Winett de RokhaThe Chilean poet Luisa Victoria Anabalón Sanderson (1894-1951) published her mid- and late-career work under the name Winétt de Rokha. Born to a patrician Catholic family in Santiago, in 1916 she married the poet and communist Pablo de Rokha - a modenist firebrand who was to become one of the most revered figures in twentieth century Chilean poetry. Together they concocted her nom de plume, Winétt. ("De Rokha" was already an invented name: Pablo's name at birth had been Carlos Díaz Loyola, but as a schoolboy he became "Pablo made of Rock.") The couple had nine children, seven of whom lived to adulthood (among them the poet Carlos and the painters José and Lukó). During these busy years, Winétt de Rokha published four significant books: Formas del sueño (1927), Cantoral (1936), Oniromancia (1936), and El valle pierde su atmósfera (1949). Chile, even more socially polarised in 1930 than it is today, was hit hard by the Great Depression; its economy contracted to a greater degree than that of any other nation. In 1939, Winétt and Pablo together founded the communist and anti-fascist literary journal - and publishing house - Multitud (whose slogan was, "For bread, peace, and global freedom"). In that decade, Winétt would look back to her childhood relationship with maternal grandfather Domingo Sanderson, an anglophile classicist with Scottish (or perhaps Irish-Scottish) roots, as being pivotal in her turn away from the moneyed, Catholic establishment of Chile's capital city. The early twenty-first century has seen a renewal of literary and scholarly interest in Winétt de Rokha's poetic achievement quite independent of her husband's fame. (Mark Smith) Read More Read Less