Torn From The Nest (review)

Torn from the Nest by Clorinda Matto De Turner; Edited and with a Foreword and Chronology by Antonio Cornejo Polar; Translated from the Spanish by John H. R. Polt Oxford University Press, 1998

This new and valuable translation of Aves sin nido (1889) will surely help to make Clorinda Matto de Turner's novel better known outside the boundaries of Latin American literary history. The recent revival of interest in this long-forgotten nineteenth-century Peruvian novel can be attributed to the important place that categories of ethnicity and gender--central to modern scholarly debates--occupy within its pages. In the preface to Aves sin nido, the literary subject invokes the discourse of sentimental affect that was assigned to women in Republican Peru in order to establish imaginary bonds between women and Indians. At a time when even the most progressive intellectuals considered Indians to be savages, Matto proposes to incorporate Indians into the national family as "brothers who suffer, exploited in the night of their ignorance, tormented in the darkness that cries out for light" (4). In a novel that celebrates domesticity, she assigns luminous Lucía the "sentimental power" to welcome racial others into her nest (Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985]). In this way, Aves sin nido could be of interest not only to Latin American literary scholars, who work on issues of national identity and peripheral modernization, but also to literary historians who reflect on canon revision and formation within a comparative approach.

Matto's ideas about race and her proposal to homogenize racial difference through charity and education have been problematic since their inception. However, when Aves sin nido was first published, it was not Matto's humanitarian defense of suffering Indians that caused the most controversy, but her fiercely anticlerical views. Matto's negative portrayal of priests as "birds of prey," who sexually abuse women regardless of race, contributed to make her an instant enemy of ecclesiastical authorities. After the publication of Indole (1891), one of her most rabidly anticlerical novels, she was excommunicated by Archbishop Bandini and forced to live out the rest of her life in political exile.

Torn from the Nest is one of the titles in the Latin American series by Oxford University Press, an excellent collection that seeks to establish cultural links between the literatures of the two hemispheres. In the introduction to the series, a founding member of the editorial committee, Jean Franco-Richard Graham, explains that one of the collection's aims is to make available in English both canonical and noncanonical texts from nineteenth-century Latin America. If most of the titles selected for translation by the editorial board (Tulio Halperín Donghi, Iván Jaksic, Naomi Lindstrom, Francine Masiello, Eduardo Lozano, and Antonio Cornejo Polar) are virtually unknown to English language readers, Torn from the Nest is an exception. After becoming a fin-de-siècle best-seller in Peru, an early translation of the novel, titled Birds without a Nest: A Story of Indian Life and Priestly Oppression in Peru, by anonymous translator J. G. H., was published in London in 1904. As Naomi Lindstrom points out in the foreword to her greatly appreciated emended version of the 1904 edition of Birds without a Nest (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), J. G. H.'s translation was successful in reproducing the Victorian style of the novel but took too many liberties from the original Spanish text.

This new critical edition includes an excellent foreword by Antonio Cornejo Polar, a bibliography about the novel, and a chronology of Clorinda Matto de Turner. John P. Holt has done a superb job in bringing to us a novel that even in its original is difficult to read due to the frequent linguistic intersections between Quechua and Spanish. Although there is no introduction by the translator, one can assume that the main challenge of translating such a work must have been to make it palatable to contemporary American audiences without killing...