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to burn. And what about the structure of the
sentence itself? Why create an awkward
dependent clause (“Instead of autumn’s usual
pale offering”) when the original is a clean
declarative sentence?
Because the sentence is the basic unit of
meaning in any text, I strove to preserve
Bombal’s own divisions whenever possible. In a
few instances, however, I was forced to split a
sentence because English simply would not
support the structure and the amount of
information that the original contained. For
example:
Esta muerta, sobre la cual no se me
ocurriría inclinarme para llamarla, porque
parece que no hubiera vivido nunca, me
sugiere de pronto la palabra silencio (12).
A literal translation of the sentence would read:
“This dead girl, over whom it would never occur
to me to lean in order to call her name, because
she seems never to have lived, suggests to me
suddenly the word silence.” In this instance,
English will not tolerate this level of
subordination, even though the structure of the
original falls within accepted Spanish usage. To
avoid creating the impression that Bombal was
deliberately disregarding grammatical norms, I
settled on the following translation: “It would
never occur to me to lean down to her and call
her name because she seems never to have been
alive. This dead girl suggests to me suddenly the
word silence” (Perez 5). Although divided into
two sentences, this rendering still preserves
Bombal’s grouping of words and ideas.
Maintaining the shape of Bombal’s
sentences is especially important because her
narrative relies heavily on the connection
between the speaker’s experience of her world
and the reader’s experience of the text to elicit
empathy for the protagonist. The reader feels the
intensity of the speaker’s physical sensations
through the short sentences that report them
directly: “I look at her,” “I begin to tremble,”
“I move closer,” “I hear footsteps approaching.”
The simple construction focuses the reader’s
attention on the “I” of the narrative, and through
the present tense, her world unfolds for the
22 Translation Review
reader at the same time as it is unfolding for her.
As Amado Alonso notes, Bombal intensifies this
effect by revealing information only as it
becomes immediately relevant (16). Bombal
tells us, “I enter the parlor through the door that
opens onto the bed of rhododendrons” (Perez 6),
and the bed of rhododendrons and the parlor
become real for us at the exact moment in which
they enter the speaker’s consciousness.
Bombal juxtaposes these clear sensory
moments with intricate descriptions that
correspond to the speaker’s disquietude: “Last
night I dreamt that [the mist] slipped through the
cracks around doors and windows and into the
house, into my room, that it softened the color
of the walls and the outlines of the furniture, that
it wove itself into my hair, that it clung to my
body and erased it completely, completely…”
(Perez 10). These long, intricately woven
sentences prove disorienting, and the reader
anxiously awaits the terminal punctuation,
thereby sharing the speaker’s “vague
uneasiness.”
The contrast between simple and elaborate
sentence constructions reflects a fundamental
tension in key dreamlike passages of the text.
Complex, almost disorienting descriptions
suggest that the speaker is dreaming, but these
intricate constructions are punctuated by clean
statements of sensation whose very clarity
seems to point, paradoxically, to the reality of
the experience. Although this contrast is
abundantly apparent in the Spanish, readers of
the New Islands translation would have
difficulty detecting it. The Cunninghams often
diminish the effect of Bombal’s direct sentences
by combining them to form more conventional
sentences or omitting them altogether.
Similarly, the Cunninghams tend to
undermine the ambiguity of the original by
inserting clarifications of the events the speaker
narrates. For example, where the original states
simply, “A moan, then a pause” (Perez 31), the
New Islands translation reads, “His mother
groans” (39). This translation suggests that the
speaker immediately attaches the moan to her
mother-in-law, when in fact she experiences it
first as pure sound and only later connects it to