La Cuenta-Mundo / The World Counting

Poems by Gabriela Mistral
Translated by Doreen Stock

Originally written in Spanish by renowned poet, Gabriela Mistral, and now translated by Doreen Stock, these poems speak to a newborn baby of the elemental things of our world, touching on the most powerful forces in the universe: light, water, air, fire. Deceptively simple, they call forth what it means to be human, to be born human, and to live in the midst of profound mystery touching the core of existence.

Early Praise

I’m so grateful for these wonderful translations of Gabriela Mistral’s strange, loving poems to a newly born child. They are deep with mysterious imagery and tenderness, and these versions are a great contribution to our understanding of one of the finest 20th century poets.

—MATTHEW ZAPRUDER, I Love Hearing Your Dreams and How to Continue

In these breathtaking poems by Gabriela Mistral, we are invited to experience the world with wonder through the presence of a newborn child, and through the mother who beholds that life with awe. Doreen Stock’s luminous translations carry Mistral’s tenderness into English with extraordinary care. This is a poetry collection to read slowly and savor whenever one needs a reminder of life’s beauty. Stock’s love of language and her deep sense of the sacred shine through on every page as time pauses before the miracle of new life.

—ELANA ROSEN-BROWN, Rabbi, Congregation Rodef Shalom, San Rafael, CA

Doreen Stock delivers the brilliance of Gabriela Mistral in the ways only a great translator can, one intimately connected not only at the level of the word, but the syllable, the very clay from which Mistral draws her breath to form this litany of fire, of loam, this trembling halfway between the body and the soul. In these early poems, written long before her Nobel recognition, animals, fruits, wounded pines, and mountains bow to the tenderness and awe few poets have managed to capture in language as well as Mistral does. Stock has descended into the petrichor of Mistral’s imagination in these sparse poems that belie their complexity, and has emerged with a rare gift, one that will compel you to abandon yourself, dizzy to the swaying.

—MARCELO CASTILLO HERNANDEZ, Cenzontle and Children of the Land

About Doreen Stock

Poet, literary translator and memoir practitioner, Doreen Stock has been exploring creative nonfiction for sixty plus years from the feminine point of view as a wife, mother of three, grandmother of eleven, ands great-grandmother of 13. Her first book of poems, The Politics of Splendor, Alcatraz Editions, Santa Cruz, 1984, was part of a New American Writers exhibit at the Frankfurt Book Fair that year. It combined her own poetry and prose poems with translations from the work of Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova. More recent publications include: Bye Bye Blackbird (The Poetry Box, 2020), poems of her mother’s last year, and A Noise in the Garden, selected poems with an afterward by Stephen Kessler (Kelsay Press, 2022). She co-translated Excellency/Free Will, a book of translations from the Spanish of Amparo Casasbella Alconada, Prosa American Editores, Buenos Aires with her husband, Marcelo Holot. She is a founding member of the Marin Poetry Center.

For more information, please visit DoreenStock.com

About Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral was born in 1890 in Chile in a provincial village where, at the age of fifteen, she began to teach school and to compose her early poems. She went on to win prizes and widely publish her collections of poetry until in l945 she became the first Latin American woman to win the Noble Prize for literature. Although she was Pablo Neruda’s teacher and mentor, her work is much less well known than his. Due to her unflagging love and advocacy for children in the difficult world they continued to inherit as well as her prominence as an international educator she became Chile’s delegate to the United Nations.

The post La Cuenta-Mundo / <br>The World Counting appeared first on The Poetry Box.