Silvina Ocampo

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Silvina Ocampo

Silvina Ocampo Aguirre (born July 28, 1903 in Buenos Aires , † December 14, 1993 there ) was an Argentine writer and translator.

Life

Silvina was born as the youngest of the Ocampo sisters in Buenos Aires into a well-off family; her parents were Ramona Aguirre and Manuel Silvino Ocampo, the names of the sisters were Victoria , Angélica, Francisca, Rosa and Clara. At first they all lived together in the Ocampos house in the San Telmo district , after the family returned from Europe in a villa in San Isidro , one of the most fashionable districts of Buenos Aires, in a world of the Argentine upper class at the turn of the century. Many servants took care of the girls. As a child, she spoke better English and French than Spanish; she wrote some poems in French. When she was five, the family went on a two-year trip to Europe, with a special destination as the “secret capital of Latin America” being Paris . The sisters had their own private tutors in history, ethics, math, English, French, music, Spanish and catechism. A traumatic experience as a ten-year-old was the death of the second youngest sister Clara at the age of 12.

In her youth she studied painting with Fernand Léger and Giorgio de Chirico in Paris, whose influences can be found in her illustrations for the early stories of her later acquaintance Jorge Luis Borges and her future husband Adolfo Bioy Casares , whom she met in 1934, married in 1940 and his Daughter, Marta, adopted her in 1954. Bioy Casares had this daughter during his marriage to Silvina Ocampo, to a prostitute in Paris. She kept silent about her relationship throughout her life, because she did not want to mix her private life with writing, but said that she had learned a lot from him and that she always gave him her texts to read first. She was also good friends with Jorge Luis Borges; she began to write herself at the end of the 1930s, not least through contact with the writers of the magazine Sur , which was published by her sister Victoria.

Together with Bioy Casares and Jorge Luis Borges, she edited the Antología de la literatura fantástica , an anthology of fantastic stories from all times and countries, as the subtitle says. The volume opened the new flow of fantastic literature in Argentina. In the arch-conservative upper class of the country, the couple, like Borges, were regarded as the epitome of discarded bohemians , whose art was initially ridiculed.

For a long time Silvina Ocampo was in the shadow of her sister, her husband and her friend Borges, and yet she has retained her own feminine voice. She has published 16 volumes of her own short stories, 10 volumes of poetry and a novel Los que aman, odian , which she wrote with her husband. She herself also worked as a translator (for example, she transcribed poems by Emily Dickinson ), because she saw translating and writing letters as a finger exercise for literary writing.

Prizes and awards

  • Segundo Premio Nacional de Poesía for Los nombres 1953
  • Premio Municipal for Espacios métricos 1954
  • Premio Nacional de Poesía for Lo amargo por dulce 1962
  • Premio del Club de los 13 for Cornelia frente al espejo 1988.

plant

Silvina Ocampo is primarily known for her fantastic short stories , in which women and children are often the main characters. Her first texts with the title Viaje olvidado , which already show elements of fantastic literature, appeared in 1937. After that, she mainly published volumes of poetry and a few plays. Norms and natural laws are broken in their texts, and despite an approach to crime stories - unlike this one - no clear "resolutions" are given. The starting point is usually a petty bourgeois milieu that is disrupted by the onset of an unfamiliar element. The laws of causality have been abolished, ambivalence , absurdity and lawlessness prevail, a contradicting collapse of opposites occurs. Realistic laws of probability are denied and the supernatural and magical are introduced. Her characters are outsiders , the sick, the dying, the crazy, animals, children and women. The author often starts from stereotypes and common idioms , which she takes literally and thereby alienates .

Stories and short stories

  • Viaje Olvidado , Buenos Aires: Sur, 1937.
  • Autobiografía de Irene , Buenos Aires: Sur, 1948. (there is also a verse version of it)
  • El pecado mortal , Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1966.
  • Los días de la noche , Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1970.
  • La furia , Buenos Aires: Sur, 1959. New edition by Orión, 1976.
  • Las invitadas , Buenos Aires: Losada, 1961. New edition by Orión, 1979.
  • Y así sucesivamente , Barcelona: Tusquets, 1987.
  • Cornelia frente al espejo , Barcelona: Tusquets, 1988. Premio del Club de los 13.
  • Las reglas del secreto , México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1991.
  • La casa de azucar

Poetry

  • Poemas de amor desesperado , Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1949.
  • Los nombres , Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1953. Premio Nacional de Poesía.
  • Espacios métricos , Buenos Aires: Sur, 1942. Premio Municipal.
  • Enumeración de la patria , Buenos Aires: Sur, 1942.
  • Los sonetos del jardín , Buenos Aires: Sur, 1946.
  • Lo amargo por dulce , Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1962. Premio Nacional de Poesía.
  • Amarillo celeste , Buenos Aires: Losada, 1972.
  • Árboles de Buenos Aires , Buenos Aires, Crea, 1979.
  • Breve Santoral , Buenos Aires: Ediciones de Arte Gaglione, 1985.

novel

  • Los que aman, odian , Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1946 (detective novel, together with Adolfo Bioy Casares)

drama

  • Los traidores (verse drama), Buenos Aires: Losange, 1956 (with JR Wilcock )
  • Porfiria
  • Keif

Children's literature

  • El cofre volante , Buenos Aires: Estrada, 1974.
  • El tobogán , Buenos Aires: Estrada, 1975.
  • El caballo alado , Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la flor, 1976.
  • La naranja maravillosa , Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1977.
  • Canto Escolar , Buenos Aires: Fraterna, 1979.

Anthologies

  • Antología de la literatura fantástica , Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1940; 2nd edition 1965, 3rd edition 1970, 4th edition 1990.
  • Antología poética argentina , Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1941.
  • La continuación y otras páginas , Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1981.
  • Páginas de Silvina Ocampo , foreword by Enrique Pezzoni, Buenos Aires: Editorial Celtia, 1984.

German translations

literature

  • Metzler Autorinnen Lexikon (1998): Edited by Ute Hechtfischer, Renate Hof, Inge Stephan and Flora Veit-Wild. Stuttgart-Weimar: Verlag JB Metzler, pp. 395-396 (article by Sabine Börcher).
  • Ulla, Noemí: Encuentros con Silvina Ocampo , Buenos Aires: Editorial de Belgrano, 1982.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Ulla 1982: pp. 63ff., 75f.
  2. ↑ See Ulla 1982: p. 78
  3. ↑ See Ulla 1982: p. 32
  4. ↑ a b Metzler Autorinnenlexikon , p. 396.
  5. ↑ See Ulla 1982: p. 69.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Ocampo, Silvina
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ocampo Aguirre, Silvina
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Argentine writer
DATE OF BIRTH July 28, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Buenos Aires
DATE OF DEATH December 14, 1993
Place of death Buenos Aires