Ballad of my name

In commemoration of International Women’s Day, this week’s post is a poem by Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957). Born in Vicuña, Chile, of indigenous and Basque descent, Mistral went on to become one of her nation’s most outstanding ambassadors and the first Latin American (and, to date, the only Latin American woman) to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1945. A true Latin American icon, Mistral will be remembered as a great educator, a tireless advocate of children’s rights and, above all, the author of some of the most moving poems ever written.

My name, which I have lost,
where does it live, where does it thrive?
Name of childhood, a drop of milk,
a myrtle branch so light.

It was happy to be free of me,
not to bear my youthful sorrows
and no longer do I walk with it
over fields and meadows.

It never heard my weeping
was not burned by the salt of my tears;
it has not seen my white hairs,
or my mouth made weary with years,
and never speaks to me if we meet.

But they tell me that it wanders
on my mountain’s broken roads
late in the silent evening
without my body, turned into my soul.

Translated by Martin Boyd