A review by octavia_cade
Madwomen: Poems of Gabriela Mistral by Gabriela Mistral

emotional reflective medium-paced

3.5

I freely admit that I picked this up because of the cover - it turned out to be poetry, but I like poetry so that's alright! As the title makes plain, it's a collection of poems about women who, while not actually mad, can be perceived that way by more, shall we say, conventional thinkers. Many of them are about anonymous women, but there are a handful of poems on legendary or mythological figures, primarily Greek or Trojan women such as Cassandra, for instance. 

While I enjoyed them all, I still think the cover's the most appealing thing about this collection for me. There were a small number of poems that I liked more than the others - "She Who Waits" pulled this up to three and a half stars by main strength, otherwise the collection as a whole would have got three. It's a fantastic poem, though, and it's worth reading the collection just for that one.

This is a bilingual collection; I feel I should note this because I don't read Spanish, so I had to content myself with what I can only presume is the very competent English translation. I did find the translator's notes at the beginning quite interesting, and it brings home, I think, the particular challenge of translating poetry. So much depends on rhythm and meter, and it makes me wish I were better at languages so that I could read more work in the original.