Sounding the Fell and the Fugue: Gabriela Mistral’s “Tala”

In a new Future of the Humanities Project event series — A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment — we delve into the topical area of our environment. In recent years, we have rightly heard much about the world’s environmental problems, dangers, and disasters. However, in this series, we will invite speakers to explore the ways in which art and literature have foregrounded the inspirational beauty, delicacy, and strength of the natural world.

How might we sound the relationship between the intimacy of feeding one’s child and the land’s ability or inability to relieve that child’s hunger? What temporal, rhythmic, or language structures would such a relationship take in poetic form, and why? These questions are a central concern of Chilean Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Gabriela Mistral’s 1938 volume, Tala. Tala, which means “fells,” refers to the act of clearing regions for large-scale agricultural production, the creation of cities, or modern infrastructures. In this talk, Anna Deeny Morales will examine how Mistral’s ultimate disquiet in Tala is grounded in her desire to define humanity in terms of our treatment of children whose well-being she tied to the defense of the environment in Latin America. Michael Scott, director of the Future of the Humanities Project, will provide opening and closing remarks, and Kathryn Temple will moderate a Q&A session following the presentation.

Online. Open to all.

 

Speakers:

Anna Deeny Morales works in poetry and music as a librettist, translator, and literary critic and is an adjunct professor in the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University. Her recent works in opera include ZAVALA-ZAVALA: an opera in v cuts, which debuted at the Kennedy Center with the Georgetown University Orchestra and members of the Chiarina Chamber Players in 2022. Deeny Morales is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for her translation of Tala by Gabriela Mistral.

Kathryn Temple (moderator) is a professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University where she has taught since 1994. She specializes in the study of law and the humanities. Among her publications are Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England (2019) and the co-edited Research Handbook on Law and Emotions (2021). Her humanities outreach activities include work with military veterans and the incarcerated.

Michael Scott is senior dean, fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, college adviser for postgraduate students, and a member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior adviser to the president at Georgetown University. Scott was on the editorial board which relaunched Critical Survey from Oxford University Press. Scott previously served as the pro vice chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University.

 

This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project; the Georgetown Humanities Initiative; the Georgetown Master’s Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities; Campion Hall, Oxford; and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars Hall, Oxford). It is part of the one-year-long series: A Bent but Beautiful World: Literature, Art, and the Environment.

Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk