Chile, China celebrate ties with literature

Apart from its many delicacies that appeal to the palate, Chile, a land of poets, also has great "food" for the mind. Poetry by Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), Chile's Nobel laureate, is part of that cultural bounty the Latin American country is sharing with the world.

To share the laureate's work with Chinese literature lovers, the Chilean embassy in China held a ceremony on Nov 27 in Beijing, donating copies of You Are the Water With a Hundred Eyes, the reissue of Mistral's poem anthology in Chinese, to a number of Chinese universities and institutes.

"Although Chile and China are separated by thousands of kilometers, culture, especially literature, doesn't know any distance. It has the amazing power to transport us to faraway lands as well as bring us closer to our roots," remarked Luis Schmidt, Chilean ambassador to China.

Born as Lucila Godoy Alcayaga to a father who was a dilettante poet, Gabriela Mistral became a village schoolteacher at the age of 15. She began to compose poetry after a passionate romance with a railway employee who died by suicide. Throughout her life, Mistral combined writing with a career as an educator, cultural minister and diplomat; she served as Chilean consul in Naples, Madrid and Lisbon.

She made a name for herself as a poet in 1914 when she won a Chilean prize for her three Sonnets of Death. Her major poetry collections are Despair, Tenderness, Destruction and The Wine Press, all included in the Chinese anthology. Major themes in Mistral's poems include nature, romantic love, maternal love and fraternity.

In 1945, she became the first Latin American author to win a Nobel Prize in Literature "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world," according to the Nobel committee.

"Love – erotic love, maternal love and brotherly love, runs through Mistral's poetry," said Peking University professor Zhao Zhenjiang, who translated the anthology. "I admire and translate Mistral not only for her poetry, but also for her virtues and charisma," added Zhao, the first Chinese translator of Mistral's poems back in the 1980s.

Zhao, an eminent figure in translating and researching Latin American literature, said compared with Pablo Neruda, another Chilean Nobel laureate, Mistral's poetry is more focused on human nature than on politics.

"Her verses, especially those on fraternity, responded to people's needs at the time when World War II had just ended," Zhao said, adding "fraternity is also what we need now as the world is being fractured by the COVID-19 pandemic".

The event is part of celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and Chile.

"The two countries formed diplomatic relations in 1970, but our friendship dates way before that; poetry, an invisible yet powerful force, played a key role in forming it," Chilean foreign minister Andres Allamand wrote in the book's foreword.

In 1952, Neruda and painter José Venturelli established the Chile-China Cultural Association, the first non-governmental organization in Latin America committed to growing friendly ties with China, Allamand revealed in the foreword.