That single word: Gabriela Mistral's creative process from the poem "La que camina"

Abstract

Gabriela Mistral published three books of poetry before receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945. Her fourth and final book published during her lifetime, Lagar, published in 1954 and and features a section dedicated to women, titled “Locas mujeres”, composed of sixteen poems. In this paper, we analyze and compare the audio recording, manuscript, and final version of the poem “La que camina”, part of this section. Both the manuscript and the audio recording are available in the Gabriela Mistral archive at the National Library of Chile (BNC), as part of the Archivo del Escritor collection; the published version we use is from Poesías completas (Aguilar, 1970, first reprint). Drawing on the methodological tools of genetic criticism (Pino; Zular, 2007), we propose an analysis organized around stages of textual reconfiguration that make it possible to observe the poem’s lexical, rhythmic, and structural transformations throughout its writing process. We consider dictation as a productive instance in which orality functions as a generative principle that shapes the formal configuration of the text, rather than merely as a preliminary stage to be superseded by writing.