Through the decades, Mistral has remained continuously popular in South America, especially her native Chile, but in North America her reputation has been kept alive mainly by the good word of critics. It was, in fact, good critical response that led to the publication of her first book, Desolacion: it was not until a professor at Columbia University in New York, Federico de Onis, talked about Mistral's poetry in a lecture that interested readers created a demand that a publisher filled. Margaret Bates, in her introduction to Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, pointed out why it has been so difficult to capture the flavor of Mistral's poetry for North American readers. They are especially difficult to translate, she said, because "the effect of utter simplicity is backed up by a subtle, complex, hidden machine that extracts from each word, from each sound and accent, its maximum...