Fernanda Bentancor (Fiction), by Scott Burton
(The following feature is a work of fiction. The fact that it was a work of fiction was brought to our attention after publication on our site.)
Fernanda Bentancor is an almost now forgotten late 19th, early 20th century Uruguayan poet and ornithologist. Bentancor was born in the Manga district of Montevideo in 1865. Her mother died in childbirth. From a young age her father, a pharmacist and avid birder, took her to see the birds of the Rio de la Plata, the ecologically vibrant estuary that separates Uruguay and Argentina. A young Bentancor quickly developed a love for birds but also an interest in and strong aptitude for describing them. As a young girl Bentancor collected bird feathers on her trips to the Rio de la Plata and began describing the birds in her journals. Her early poems were spare yet descriptive. (Note: The examples of Bentancor’s poetry in this article are my own translations as her poetry has yet to be translated into English.)
So many Grebes in the Rio,
I can’t tell one from another.
Father helps me identify them.
Least,
Pied-Billed,
White-Tufted,
Silvery,
Hooded,
Short-Winged,
Great.
In 1883 Bentancor enrolled in the ornithology department at the University of Montevideo. During the course of her studies she was assigned to do field work in rivers and tributaries across Uruguay and neighboring countries. She later joined expeditions on the Amazon in search of new species of which she would examine and write about. Her first collection of poetry titled ‘Birds of the Amazon’ was published in 1886. The poem ‘Glaucous Macaw’ begins with the lines:
The Glaucous Macaw nests in the river banks,
above the murky grey waters of the Amazon.
I first see her belly,
a distinct greenish blue.
Once common,
no longer.
One day she will become extinct,
perhaps through disease.
I fear I will meet the same fate.
During one of her expeditions on the Amazon, Bentancor contracted a rare, tropical bird flu and became seriously ill. She was forced to return to Montevideo where she spent two months recovering in a hospital bed. She continued to write poems during her stay in hospital, often writing about birds that had landed and were sitting on her hospital room windowsill. Her second collection of poetry emerged from this hospital stay. The collection is titled ‘Birds of the University of Montevideo Hospital.’ My favorite poem in this collection is titled ‘Night Nurse’ and describes a hummingbird that has come to visit Bentancor one evening during her convalescence:
A Black Jacobin landed on my windowsill last night,
amidst my delirious slumber.
I was happy to see her there,
black but for the back.
Her purple tail,
the white outer vane of her outer feathers,
almost phosphorescent in the moonlight.
After recovering from the bird flu, Bentancor ceased her river voyages and instead began studying the birds of Montevideo. She would often go out into the city with a pencil and paper and binoculars and record descriptions of the birds she saw. In 1889 Bentancor published the first known bird book about the birds of the city of Montevideo titled, ‘The Birds of Montevideo.’ The book became a minor hit in the Uruguayan capital and won her a contract with a South American press to write other such books about the birds in various other South American cities. Over the next five years Bentancor traveled the South American continent with her pencil and paper and binoculars recording the different birds she saw in cities like Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, and Bogota. A compilation book was published in 1895 titled ‘Birds of the South American Capitals.’ Bentancor became exhausted by her travels and returned to Montevideo to rest. She found she had become tired of simply writing plain descriptions of the birds she saw and instead found within her a renewed desire to return to writing poems about her beloved birds. She returned to the birthplace of her love of birds, the Rio de la Plata, and spent the next two years writing poems about the birds she saw there. In 1901 her collection ‘Birds of the Rio Plata’ was published and would become her best-known book. The title poem in the collection ends with the stanza:
The Rio is home to many birds.
My favorite will always be,
the one and only true love my little life has seen,
her majesty,
guttural Señorita,
the Gull.
Following the death of her father in 1910, Bentancor left Montevideo and moved to the countryside. There she started a bird sanctuary and lived alone, spending her time taking care of her birds and writing poems about them. Her later poems are filled with flowery and descriptive language and imagery of colorful and tropical birds, the inhabitants of her sanctuary. Bentancor’s final collection of poetry was published in 1915 under the title ‘Birds of Paradise.’ Bentancor died in 1918 at her sanctuary of an unknown illness. The title poem of ‘Birds of Paradise’ sums up Bentancor’s love of and lifelong fascination with birds and became an appropriate homage to them:
Is this Paradise?
Yes.
Always, when my birds are near.
Sadly Fernanda Bentancor has become a largely forgotten figure outside of Latin American ornithological societies and birding poetry enthusiasts. This is a terrible shame. Bentancor was an extraordinary and visionary poet who devoted her life to capturing beauty. She must be remembered.