Translator’s Note
“Menos Cóndor y más Huemul” (1925) is one of the many prose texts that the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957) published in newspapers and other venues during her lifetime. These texts have scarcely been translated to English. A selection of Mistral’s essays was published in English in 2002,1 but this is the first translation into English of “Menos Cóndor y más Huemul.” Many essays by Mistral remain unavailable for English speakers, and her prose has been much less read and studied than her poetry. Fortunately, new critical studies of her prose have appeared in the past decade.2
In this short essay, Mistral argues for a reconfiguration of the symbolic elements that articulate Chilean national identity. The title of the text refers to the two national animals that decorate the country’s coat of arms, and that popularly represent strength and reason. The country’s motto—por la razón o la fuerza—also refers to these two faculties of the national character. Under Mistral’s interpretation, Chile has paid too much attention to the strength of the condor, and has largely ignored the huemul’s grace and intelligence. Hence, she argues that the national ethos needs to be redirected, in favor of acts of kindness and communal comradery instead of the belligerent and militaristic narrative of national achievements. It is a poetic and political exhortation for a more humane and less aggressive notion of national identity.
During the military dictatorship (1973-1990) the regime of Augusto Pinochet attempted to impose a conservative version of Mistral, as opposed to the other big name in Chilean poetry: Pablo Neruda. Through this lens, Mistral was seen as the harmless and soft mother of the Nation, who suffered for love, wrote sweet lullabies, and didn’t mess with politics. Needless to say, this image of Mistral strategically ignores key aspects of her work and career, such as her radical commitment to human rights, her role as a transnational public intellectual, her dissident sexuality, and her passionate defense of the dispossessed. Thanks to the feminist scholars of the late eighties and nineties, new critical approaches to the Mistral’s work appeared, and we can now read a richer and more complex Mistral—one that does not fit into conservative frames of interpretation.
In the context of the massive protests that took place in Chile in 2019-2020, Mistral rapidly became a key political reference point: there were stencils, collages, and graffiti of her figure and texts in the streets of downtown Santiago. References to “Menos Cóndor y más Huemul” were everywhere. Through this gesture, a text that was written almost a hundred years ago reached new audiences and acquired new political implications. Why did Mistral’s proposal ignite the rebel imagination of Chilean protesters? The text envisions a new narrative of national identity, one that is not dominated by masculine war-centric rhetoric and instead pays attention to, as Mistral says, “the acts of kindness… [and] the fraternal actions.” This shift in the way we imagine a national community can guide us towards a future of equality and justice too. Although Latin America is currently filled with tensions and radical inequalities, and hate speech is gaining space in the political arena, we can foresee, as Mistral did, a different trajectory. And that act of imagination is truly revolutionary. By reading Mistral in her role as a public intellectual and activist, we are acquiring new tools with which to rewrite our own futures.
Gonzalo Montero
1 Selected Prose and Prose-poems. U of Texas P, 2002. Translation by Stephen Tapscott.
2 I want to highlight, for example, Claudia Cabello Hutt’s Artesana de sí misma. Gabriela Mistral, una intelectual en cuerpo y alma (Purdue UP, 2018). This book focuses exclusively on the intellectual career of Mistral, by analyzing mostly her prose writing.
Less Condor and More Huemul
We Chileans have in the condor and the huemul of our coat of arms an expressive symbol like no other, which indicates two aspects of the spirit: strength and grace. Due to its duplicity, the rule that it dictates is not easy. It might resemble what the sun and the moon have been in some theogonies, or the earth and the sea: opposed elements equipped with excellence that shape a difficult proposal to the spirit.
Much has been said, both in schools and in screeching speeches, about the meaning of the condor, and little has been said about its heraldic companion: the humble huemul, scarcely situated in the national geography.
I confess my lack of love for the condor, which is, in the end, only a beautiful vulture. However, I have seen its clean flight above the Cordillera. It crushes my emotion when I recall that its grand trajectory has no other cause than the carrion hidden in a ravine. We females are like this, more realistic than some might think…
The schoolteacher explains to the pupils: “The condor means the dominion of a strong race; it teaches the just pride of the strong. Its flight is among the happiest things on earth.”
So much has heraldry abused the raptors, there are so many eagles, so many ospreys in military insignia, that it does not say much because of repetition, the sharp beak and the metallic talon.
I choose this deer, that, in order to be original, does not even have arboreal antlers; I choose the deer, unexplained by the pedagogues, and about which I would say to the kids more or less the following: “The huemul is a sensitive and petite beast; relative to the gazelle, which is to be related to perfection. Its strength lies in its agility. Refined senses are its defense: the delicate ear, the eye of attentive water, the sharp smell.
Like the deer, it often defends itself, not with confrontation, but intelligence, which is its unspoken power. Slim and throbbing snout, greenish eyes that capture the surrounding woods; neck of the purest line, flanks of moved breath, hard, silvery hoof. In it the beast is forgotten, since it almost resembles a floral pattern. It inhabits the green light of bushes and has something of light in its arrow’s speed.”
The huemul suggests the sensitivity of a race: refined senses, vigilant intelligence, grace. And all of that is defense, invisible but effective spurs of the Spirit.
The condor, in order to be beautiful, has to fly high, liberating itself completely from the valley; the huemul is perfect simply arching its neck above the water or raising its neck to spot a sound.
Between the direct defense of the condor, the peck on the horseback, and the indirect defense of the one that dodges the enemy by smelling it in the distance, I prefer the latter. The attentive eye that observes behind the reeds is better than the bloody eye that dominates from above.
The symbol might be too feminine, if it were limited just to the huemul, and it would not work as the expression of a people. But, in this case, let the huemul be the first face of our spirit, our natural pulse, and let the other be the beat of urgency. Pacifiers of all peace in good days, soft in our faces, our words, our thoughts, and condors only to fly over the cliff of imminent danger.
On the other hand, it is preferable not to exaggerate the symbol of strength. I am reminded, when singing these praises of the deer in heraldry, of the Greek laurel, whose leaf is both soft and firm. This is the leaf chosen as a symbol by those who were masters in symbology.
Much have we displayed the condor in our acts, and I hope we display other good things that we also possess but have not emphasized. In Chilean history, it is right to cultivate the acts of kindness, which are many; the fraternal actions that fill forgotten pages. Our predilection for the condor over the huemul might have caused us much harm. It will be difficult to superimpose one thing over the other, but this will be achieved little by little.
Some national heroes belong to what we might call the order of the condor; in parallel, the huemul also has its members, and it is time for us to celebrate them.
Professors of Zoology always say, only at the end of the class, of the huemul: an extinct species of the deer.
The extinction of this fine beast in a specific geographical area does not matter; what matters is that the order of the gazelle did exist and continues to exist among Chilean people.
Translated by Gonzalo Montero
Originally published in Spanish in El Mercurio, July 11, 1925
Santiago de Chile
La Orden Franciscana de Chile autoriza el uso de la obra de Gabriela Mistral. Lo equivalente a los derechos de autoría son entregados a la Orden Franciscana de Chile, para los niños de Montegrande y de Chile, de conformidad a la voluntad de Gabriela Mistral.
