Their Name Is Today

A rather beautiful quote from Gabriela Mistral, the translation of whose book Madwomen by Randall Couch won this year’s Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. Gabriela Mistral, who died in New York in 1957, was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, which she achieved in 1945. This is my translation.

“We are guilty of many mistakes and omissions but our worst crime is to abandon children, denying them the source of life. Many of the things we need can wait, children cannot, now is the moment, their bones are forming, also their blood, their senses are developing, we cannot say to a child tomorrow, their name is today.”