Jan Steckel's Blog: Horizontal Poet Sings Bidyke Blues - Posts Tagged "la-extranjera"

Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet, who was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945. She was bisexual. Here is a poem of Mistral's that she dedicated to the man who translated her poems from Spanish to French. Below it is my translation of her poem to English.

La extranjera

A Francis de Miomandre

Habla con dejo de sus mares bárbaros,
con no sé qué algas y no sé qué arenas;
reza oración a dios sin bulto y peso,
envejecida como si muriera.
En huerto nuestro que nos hizo extraño,
ha puesto cactus y zarpadas hierbas.

Alienta del resuello del desierto
y ha amado con pasión de que blanquea,
que nunca cuenta y que si nos contase
sería como el mapa de otra estrella.

Vivirá entre nosotros ochenta años,
pero siempre será como si llega,
hablando lengua que jadea y gime
y que le entienden sólo bestezuelas.
Y va a morirse en medio de nosotros,
en una noche en la que más padezca,
con sólo su destino por almohada,
de una muerte callada y extranjera.


The Stranger

To Francisco de Miomandre

She speaks with a feel of her savage seas
with I don’t know what seaweeds and sands;
she prays to a formless, weightless God,
aged as if she were dying.
In our garden that she made alien to us,
she has planted cactus and rough herbs.
She breathes life from the desert’s wind,
and she has loved with a whitening passion
she never speaks of, for if she were to tell
it would be like the map of another star.
She will live among us eighty years,
yet always as if just arrived,
speaking a tongue that pants and whines
and that only the little beasts understand.
And she will die here in our midst
one night of utmost suffering,
with only her fate as a pillow,
a quiet and foreign death.