Muna Lee (writer)

Muna Lee (January 29, 1895 – April 3, 1965) was an American poet, author, and activist, who first became known and widely published as a lyric poet in the early 20th century. She also was known for her writings that promoted Pan-Americanism and feminism. She translated and published in ''Poetry'' a 1925 landmark anthology of Latin American poets, and continued to translate from poetry in Spanish.

A long-term resident of Puerto Rico from 1920 to her death 45 years later, she was an activist in the 1920s and 1930s, working on issues of women's suffrage and equal rights in Puerto Rico and Latin America. Lee worked for more than two decades in cultural affairs for the United States State Department, promoting artistic and literature exchanges between Latin America and the US, as well as other countries.

Biography

Born in Raymond, Mississippi in 1895, the eldest of nine children, Lee was the daughter of Benjamin Floyd Lee, "a self-taught druggist" and son of a planter, and Mary Maud (McWilliams) Lee, whose father was a physician.JONATHAN COHEN, "MUNA LEE: A PAN-AMERICAN LIFE
Three of her siblings died in infancy. Her parents encouraged her early interest in literature and art. When Muna was seven her family moved to Hugo, Oklahoma">Hugo, Oklahoma">Hugo, Oklahoma, where her father set up his store. It was in the heart of "Indian country", at a time when many whites were moving to Oklahoma.

Lee returned to Mississippi at age 14 to attend Blue Mountain College (then scaled like a prep school). After a year and summer study at the University of Oklahoma, she went on to the University of Mississippi, where she graduated in 1913 at the age of eighteen. Lee published her first poem soon after.

After college, she started working as a teacher in Oklahoma, then in Texas. By fall of 1916, she was teaching in Tonkawa, Oklahoma, at a new junior college, University Preparatory School (now Northern Oklahoma College). Through all these moves and her teaching, she kept writing and submitting poems to magazines. In 1916, she succeeded in getting several poems published in national literary magazines: ''Poetry: A Magazine of Verse,'' '' Smart Set,'' ''Contemporary Verse'', and ''Others: A Magazine of the New Verse.'' Three of these were new magazines devoted to contemporary poetry. Her year of publication was crowned in September by her winning the first Lyric Prize of ''Poetry'' magazine.

Lee taught herself Spanish and got a job with the United States Secret Service in New York City, where she worked as a translator during World War I. She translated confidential letters from Spanish, Portuguese and French. By this time she had already published two dozen poems in ''Smart Set'', and was its second-most frequent contributor.

In New York, she quickly learned about the Pan American movements and began to explore Latin American literature. In 1918 she had poems published in ''Pan American Poetry'' and ''Pan-American Magazine.'' All were translated by Nicaraguan poet Salomón de la Selva, who was editor-in-chief of the poetry magazine).

Marriage and family

It was through her poetry being translated into Spanish and published in the Pan American magazines that she met her future husband Luis Muñoz Marín, a Puerto Rican poet and journalist. He had started a new bilingual magazine "devoted to Pan-American culture," called ''Revista de Indias'' (Indies Review), and wanted to publish her work. The magazine soon folded but was a sign of the artistic ferment in the city.

They became passionately involved and were married on July 1, 1919. The couple moved to Puerto Rico in 1920, but divided their time between New York and Puerto Rico for years. Soon they had two children together: daughter Muna Muñoz Lee (known as ''Munita'') and son Luis Muñoz Lee (known as ''Luisito''). They were often separated; Muñoz Marín lived in Greenwich Village for extended periods, due to his dependence on opium, in the 1920s as he continued to work at poetry.

They were legally separated by 1938 and officially divorced on November 15, 1946. In 1948, Muñoz Marín became the first democratically elected Governor of Puerto Rico.

To Puerto Rico and back

Lee became a longterm resident of Puerto Rico in 1920 when moving there with her husband, Muñoz Marín. By 1923 they had returned to the New York area, and his mother lived with them at their house in Teaneck, New Jersey. Muñoz Marín also returned to Puerto Rico, working more in politics. Lee stayed in New Jersey because of their young children.

In 1920 Lee published her first poems in translation from Spanish, in Thomas Walsh's ''Hispanic Anthology.'' She became immersed in Latin American poetry and began to work on a project of an anthology of poets in Spanish. This was published in June 1925, in a special issue of ''Poetry'' magazine. She had selected and translated 31 poets from Latin America. This was a "landmark publication, among the first of its kind in the history of twentieth-century literary magazines." The year before, Lee's essay, "Contemporary Spanish-American Poetry," was published in ''North American Review,'' reviewing major trends in Pan American literature.

She became an advocate for and translator of Latin American literature, making major contributions to the modern Pan-American literary tradition. She wrote about translating from Spanish, that the poetry "is only partially translatable — that is, so much of its beauty depends upon the intricately braided jet and silver of its cadences that a great deal is necessarily lost by translation into a less liquid tongue."

After Lee and all the family returned to Puerto Rico in 1926, they lived in San Juan. Muñoz Marín took over '' La Democracia'', a newspaper started by his father, and got more involved in politics. In 1927 Lee started working for the University of Puerto Rico as director of International Relations, where she served for nearly a decade. She was the university's chief publicist and established relationships with other academic institutions and governments. She and her husband were more financially secure, for the first time in years. But later that year, Muñoz Marín returned to New York, remaining there for most of three years.

Political activism

Lee became involved in feminist activism, making important contributions to the modern women's movement, in particular the struggle for equal rights. She was a founder of the Inter-American Commission of Women, for which she worked in Washington, DC, in the summers of 1928 and 1929. She helped represent Puerto Rico and joined with women of Latin America at the Sixth Pan American Congress in 1928 in Havana

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