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TRANSLATING MARÍA LUISA BOMBAL’S LA ÚLTIMA NIEBLA
By Ashley Hope Perez
U
ntil now, Chilean María Luisa Bombal’s
influential novel La última niebla has been
available to English speakers only through the
1982 translation by Lucía Guerra-Cunningham
and Richard Cunningham (collected in New
Islands and Other Stories by María Luisa
Bombal). Certainly, this translation was an
important step, for it gave English speakers their
first opportunity to access Bombal’s fiction. But
although Lucía Guerra is a noted and active
Bombal scholar, even a cursory examination of
the New Islands text reveals numerous
distortions and intrusions. 1 The Guerra-
Cunningham translation tends toward
paraphrase, frequently omits images, glosses
over intentionally repeated language, explicates
what is left ambiguous in the original, and
interpolates countless similes of the translators’
invention. Reading the Guerra-Cunningham
translation, one would be hard pressed to
recognize Bombal as a precursor to magical
realism, a fact so evident in the Spanish that
Carlos Fuentes said, “María Luisa Bombal is the
mother of us all.” 2 Although she wrote only two
novels in Spanish, one in English, and a little
more than half a dozen stories, Bombal
nevertheless broadened the range of strategies in
Latin American fiction by blending fantasy,
deeply subjective narrative, and sustained
ambiguity into an imagistic and lyrical form of
prose.
Characteristic of both the style and content
of Bombal’s fiction in Spanish, La última niebla
provides an intimate portrait of a woman
trapped in an unhappy marriage and isolated
from others on her husband’s mist-covered
hacienda. First-person narration connects the
reader to the unnamed speaker as she struggles
against her husband’s indifference, the
unrelenting presence of the mist, and her life’s
sheer lack of stimulation. Yet the reader is never
sure whether the experiences the speaker
describes so vividly — approaching the corpse
of a young girl, bathing nude in a pond, meeting
a lover in secret, seeing him pass through the
woods in a carriage, going in search of his home
in the city — are real or whether they exist only
in her imagination to compensate for the stifling
nature of reality.
A New Translation
My decision to translate La última niebla
was ultimately one of expediency: I wanted to
be able to expose students to Bombal’s narrative
style and challenge them with the deep
ambiguities of her writing. When I located the
Guerra-Cunningham translation, I found it so far
removed from the Spanish text, so deeply
compromised, that I knew I could not teach with
it. Of course, all translations of complex fiction
require some compromises. But in making these
compromises, the central goal of the translator
must be to create an experience in English that
parallels the experience of reading the original
as closely as possible.
I worked to match Bombal’s phrasing and
word choice, guarding carefully against
paraphrase. Consider the following example:
El pálido otoño parece haber robado al estío
esta ardiente mañana de sol (24).
The passage describes the unseasonable weather
with a novel image, one of autumn stealing a hot
day from summer. The preservation of this
image is crucial, and I devised the following
translation, which respects the phrasing and
imagery of the original: “The pale autumn
seems to have stolen this sun-scorched morning
from summer” (Perez 17). But the Cunninghams
translate the sentence as “Instead of autumn’s
usual pale offering, this warm sunny morning
seems more like summer,” eliminating the very
feature that made the sentence fresh and
interesting. Their “warm sunny morning” fails
to capture the edge implied by “ardiente,” an
adjective derived from the Spanish verb arder,
Translation Review 21