«Escrito especialmente para ellos» - House of Mist - María Luisa Bombal对《La última niebla》的重思

Aug 29, 2026

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María Luisa Bombal’s 1935 novel La última niebla became extremely well known in Chile, prompting her North American husband to urge an English translation after Bombal largely stopped writing. House of Mist consciously re-elaborates features of Bombal’s earlier work, shaping a picturesque, poetic, passionate, and exotic portrait of South American women’s lives while adapting it to the Victorian novel form. Despite critical claims, the text presents no trace of irony.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages23

Reading Time35 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Exoticism

Intertextual approach

Question of irony

«Escrito especialmente para ellos»: María Luisa Bombal's rethinking of «La última niebla» in «House of mist» Iole Scamuzzi UNIVERSITÀ DI TORINO ~~ ~~ ABSTRACT ~~ ~~ María Luisa Bombal’s La última niebla, published in 1935, was so famous in Chile that Bombal’s North American husband, Rafael de Saint Phalle, urged her to translate it into English years after its publication and after Bombal had mostly given up writing. House of Mist consciously re-elaborates traits of Bombal’s early writings to depict a picturesque, poetic, passionate and exotic portrait of South American women’s life and adapts them to the genre of Victorian novel. No irony can be traced in the text, despite much of the critique implying so. Keywords: exoticism; intertext; irony; translation; feminism. La última niebla de María Luisa Bombal, publicado en 1935, alcanzó una fama tan grande en Chile que el marido norteamericano de la autora, Rafael de Saint Phalle, quiso que su mujer lo tradujese al inglés cuando ella casi había renunciado a la escritura. En House of Mist, la autora relabora varios rasgos de sus obras castellanas para adaptarlos al género de la novela victoriana. En el texto no hay ironía, aunque mucha crítica lo diga. Palabras clave: autoexotismo; intertexto; ironía; traducción; feminismo. CONFLUENZE Vol. XV, No. 1, 2023, pp. 356-378, ISSN 2036-0967, DOI: [https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036-](https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036-)[ ](https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036-)[0967/16090](0967/16090), [Dipartimento di Lingue](Dipartimento di Lingue), Letterature e Culture Moderne, Università di Bologna. CONFLUENZE Vol. XV, No. 1 The story won’t tell. Not in any literal, vulgar way. (Henry James, Turn of the Screw) The circumstances and reasons for María Luisa Bombal deciding to recreate the core idea of La última niebla into an English Victorian novel are largely known and need not be repeated here except very briefly 1. Her husband, Fal de Saint Phalle, found for her a literary agent, who suggested adding an ending – a happy one – to the tale, and recommended setting clear boundaries between life and dreams, because “no vamos a publicar un poema en prosa”(Bombal 2005, II, 146) . Farrar & Straus published it with acceptable success, which allowed Bombal to add some substance to her modest financial resources2 until the end of her life. The English novel was titled House of Mist and from the beginning Bombal defined it anew work, connected to La última niebla only by its inspiration: “The strange house of mist that a young woman, very much like all other women, built for herself atthe Southern end of South America”(Bombal 1947, prologue)3. Critics have studied this text from different angles, the most common being its comparison with La última niebla. It is generally agreed that this novel is less innovative, and somehow inferior to its Spanish predecessor. Some scholars attribute this to the more exterior, objective nature of the English language as compared to Spanish (Pérez Firmat 2003; Byrkieland 2013); others, drawing from biographical sources, propose that the loss in poetry is due to Bombal’suneasiness with the new tongue (Gligo 1986; Martinetto 2002; Guerra 2012 and 2020); some others proceed further to imagining in Bombal some ironic detachment from her tale, thereby saving her artistic stature from the abasement that her complete adhesion to such a work could cause (Díaz 2002; Edwards 2009) . None of these approaches seems to me completely satisfactory: a general unease in admitting that a talented writer like Bombal may have licensed this work with a clean conscience seems to bother deeply all researchers, to the extent that actual textual analysis is neglected, leaving to contextualization the justification for the metamorphosis of her tale. I would like to try a more textual, and intertextual approach. I am not excluding biography and self-narration from the range offactors influencing Bombal’s literary creation: she i

FAQs

House of Mist与《La última niebla》之间的关系是什么？

House of Mist有意识地重写《La última niebla》的核心灵感，但将其改造为英语维多利亚小说体裁；两部作品主要通过“灵感”而非情节的直接重现相连。

研究者如何看待《House of Mist》中的“异国情调”？

文中指出读者会在小说中注意到带有南方魅力的细节，并通过西班牙语零散词汇、人物命名以及反复出现的主题来制造“陌生感”。

评论界为何会谈到“讽刺/反讽”，而本文的立场是什么？

尽管不少批评者认为文本带有反讽，文章强调在文本内部找不到讽刺的迹象；并提出需要更具文本与互文性的研究路径来理解这种改写。

Aug 29, 2026

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