Desolación (Desolación: Poemas)

The true first edition is the Spanish-language Desolación, Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos, New York, 1922 (printed by Carranza & Co.) — notable because Chile's national poet's first book appeared in New York rather than Santiago. The first Chilean edition (Editorial Nascimento, Santiago, 1923) is an enlarged/revised, textually altered edition, not the first. The first English-language appearance in book form is Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, translated with an introduction by Langston Hughes (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1957) — commissioned in 1956 and issued the year of her death; Hughes stated no one had made a volume of Mistral's poems in English in the preceding thirty-odd years. It is frequently confused with the fuller bilingual Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral translated and edited by her literary executor Doris Dana, with woodcuts by Antonio Frasconi (Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1971), which is later; Ursula K. Le Guin's Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (University of New Mexico Press, 2003) is later still.