Another ‘Waste Land’: Gabriela Mistral in 1922

Abstract

1922 has been described as an exceptional year in what we may (hesitatingly) call the globalising of modernism as an early episode in the contemporary history of ‘World Literature’. For the European and Anglo-American contexts, it was the year of publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Paul Valery’s Charmes, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, W. B. Yeats’s Later Poems, Henri Bergson’s Duree et simultaneite, Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus, and the revised edition of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918), to mention a few prominent examples.1 The English translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921) also appeared the same year; it was a work, as Michael North indicates, that inaugurated a ‘linguistic turn’ in Western philosophy and thus stands as a proper complement to the linguistic reflection and experimentation practiced by the emerging avantgardes.2 In the Hispanic world, 1922 represented an equally-significant year: to mention a few examples, at this time Cesar Vallejo published his ground-breaking verse collection Trilce, Juan Ramon Jimenez his highly influential Segunda antolojia poetica, and Oliverio Girondo his Veinte poemas para ser leidos en un tranvia. In 1920, Miguel de Unamuno had issued his ekphrastic masterpiece, El Cristo de Velazquez, which is worth noting because Christological symbols abound in Mistral, who also wrote at length on Francis of Assisi.