Synopses & Reviews
A schoolteacher whose poetry catapulted her to early fame in her native Chile and an international diplomat whose boundary-defying sexuality still challenges scholars, Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) is one of the most important and enigmatic figures in Latin American literature of the last century. The
Locas mujeres poems collected here are among Mistrals most complex and compelling, exploring facets of the self
in extremis—poems marked by the wound of blazing catastrophe and its aftermath of mourning.
From disquieting humor to balladlike lyricism to folkloric wisdom, these pieces enact a tragic sense of life, depicting “madwomen” who are anything but mad. Strong and intensely human, Mistrals poetic women confront impossible situations to which no sane response exists. This groundbreaking collection presents poems from Mistrals final published volume as well as new editions of posthumous work, featuring the first English-language appearance of many essential poems. Madwomen promises to reveal a profound poet to a new generation of Anglophone readers while reacquainting Spanish readers with a stranger, more complicated “madwoman” than most have ever known.
Review
"A beautiful, hard-bound edition. . . . This volume makes it easy for the bilingual reader to jump back and forth between the original poem and the translation to elucidate the meaning of a particularly sophisticated word or to tease out the meaning of an unfamiliar phrasing in the Spanish."
Review
“Couch offers a succinct, comprehensive biocritical introduction to Mistral and her ‘Locas mujeres poems, particularly exploring autobiographical issues in the poems. . . . Plentiful information on the rich cross-references . . . in Mistrals poems and on the identities of those to whom Mistral dedicated her poems enhances this volume, which will interest Spanish and English speakers alike.”
Review
"Randall Couch has gathered a remarkable collection of Mujeres Locas, the Mad Women pivoting brilliantly within twenty six poems by Gabriela Mistral, taken from previously published and unpublished sources. He has accepted the challenge of setting them forth in English, and one can only respect and applaud his efforts, undertaken with painstaking scholarship and impassioned linguistic acuity."
Review
Review
"Randall Couch's translation of the Locas mujeres of Gabriela Mistral recreates in English some of the most important poems of the past century. Written in the voices of women who are witnesses to war and violence of many kinds, and completed during a period when Mistral herself was such a witness, these poems are at once devastating in their emotional clarity and astonishing in their lyrical beauty and formal complexity. Couch's readers, even those who already know the poems in Spanish, will be grateful to him for the sympathetic care he has brought to the tasks of editing, introducing, and translating this distinguished edition of Mistral's work."
Review
"Utterly remarkable--Gabriela Mistral turns out to be a great poet of modernist intensities and compactness, and darker preoccupations, as well as being that more conventional 'pastoral' poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize. Randall Couch's translations are sonically superb--he has an almost uncanny ability to create a rhythm in English lines that not only is very pleasing and authoritative in itself but also makes for an excellent representation of Mistrals own rhythms."
Review
"This collection deploys the best of the best, revealing for the first time these poems of anguish and triumph from the winner of the 1945 Nobel Prize in Literature. Randall Couch matches her brilliance, depth and range. Here is her direct witness to war and Holocaust, dispatched from Southern France and Brazil, her revisions of Greek tragedy, written in occupied Europe, and her serene and uncompromising, Buddhist-Franciscan defense of the land and indigenous cultures. Here, in stunningly contemporary terms, is the protean complexity of one of the greatest poets of the 20th century."
Review
Runner-up for the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation Elizabeth Rosa Horan, Arizona State University
About the Author
Randall Couch is adjunct professor of English at Arcadia University and an administrator at the University of Pennsylvania. He received Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships in poetry in 2000 and 2008.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
From Lagar Winepress
La otra
The Other
La abandonada
The Abandoned Woman
La ansiosa
The Anxious Woman
La bailarina
The Ballerina
La desasida
The Woman Unburdened
La desvelada
The Sleepless Woman
La dichosa
The Happy Woman
La ferverosa
The Fervent Woman
La fugitiva
The Fugitive Woman
La granjera
The Farm Woman
La humillada
The Humbled Woman
La que camina
She Who Walks
Marta y María
Martha and Mary
Una mujer
A Woman
Mujer de prisionero
Prisoners Woman
Una piadosa
A Pious Woman
From Lagar II
Antígona
Antigone
La cabelluda
The Shaggy Woman
La contadora
The Storyteller
Electra en la niebla
Electra in the Mist
Madre bisoja
Cross-Eyed Mother
La que aguarda
She Who Waits
Dos trascordados
Two Forgotten Ones
La trocada
The Changed Woman
Uncollected
Clitemnestra
Clytemnestra
Casandra
Cassandra
Texts and Sources
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index of First Lines