Madwomen: The "Locas mujeres" Poems of Gabriela Mistral, a Bilingual Edition

Madwomen by Gabriela Mistral is a delightful masterpiece successfully translated in English by Randall Couch. The strength and passion of Mistral's work is mirrored by the poems that Couch has translated for us. I enjoyed this book very much. In the poem "Cross-Eyed Mother," Mistral writes, "Era la higuera de leche y era la Osa encrespada y era mas ... She was the milky fig tree and she was the bristling She-Bear and more ..." These lines display the great task of the translator to discover and rediscover words that work or fit. Some of Mistral's poems seem positioned to translate themselves, yet Couch does a wonderful job guiding them. Some of my favorite lines come from "The Storyteller:" "They want to hear my own story which on my living tongue is dead. I search for someone who remembers it, page for page, thread for thread. I'll lend them my breath, give them my beat to see if hearing it wakes it in me." All the poems in Madwomen are wonderfully written. We are given perspective and the stories of some amazing women in them. We are taken to a land that could very well be our own backyard, while at the same time, we are transported to a time specific to Chile. Couch, trained early in his career as an art conservator, exposes us to the translations of Madwomen with a precise skill in the preservation of the authentic.