48 The New York Review
‘Mysterious and Infinitely Solitary’
Laura Kolbe
Forgotten Journey
by Silvina Ocampo,
translated from the Spanish
by Suzanne Jill Levine and
Katie Lateef-Jan, with
a foreword by Carmen Boullosa.
City Lights, 125 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Promise
by Silvina Ocampo, translated from
the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine
and Jessica Powell, with a
foreword by Ernesto Montequín.
City Lights, 103 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Literary debuts are generally terrify-
ing for the debutant. The Argentinian
writer Silvina Ocampo, however—pub-
lishing her first short-story collection
at thirty-four, in 1937, after begin-
ning to doubt her earlier training as a
painter—had the kinds of connections
that tend to soften the landing. Close
friends with Jorge Luis Borges, a few
years her senior and already a rising
star, Ocampo had also studied paint-
ing under Giorgio de Chirico and Fer-
nand Léger and had a well-placed older
sister, Victoria Ocampo, who edited
Sur, the preeminent literary magazine
of South America. The magazine’s
book-publishing arm brought out Silvi-
na’s first collection, Viaje Olvidado
(Forgotten Journey).
Soon after its publication, the book
was reviewed in Sur. But anyone sus-
pecting literary nepotism would be
wrong—the piece was in large part a
pan. Stranger still, it was written by
Victoria. She expressed her uneasiness
with the warped likeness of details
she recognized from her and her sis-
ter’s childhood—“that game of hide-
and-seek, that coalition of a reality
become unreal and a dream become
reality”—and railed against Silvina’s
language, full of “irritating mistakes”
and “unsuccessful images, which seem
attacked by torticollis.” She acknowl-
edged that some of the infelicities came
perhaps from a dedication to “spoken
language,” but argued that too much
fidelity to a kind of unschooled diction
becomes a cover for laziness. “Before
renouncing skill,” Victoria declared,
one must do a strict self-inventory,
determining “what percentage of neg-
ligence has entered the composition,”
since awkward writing “should never
be involuntary.... If you want to stick
out your tongue, you have to look at it
face to face.”
Victoria’s piece in Sur—at that time,
one of the few publications bringing
news of the South American scene to
patrons and subscribers such as the
Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y
Gasset, Waldo Frank, and Virginia
Woolf—may be one of the reasons
why Silvina was never much known
outside of Argentina and her immedi-
ate literary circle. The critic and film-
maker Edgardo Cozarinsky called her
“the best kept secret in Argentine let-
ters.” References to her collaborative
projects, such as The Book of Fantasy
(1988), which she coedited with Borges
and her husband, the novelist Adolfo
Bioy Casares, frequently leave out her
name. Her own books have been late
to appear in English translation, if at
all. (Still missing are at least five other
short-story collections and nine books
of poetry, though some of these have
been culled into volumes of selected
work.)
The girls, along with their four other
sisters, were more highly cultivated in
French and English than in Spanish.
French remained Victoria’s language
for writing, though she translated her
own completed manuscripts into Span-
ish before publication. Silvina had a
particular love and affinity for English,
especially for American poets such as
Emily Dickinson, and for British sci-
ence fiction and detective novels. Eu-
ropean and North American audiences
and critics, however, wanted exotic na-
tional character and the piquancy of
folk art from South America, particu-
larly from its women, who were consid-
ered even more charmingly unmodern
in their emotionality and direct rapport
with land and hearth. Outsiders such
as Ortega had already decided what
an Argentinean woman was: a fantasy
creature of “maximum spontaneity and
permanent authenticity.” Silvina’s body
of work, sometimes furiously nihilistic
as it smashes an opening between the
walled cities of Surrealism and domes-
tic realism, did not quite represent a
salutary New World.
In recent years there has been an
effort to translate more of Ocampo’s
work into English. Two books appeared
in 2019: Forgotten Journey was trans-
lated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie
Lateef-Jan, and Ocampo’s final novel,
The Promise, was translated by Levine
with Jessica Powell. These were pre-
ceded, a few years ago, by the selected
stories of Thus Were Their Faces, trans-
lated by Daniel Balderston; selected
poems in Silvina Ocampo, translated
by Jason Weiss; and the collaborative
novel Where There’s Love, There’s
Hate with Bioy Casares, translated by
Levine and Powell. Levine is the daring
translator of many of Latin America’smost formally inventive writers—Julio
Cortázar, Severo Sarduy, Cristina Ri-
vera Garza, and others—and has long
argued that translation is best practiced
as a form of inventive artistry rather than
dutiful technique. In her, Lateef-Jan’s,
and Powell’s hands, Ocampo’s diction is
clean and forthright, occasionally fusty
like a school-prize essay, but reveals
its wilder, more profligate heart in its
lavish, extended syntax, its lists and pe-
remptory qualifications, and stacking of
event upon event.“Skylight,” the first of the twenty-
eight stories in Forgotten Journey,
contains several of Ocampo’s narra-
tive signatures: seemingly guileless
witnesses whose relative innocence
(or basic comprehension of events)
we can only guess at; a painterly in-
sistence on inventorying the everyday
optical tricks that flood our waking vi-
sion but are rarely objects of conscious
thought; and a final volte-face that
springs the story open again just where
it should have shut. The narrator, who
we assume is a child, is sent to an aunt’s
apartment every weekend. Everything
interesting is too high for her: not the
elevator car but its “huge snakes” of ca-
bles, its wrought iron “that would catch
your eye when you were sad”; not the
aunt’s apartment (of which we learn
nothing) but the foreshortened human
figures glimpsed in fragments through
its skylight, which oddly looks up into
another apartment:A family of feet surrounded by ha-
loes, like saints, and the shadows
of the rest of the bodies to which
those feet belonged, shadows flat-
tened like hands seen through
bathwater.... Trunks moved across
the floor with the noise of a thun-
derstorm, but the family neverseemed to travel. From time to
time, voices bounced like balls
against the floor or fell quietly onto
the rug.When one night the little girl up-
stairs refuses to go to bed, her feet
appearing and disappearing against
the glass as she jumps rope, another
pair of feet, clad in boots and ringed
by a hoop skirt, crosses in and out of
the composition. The noises become
more and more frantic until the boots
trip. Then “a deep silence—the kind
that precedes the cry of a child being
beaten.” Through the glass, the narra-
tor sees “a head sprouting bloody curls,
tied in bows.” What was that? A real
murder or a child’s tall tale, born of
boredom or vengefulness against the
girl upstairs (amid the screams, we
learn her name is Celestina) who gets
to live among her toys instead of being
farmed out to relatives?
The story ends with these two
sentences:Celestina was singing “The
Chimes of Normandy” and run-
ning with Leonor behind the trees
in the plaza, around the statue
of San Martín. She wore a sailor
dress and had a horrible fear of
dying while crossing the street.We have been thrust into a position of
impersonal omniscience, with an awful
suggestion of time that waits outside
the story’s boundaries. Is Celestina
alive, enjoying some reprieve in a cycle
of abuse? Or is that final image placed
there to show us how little we can guess
about the life of any family? Ocampo’s
most admirable and maddening quality
is her refusal to explicate.
She is a remarkably visual writer. The
situations she composes—innocence
corrupted; class status revealed or re-
voked; the external effects on the body
of various foods, states of weather, vari-
eties of poison and medicine—make for
phenomenal tableaux. By drawing as
carefully as possible only what is there
without any causal inferences, Ocampo
strings together discrete images of real
life that together produce an effect en-
tirely unreal and disorienting.
In “The Acrobats,” another story
in Forgotten Journey, a deaf laun-
dress who is good at ironing can make
creases open “like big white flowers”
but struggles with the resistant “wax”
of her sons’ mouths, so much harder
to unlock as she struggles to lip-read
their chatter. The story ends in the
most macabre fashion: the laundress’s
circus- mad sons, goading themselves
into ever more fantastical leaps, jump
to their accidental deaths; she, seeing
but not hearing a fragment of their
performance and the neighborhood’s
subsequent chaos, believes she has
glimpsed merely another of their “mar-
velous acts.”
In “The Backwater,” a family of ser-
vants arrives at their new workplace
in a grubby, loaned wagon just as the
father feels “on his arm the soaking
wet skirts of his daughter, who had just
peed”; the family of landowners, obliv-
ious to the accident, “flutter” the little
girl’s name around the house the way
one might coo loving condescension atSilvina Ocampo at her family’s summer home near Buenos Aires, 1933–1934Silvina Ocampo Estate