a hundred mountains

For several years, I've wanted to post Ursula K. Le Guin's poem "For Gabriela Mistral," which is a gorgeous poem about translation and geography and language and connection across time. But as much as I love poets writing about other poets, I felt a little weird posting it without actually having read any Mistral. Then, this year for my birthday, Lucy got me a volume of Mistral poetry translated by Le Guin, and I had a different problem, which was picking a poem to post alongside the Le Guin poem. So here is Le Guin on Mistral, for today, and Mistral herself—also about connections and words—for April 20, one of my missed days.

                    En el Valle de Elqui, ceñido
                de cien montañas o de más...

Forty years beyond her mortal years
she came back to me, to our Pacific,
she came here, she
who sank the meek and blinded saint
and the grim men from Spain
in the glory of the lord of angels
and a gust of the craziest wind.
She stood on this northern shore
where gulls whirled like torn paper
and said in the language that I spoke
before I spoke words, "Come!"

"Come!" she said, standing
heavy-bodied and rough-voiced,
deep-breasted as the hills:
"I came north, but you didn't know me.
I've gone home now to the valley
encircled by a hundred mountains,
a hundred mountains, maybe more.
You must come and you must learn
my language."

    If I walk south
with the ocean always on my right
and the mountains on my left,
swimming the mouths of the rivers,
the estuaries and the great canal,
if I walk from high tide to low tide
and full moon to new moon, south,
and from the equinox to solstice, south,
across the equator in a dream of volcanoes,
if I walk through all the Tropics
past bays of amethyst and bays of jade
from April spring to April autumn, south,
and cross the deserts of niter and asbestos
with the sea silver on my right
and a hundred mountains on my left,
a hundred mountains, maybe more,
I will come to the valley.

If I walk all the way, my poet,
if I can walk all the way,
I will come to you.
And I will speak your language.

—Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), "For Gabriela Mistral," from Sixty Odd (1994-1999), and in this case from Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems: 1960-1920 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

*

                A Blanca Subercaseaux

    Yo no sé si podré venir.
A ver si te cumplo, hermana.

    Llego, si vengo, en aire dulce
por no helarte la llanada
o en el filo de tu sueño
con amor, y sin palabra.

    Empínate por si me cuesta
hallémonos a media marcha,
y me llevas un poco de tierra
por que recuerde mi Posada.

    No temas si bulto no llevo
tampoco si llego mudada.
Y no llores si no te respondo
porque mi culpa fue la palabra.
Pero dame la tuya, la tuya,
que era como paloma posada.


                    For Blanca Subercaseaux

    I don't know if I can come
let's see if I can reach you, sister.

    I'll arrive, if I do, on a mild wind,
so as not to freeze your plains,
or at the edges of your dream,
with love, and without a word.

    Stand up tall, in case I find it
hard to meet halfway,
and bring me a little earth
to remember my Inn by.

    Don't worry if I don't have a shape,
or if I look different.
And don't cry if I don't answer,
for my sin was words.
But give me yours, your word
that was like a dove alighting.

—Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), "Encargo a Blanca" or "Message to Blanca," translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, from Lagar or Winepress, 1954. Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, trans. Ursula K. Le Guin (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003).