Her portrait also appears on the 5,000 Chilean peso bank note. Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences. In 1945, she became the first Latin American author to receive 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'. Strongly drawn to Mistral's work as soon as she discovered it, Le Guin has been working on this translation for five years.Lucila Godoy Alcayaga ( American Spanish: 7 April 1889 – 10 January 1957), known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral ( Spanish: ), was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator and humanist. Le Guin has published five volumes of her own poetry, an English version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, and a volume of mutual translation with the Argentine poet Diana Bellessi, The Twins, the Dream/Las Gemalas, El Sueño. The intelligence and passion of Le Guin's selection and translation will finally allow people in the North to hear the originality, power, purity, and intransigence of this great American voice.

Le Guin includes poems from all five books in this volume, with particular emphasis on the later work. These are included in the 'Complete' Nobel edition published in Madrid the Poem of Chile, her last book, was printed years after her death. During her lifetime Mistral published four books: Desolation, Tenderness, Clearcut, and Winepress. Translations, and even selections of her work in Spanish, have tended to underplay the darkness, the strangeness, and the raging intensity of her poems of grief and pain, the yearning power of her evocations of the Chilean landscape, the stark music of her Round Dances, the visionary splendor of her Hymns of America. The reputation of her more flamboyant and accessible friend and countryman Pablo Neruda has overshadowed hers, and she has been officially sentimentalized into a 'poetess' of children and motherhood. Famous and beloved during her lifetime all over Latin America and in Europe, Mistral has never been known in North America as she deserves to be.

The first Nobel Prize in literature to be awarded to a Latin American writer went to the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral.

Selected poems of gabriela mistral