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Title: This America of Ours : The Letters of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo by Gabriela Mistral, Victoria Ocampo, Elizabeth Horan, Doris Meyer ISBN: 0-292-70540-9 Publisher: Univ of Texas Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: A service to scholars and a treat for readers
Comment: _This America of Ours_ chronicles the thirty-year epistolary friendship of Latin America's two most remarkable women of letters. Though intended primarily for readers already familiar with Mistral or Ocampo, the book's editors provide such generous and well-placed notes and supporting material that the two writers and their turbulent worlds emerge in compelling depth and intimacy even for the nonspecialist.

The surviving letters from Mistral are more numerous and longer than Ocampo's and--especially later in the correspondence--Ocampo's are more often censored (or self-censored). Thus we experience the Chilean poet more vividly, though the editors have compensated for this imbalance by including pertinent letters by and to other correspondents, as well as poems and essays by both writers on each other's work.

Portraying a fascinating range of relationships across three continents, the letters make personal the intellectual and political upheavals leading to the Spanish Civil War, the rise of European fascism and horrors of the Second World War, as well as the Peronist movement and its aftermath in Argentina. They also show Mistral's struggle to cope with the suicide of her nephew and adopted son Juan Miguel (Yin Yin).

But their chief value may lie in revealing--especially for Mistral--the process of self-fashioning. Both women successfully created platforms for their own work as artists and public intellectuals in cultures that tried to constrain them to approved feminine roles. Mistral particularly had enjoyed unusual (for any poet) proximity to real political power in her education work for the revolutionary government in Mexico. In the letters we witness her constant awareness of playing roles--of carefully selecting positions, associates, and words. Like Thomas More, she knew only too well how dangerous rulers could be, and how trapped she could become in an image the state found useful. She derided under the term "organdy" the starched homages she constantly received from provincial schoolteachers and pupils when she appeared in public.

This self-fashioning had a private side as well. For decades, we learn, Mistral engaged in an astonishing and apparently unsolicited _interpretation_ of Ocampo in her letters to her, explaining to her friend what her true nature was and how her behavior and words could better embody it. This apparently bizarre mirroring can be understood in the context of Mistral's passionate desire to define a specifically "(pan)American" identity. It was crucial for this project that any such definition be able to accommodate her elegant and courageous friend. Over the years we watch Mistral cajole, berate, and praise Ocampo, and occasionally grudgingly adjust her own categories to allow a revised appreciation of some action on her friend's part.

Mistral urges on Ocampo the works of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, among other Spanish mystics. These passages in the letters highlight two things fundamental to an understanding of the Chilean Nobel laureate's poetry and politics. First is her awareness of a vast and complex inward space, a spiritual landscape or architecture suggesting that of Teresa's _Interior Castle_. For Mistral the world of action is only part of the human sphere. Second is her paradoxical (for one who insists on the value of the concrete natural world) commitment to the concept of essence.

Whether discussing class, national traits, aesthetic trends, or religious or social doctrine, Mistral argues from essence in an almost Platonic way. She judges both poets and politicians by what we would call character, and explicitly mistrusts intellectual calculus, however much she might employ it herself. She gently abuses Ocampo for her attachment to the French language, disparaging the France "of Racine," for her a symbol of sterile academic technique. Perhaps surprisingly, her essentialist vision does not lead her to serious intolerance: it seems to be more organic, favoring a diverse human ecology in which each type, while true to its nature, has a place. The letters reinforce her public reputation as a tireless worker on behalf of the displaced and oppressed.

Horan and Meyer have each spent years with the voices of their respective authors, and their translations reflect that familiar toil. The letters read smoothly and colloquially, with remarkably few verbal oddities in a work of this length. The book is a distinguished addition to Texas' growing catalogue on Mistral and her Latin American contemporaries.

Readers drawn to this epistolary friendship will find additional delight in _Amigas_, the record of a similarly lengthy correspondence between two extraordinary contemporary Chilean writers--childhood friends and expatriates since the 1973 coup that overthrew Allende--Marjorie Agosin and Emma Sepulveda, also published by Texas.