the laudable creation of a female community, and therefore a shining example of "feminine writing", others have considered her subject matter - the sanctity of motherhood, children's literature, (heterosexual) love, and the privileging of maternity over all other female attributes and purposes - embarrassing for Latin American feminism. Mistral, who never married or had children, was widely acknowledged as a lesbian in literary and social circles. Yet because her public image was based on the culturally accepted vision of womanhood, that of Mother and Teacher, her lesbianism was effectively suppressed or ignored by the community she worked so hard to represent. For this reason Mistral remains a troublesome figure, causing some to view her writings and persona as a site for possible homophobic expression. Another aspect of Mistral's work overlooked by the "mask" is the underlying darkness to many of her poems: verses pointing to turbulent emotions of jealousy, vengeance, and foreboding ("Dios lo quiere," "Balada," "Coplas," for example).Nevertheless, her maternal spirituality is the enduring image for which she is best remembered, and which is most easily found in depictions of her life and work.

Indeed, the speech given by Hj. Gullberg of the Swedish Academy in 1945, to bestow upon Mistral the Nobel Prize for Literature, attests to the "legend" of her life, and to the fame this has brought her:

The story of Gabriela Mistral is so well known among the people of South America that in going from country to country she has become almost a legend.

The citation also recounts the well-known story of Mistral's fatal love affair, which is described as her "destiny":

It was [in the village of Cantera], at the age of twenty, that her destiny was fulfilled. A railroad man worked in the same village, and a passionate love affair developed between them.

Going on to describe her lover's "betrayal" by suicide, the speech likens Mistral to Job, who

cried aloud to the skies that had allowed this to happen. From that valley lost in the barren, burning mountains of Chile came a voice that men heard far and near. A banal tragedy of every day life lost its private character and became part of world literature. [...] The provincial little school teacher, this young colleague of Miss Lagerl of Marbacka, was to become the spiritual queen of all Latin America.

Having established dramatically the tragic romance of her legend, the speech then turns its attention to her frustrated maternity:

Gabriela Mistral shared her maternal love with the children whom she taught. It was for them that she wrote those simple songs and those rounds collected in Madrid in 1924 under the title Ternura, Tenderness. Once in her honor four thousand Mexican children sang her rounds. Gabriela Mistral became the poet of motherhood by adoption.

The citation concludes by invoking again the regal nature of her stature, and by re-emphasizing Mistral's maternal, culturally appropriate, verses:

Within a few minutes I have related for the countrymen of Selma Lagerl, as if it were a story, the amazing journey that has taken you from the desk of a school mistress to the throne of poetry. It is to render homage to the riches of Spanish American literature that we address ourselves today especially to its queen, the poet of Desolaci, who has become the great singer of mercy and motherhood.

The speech given by the Swedish Academy at once firmly established the myth of Mistral by using the language of mythology ("the story of Gabriela Mistral", "legend", "Mistral, like Job, cried aloud to the skies", "the amazing journey"); it placed Mistral on a regal pedestal ("spiritual queen of all Latin America", "poet of motherhood", "great singer of mercy and motherhood"); and at the same time it pulled her back down to ensure her acceptance by the male literary community ("provincial little schoolteacher", "young colleague"). In this way, they effectively endorsed and disseminated for the world the (acceptable) legend of Mistral the Spiritual Queen of Motherhood, while they simultaneously undermined her merit by couching their praises in the condescending language of patriarchy. This is the same legend which would inform readers for years to come.

Fortunately, recent investigations of Mistral's persona and writings encourage new readings of Mistral. One of the first in this direction is Santiago DaydTolson's recognition that many of Mistral's poems depicting a mother and child are in fact archetypes in Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child. This type of elucidation is important in that it moves away from the strictly biographical interpretation of her poems dealing with motherhood. Rather than assume that the Spiritual Mother in the verses is Mistral the author, it is possible to see an archetypal depiction of motherhood that doesn't necessarily represent Mistral's own inner desires.

Another example of what is perhaps the most revolutionary in recent Mistral scholarship is Licia Fiol-Matta's article "'The Schoolteacher of America.' Gender, Sexuality and Nation in Gabriela Mistral". In her essay, Fiol-Matta seeks to fashion interpretations of possible homosexual expression in Mistral's verses, and offers possible reasons for Mistral's tireless construction of her image as mater et magistra, citing her desire to leave Chile and travel (the aimless wanderer is a recurring subject in Mistral), and her acute understanding that knowledge of her lesbianism would have deprived her of all opportunities to work, write, and speak within a Latin American patriarchal culture. Most importantly, her position as Ambassador-at-large of Latin America granted her a unique opportunity for subversive discourse. This discourse may be found once we probe the masks Mistral used so adeptly: her Gender mask (Mistral's self-promotion as spiritual mother and her emphasis on the sanctity of female reproduction); her Sexuality mask (Mistral's sacrifice of marriage and children of her own in exchange for adopting all of the children of Latin America); her Nation mask (Mistral's privileging of motherhood above all else in order to create the good female Latin American subject).

Once problematized, it is possible to discover alternate readings of these masks: In Mistral's portrayal of childhood in "Colof con cara de excusa", the "child-I" cannot, or decides not to, face the object of its desire directly and must flee the mother/woman. Read allegorically, motherhood may represent the attraction and repulsion characteristic of repressed desire. There are other potential sites for desire in Mistral's poetry, such as the female, maternal body as one inciting sensuality and desire, or the invocation of an ambiguous "other", traditionally assumed to be male but one that could just as easily be female. These kinds of interpretations are difficult with Mistral's work, and often border on dangerous conjecture, but nevertheless offer the conditions of possibility for new readings of Mistral.

IIIa. Selection of Anthologies to be studied.

The prefaces to many editions of translations have perpetuated the Spiritual Mother figure. Langston Hughes's 1957 edition of Mistral's poems seeks to accomplish this. In the second paragraph of his introduction, using excerpts from the same Nobel Prize Citation, he recounts the famous story of Romelo Ureta,

with whom [Mistral] fell in love, but they were never married. [...] Out of love for him and of her desolation at his death came the first of a series of poems soon to be read throughout all Latin America. These included Sonnets of Death, Prayer, and the Poem of the Son, in whose stark beauty and intensity her personal tragedy "lost its private character and became a part of world literature. It was then that Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga became Gabriela Mistral." (p. 9)

Hughes goes on to describe Mistral's ascent to fame in Spanish speaking countries, pointing out that she was referred to as simply Gabriela. He calls her poetry "intensely feminine," suggesting that as a man he might not be the best translator for the job. The poems in his selection are those relating to "children, motherhood, and love." He quotes The New York Times Book Review, which upon Mistral's death lauded her "nobility of soul." Given such an overwhelming portrait of romance, purity, sacrifice, and maternity, endorsed by the most elite intellectual organization in the world, one would imagine it extraordinarily difficult to introduce lesbianism - or any other contradicting element - into this global celebration of Mistral's "nobility" of soul.

In The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature, a patronizing attitude is found in the very brief introduction to Mistral. Her "noble" image is upheld by emphasizing her maternal persona and erasing all possibility of sexual love in her verses:

Mothers sang her lullabies to their children; schoolteachers taught her songs to their pupils; poets of both sexes imitated her... She found in Delmira Agustini a kindred desperate soul, but her love was untainted by sensuality... But in her best volumes (The Felling of Trees, 1938; Wine Press, 1954) she achieved a sort of stark and uncompromising beauty that came very close to justifying the 1945 Nobel Prize she received at a time when Reyes, Neruda, and Borges were all still very active.

While Agustini's verses were "tainted" by sexuality, we are implicitly assured that Mistral's love was of a "pure" nature, and therefore could be disseminated to mothers and children everywhere. Yet we see her accomplishments again minimized by the insinuation that Mistral was unworthy of the Nobel Prize - although she "came close" to deserving it, her superior male literary colleagues were more so. The poems included support the image: "The Liana" accounts for Mistral's religiosity by describing the urgency of a prayer climbing towards God ("I cling to the vine of my prayer", "Grasp the weakening tip when my prayer reaches you"); "The Prayer" similarly addresses the religious as well as (angry) love; "The Ballad" attests to (envious) love, "Absence" to death. The poems offered are meant to be interpreted within the confines of that which has been declared previously in the introduction by the editor: Mistral's verses are to be read as the expressions of a motherly, religious, (asexual) poet.

Some anthologies fall under what may be termed "traditional" feminist translations, in that they hark back to the early goals of the women's movement when the objective was to highlight the role of women in all fields. These efforts sought to de-emphasize the differences between women and create solidarity within the female community, but they did not address cultural, racial, or national differences within it. Poemas de las madres / The Mother's Poems by Christiane Jacox Kyle (1996) is one such collection. This anthology seeks to cultivate Mistral's "community of women" in her maternal subject, but it fails to problematize the subject itself. The introduction by Margaret Sayers Peden, while acknowledging the anecdote and legend coloring Mistral's biography, actively reveres the traditional maternal persona without mention of a possibly problematic sexuality: "Perhaps the greatest irony in Mistral's life was this childless woman's lifelong dedication to children, a passion - nearly obsession - readily visible in her poems, as well as in her long career as an elementary educator." What's curious in the translations, however, is what I note to be attempts to temper with subtle lexical manipulations the intensity of some of the metaphors Mistral uses to describe motherhood, perhaps in the interest of upholding a feminist agenda that seeks to distance itself slightly from traditional female roles. For example, in "Poemas de las madres", the translator substitutes the word "sacredness" for Mistral's "santidad" of maternity. In my view, this de-emphasizes the holiness, the venerated religiosity of Mistral's word choice to describe motherhood. Whereas "sacredness" is defined as "highly valued and important", the translator could well have used the words "sanctity", "saintliness" "holiness" "piety" or "godliness", all of which bolster the religious fervor Mistral invokes by selecting "santidad" when referring to motherhood.

In the poem "Sensitiva", the poetic subject describes a feeling of weakness, of sensitivity, to the point that "de una sola mirada de mi due, si fuera dura para mesta noche, podr morir." The translator substitutes "man" for "due", which is another minimization of meaning, considering "due" signifies "master" or "owner". I believe in plurality of meanings, yet if the plurality consistently points in the same direction, it evolves into uniformity, or conformity. Whether it be for the sake of traditional patriarchal or traditional feminist ideals, Mistral seems to have been idolized, while simultaneously and subtly misrepresented to further various cultural agendas.

Chapter IV. Future Perspectives

I have begun to consider recently the effect the Internet is starting to have on the manner in which literature "travels" and reaches readers. Considering the ease with which information is distributed and retrieved globally, and the dramatic increase of our reliance on computers and the Internet - especially in the United States - as an indispensable resource and tool, I feel it pertinent to include the Internet in this discussion of myths in translation. I suspect the Internet has begun to play an important role in the perpetuation of many myths regarding women writers. It is very easy to find web sites containing overly simplified synopses of the lives and work of Agustini and Mistral, with much emphasis placed upon drama and romance. Often accompanying these outlines are several poems, often in translation, rarely attributed to a specific translator. I have witnessed the power of these types of web sites with my own students at NYU, who now collect their information and download texts already translated into English by means of the Internet. Curiously, just recently one of my students chose to prepare a presentation on Gabriela Mistral, and decided upon a poem ostensibly directed to a male lover, "Volverlo a Ver". This student had read on a web site that Mistral had lost her young male lover early in life, and chose never to love again. This romantic story and the poem it accompanied pleased the student and was the reason she chose Mistral as the topic of her presentation. I was struck by this event, and therefore have decided to investigate these types of translations and web sites so prevalent on the Internet, and incorporate them into my study. I will examine all of the sites available to me in terms of the information provided about the writer, which poems are chosen, the quality of the translations, and sources to which the site content is attributed.

Considering the complex discourses with which the reader of Delmira Agustini and Gabriela Mistral is confronted, one must question how the translator of their poetry resolves such conflictive images. I think that translations of poetry err at times in their attempt to reduce meaning to one fixed idea, whereas one of the distinguishing traits of poetry, according to Octavio Paz, is "the preservation of a plurality of meanings" (Paz, 1992). The challenge I see regarding Mistral and Agustini, then, is to produce enlightened, feminist translations which preserve the multiplicity of meaning in their verses, without falling back into some of the commonplaces of their translators and critics. Therefore, in this section I will attempt to meet this challenge by including my own translations of three poems by Delmira Agustini, and three poems by Gabriela Mistral. A guiding principle in my translation practice will be Maier's (1998) proposed "woman-interrogated" approach with regard to both language choice and poem selection, which will be discussed at length following each translation. The results of this interrogative translation practice remain to be seen, but the philosophy is rooted in the desire to throw gender into question. This might be done by avoiding all direct reference to gender (Maier, 1998: 105-6): whereas a translator with "no deliberate approach" might automatically indicate gender with regard to an adjectivized word in Spanish (i.e. "Spanish woman" for "espala"), a "woman-interrogated" translation might not impose or emphasize gender upon the reader by opting for "Spaniard", if this choice can be justified by the source text. To translate interrogatively is to address the complexity of gender and reconsider the terms used to describe it within both the translation itself as well as its supplementary material.

Much is lacking in terms of more suggestive, provocative translations of the poetry of Agustini and Mistral. Perhaps the continuing debates on gender representation, and especially gender in translation, will result in different kinds of translations which hint more strongly at sites of possible (homosexual) desire; anthologies which choose poems for translation not included in the limited canon (such as Mistral's Locas mujeres); translations which interfere in the text, accompanied by prefaces which reveal more about the complexities of their self-constructions, comparing and contrasting these constructions with their work, rather than accepting unquestioningly the public masks. Without acknowledging that they are, in fact, masks, without investigation of what these masks did for them, what purposes they served, and how they affect readings of their poetry, we will fail to achieve what feminist translation theory strives for: constant movement and change, continual revision and rewriting. If the meaning of poetry is "multiple and changeable" (Paz, 1971), as is "women's language" (Irigaray, 1977), then translators must participate in a practice characterized by plurality. Karin Littau (1995), for example, rewrites the Pandora myth as a positive paradigm of translation, and in so doing embraces the richness and excess of meaning, and consequently of translation. Her argument is for a surplus of difference, a "seriality" of translation which she sees as a sound, necessary practice. As opposed to a static hierarchical dichotomy of original versus translation, Littau's revision of Pandora as a metaphor for felicitous abundance is an extremely apt feminist symbol. Feminist translators must continuously strive to rewrite and revise translations, lest future generations of readers receive only a limited vision of what are truly fascinating literary figures.

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Bibliography of Delmira Agustini and Gabriela Mistral

Primary texts

Agustini, Delmira. El libro blanco. 1907.

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Mistral, Gabriela. Desolaci. NY: Instituto de las Espas, 1922.

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Zum Felde, Alberto. Crica de la literatura uruguaya. Montevideo: Maximino Garc,1945.

Bibliography of Latin American Women Writers in Translation

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Jacox Kyle, Christiane, transl. Gabriela Mistral. Poemas de las Madres / The Mothers' Poems. Cheney, Washington: Eastern Washington University, 1996.

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Wieser, Nora Jacquez., ed. Open to the Sun: a Bilingual Anthology of Latin American Women Poets. Van Nuys, CA: Perivale Press, 1979.

While the women's movement and the "era of feminism" it engendered has impacted almost every aspect of popular culture as well as most academic disciplines, it has sparked greater interest in North America than in Europe, where programs in women's studies and gender are not as common as they are in the United States and Canada (Flotow, 1997: 1).

Mistranslations of this sort have occurred with male writers as well. Lawrence Venuti cites a similar case with regard to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (Venuti, 1998) in which twelve pages were omitted from the translation. However, for the purposes of this paper, my focus will be the mistranslations of the woman writer's work and the unique effects this has on her reputation.

Bloom