SOURCE: “Nobel Prize Citation,” in Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, translated by Langston Hughes, Indiana University Press, 1957, pp. 13–16.

Gullberg addresses a tribute to Mistral in the following citation from the Swedish Academy, awarding her the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The tears of a mother once caused an entire language disdained by polite society to retrieve its nobility and come into its glory through the power of poetry. It is said that the first of two poets to bear the name of the wind of the Mediterranean, Mistral, while still a student, by having written his first verses in French, caused his mother to weep a flood of tears. She was an untutored peasant of Languedoc who did not understand such purity of language. It was then that her son decided to write henceforth in Provençal, his mother tongue. He wrote Mireio which recounts the love of a...