Madwomen
The "Locas mujeres" Poems of Gabriela Mistral, a Bilingual Edition
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, Mistral’s poetic women confront impossible situations to which no sane response exists. This groundbreaking collection presents poems from Mistral’s 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.
“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 Mistral’s poems and on the identities of those to whom Mistral dedicated her poems enhances this volume, which will interest Spanish and English speakers alike.”
“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.”
“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the Mad Women pivoting brilliantly within twenty six poems by Gabriela Mistral, taken from previously published and unpublished sources.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.”
“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.”
Literature and Literary Criticism: Poetry | Romance Languages
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