SOURCE: An introduction to Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, translated by Langston Hughes, Indiana University Press, 1957, pp. 9–12.

In the following introduction to his translations of her poetry, Hughes pays tribute to Mistral as a poet and as a person.

She did not sign her poetry with her own name, Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga, because as a young teacher she feared, if it became known that she wrote such emotionally outspoken verses, she might lose her job. Instead she created for herself another name—taking from the archangel Gabriel her first name, and from a sea wind the second. When the poems that were quickly to make her famous, Sonetos de la Muerte, were published in 1914, they were signed Gabriela Mistral.

She was born in 1889 in the Chilean village of Vicuña on the River Elqui in a valley where the sweetest of grapes grow. She grew up in...