Saturday poems: The Fig

In a rare prose poem, Nobel laureate Gabriela Mistral of Chile, unmasks the mysteries of the fig.

Gabriela Mistral was the first female poet and the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize.
Today, Latin America remembers her as a teacher who inspired a network of schools named in her honor, encouraging improved education for women and deprived children. While most of her poetry did not defy the conventions of form prevalent during her life, she also wrote prose poems, suggesting her desire to write untethered.

Her prose poem, The Fig, is part ode and part self portrait. While she sings praise to the ancient fruit, she also embodies it. The poet connects the fruit to Africa, the Middle East, and Greece, underscoring the nourishment the fig provided the Greeks, in particular, a gift that the deva of the plant, speaking, found completely unappreciated.

The Fig by Gabriela Mistral

translated from the Spanish by Maria Jacketti

Touch me: it is softness of good satin, and when you open me, what an unexpected rose! Do you not remember some king’s black cloak under which a redness burned?

I bloom inside myself to enjoy myself with an inward gaze, scarcely for a week.

Afterward, the satin opens generously in a great fold of Congolese laughter.

Poets have not know the color of night, nor the figs of Palestine. We are both the most ancient blue, a passionate blue, richly concentrating itself because of its ardor.

I spill my pressed flowers into your hand. I create a deaf meadow for your pleasure. I shower you with the meadow’s bouquet until covering your feet. No. I keep the flowers tied. – they make me itch; the resting rose also knows this sensation.

I am also the pulp of the Rose-of-Sharon, bruised.

Allow my praise to be made: I nourished the Greeks, and they have praised me less than Juno, who gave them nothing.