Victoria Ocampo

Victoria Ocampo, 1931

Victoria Ocampo Aguirre (born April 7, 1890 in Buenos Aires ; † January 27, 1979 there ) was an Argentine writer , translator , cultural manager and feminist .

Life

Victoria Ocampo was born as the eldest of the "Ocampo sisters" (her youngest sister Silvina also became a famous writer). She came from a privileged upper class family; her father, Manuel Silvino Cecilio Ocampo, was conservative and very strict and worked as an engineer and bridge designer, her mother's name was Ramona Aguirre. Victoria received proper private education in France , where the family had moved for a year in 1896, and later in England . She grew up in a large family, looked after by aunts and great aunts, learned French, English, Italian, piano, singing and speaking techniques . She wrote her literary works in French until 1930 and had someone translate them, as writing in Spanish seemed to her to be a "hard, artificial and difficult task". Her first literary texts were poems in French. Although she studied theater, she gave up acting again because she would never have dared actually to be on stage. In 1912 she married Bernardo de Estrada, from whom she soon divorced. The marriage lasted only a few months, but she lived with her husband under one roof for about a decade and tried to maintain the appearance of a marriage until she managed to behave officially as a "free woman", one to run her own household, etc. From around 1920 she led this freer life. She kept a large house in which writers from all over the world frequented. She had a lover, Julián Martínez (her husband's cousin), whom she hid from the family in panic fear. In 1929 she briefly had an affair with Pierre Drieu la Rochelle , with whom she had a long pen friendship.

In 1931 she founded the magazine Sur (with 346 issues up to 1980 one of the longest-lived cultural magazines in the world) and the publishing house of the same name, which she managed well into old age (1970), and thus became a patron of the arts, which, however, only promoted that which corresponded to her sense of art, which was a kind of "customs post for words", which is why she failed many texts. She herself had to fight hard to find a place for herself in society as a woman. In the third volume of her autobiography, for example, she told as an anecdote that she was insulted when she chauffeured her own car through the streets of the Argentine capital.

In Sur , she was very early on distributing the works of Virginia Woolf , to whom she felt very drawn (she had met her in London in 1934 ). She identified with Virginia because, like her, she saw herself as "too intelligent" a woman in a prosaic and unfavorable environment for women. She managed to get Jorge Luis Borges to translate A Room of One's Own and Orlando into Spanish (1935/36). But she also campaigned for Latin American authors: Gabriela Mistral , María Luisa Bombal and her own sister Silvina were published in Sur .

She herself also worked as a translator and translated works by Camus , Graham Greene , Dylan Thomas , André Malraux , Mahatma Gandhi and others into Spanish. She met Mahatma Gandhi in 1931 in Paris, where he gave a lecture. Since then she has been interested in his philosophy of nonviolent resistance . But Ocampo's political stance was not free from contradictions. At the same time, in the early 1930s, she became an ardent admirer of Benito Mussolini , whom she met in Rome in 1935 and then praised as a “genius” and reborn Caesar. The Duce exerted both a personal and a political fascination on her: "I saw that Italy, in its prime, turned its face to him [Mussolini]." It was only at the beginning of the World War that she declared herself an anti-fascist. She gave shelter to exile seekers from Nazi Germany in their homes and was actively involved in human rights and democracy. In the early 1940s, she advocated that Argentina should side with the Allies. She also attended the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 . Her attitude was now cleared to an aristocratic liberalism , which also included the fight for the rights of women (e.g. the right to vote), for which she spoke out publicly in 1935. She was also president of the Argentine Women's Union (Unión Argentina de Mujeres), which she founded in 1936.

When Juan Domingo Perón came to power in 1946, she openly declared herself against him; Above all, she was repelled by populism and the closeness to the uneducated masses, which she always hated. As one of the few women of her time, she did not deal with Evita and saw her popularity merely as a means of power by Perón, and the acquisition of the right to vote for women was only a trick. In April 1953, she was arrested for no reason at her home in Mar del Plata and locked in a room with eleven other women for a month in Buenos Aires' Buen Pastor Prison, a very important experience for her.

The rest of her life was an uninterrupted chain of club presidencies, guest lectures, honorary doctorates (e.g. from Harvard University ), French, English and Italian state medals. In 1977 she became the first woman to become a member of the Academia Argentina de Letras .

In her country house in San Isidro (Buenos Aires) , the Villa Ocampo from 1891, writers from all over the world came and went, from Rabindranath Tagore to Hermann Keyserling , from Albert Camus to José Ortega y Gasset . Victoria Ocampo died of throat cancer in 1979. Your house has been owned by UNESCO since 1973 . After a renovation in 2003, it has been a cultural center since then.

Graham Greene dedicated his 1973 novel The Honorary Consul to her .

plant

Victoria Ocampo's achievement is particularly noteworthy in the area of essays and autobiography ; The latter was still an eminently 'male' genre at the time; she tried to penetrate this male power discourse through her own writing, so to speak.

Ocampo's first article, “Babel” (1920, written in French), deals with the Babylonian confusion of languages , with the mobility and displacement of the signified , with the different interpretations of every reader who thus becomes a translator, an interpreter. She originally wrote the article as a commentary on the Divina Comedia , in the margin of the text. She sees herself as a translator, resonance, echo, her voice is fragmentary , located outside the circle of power, marginal and eccentric in the truest sense of the word . She struggles with the polysemy of language, with multilingualism, with permanent exile, an existential homelessness.

Her first works on Dante's Divina Commedia “De Francesca a Beatrice” were printed in Madrid in 1924, with the support of José Ortega y Gasset, with whom she was very friendly.

In her detailed autobiography, which was only allowed to appear after her death, Victoria Ocampo develops a subject position , an ego, but with the help of collage . The whole text is fragmentary, composed of countless quotations (which indicates the plurality of perspectives, but can also be interpreted as a search for confirmation by authorities). She has sometimes been accused of lacking unity; the only common thread is the narrator's ego, which she only gradually constructs in the course of the narration. This self is also diverse, there is no one Victoria Ocampo, but different facets, stages, developments.

Essays

• De Francesca a Beatrice . Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1924.
• Domingos en Hyde Park . Buenos Aires: Sur, 1936.
• San Isidro . Buenos Aires: Sur, 1941 (with a poem by Silvina Ocampo and 68 photos by Gustav Torlichent).
• 338171 TE Buenos Aires: Sur, 1942 (via Lawrence of Arabia).
• El viajero y una de sus sombras (Keyserling en mis memorias). Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1951.
• Virginia Woolf en su diario . Buenos Aires: Sur, 1954.
• Habla el algarrobo (Luz y sonido) . Buenos Aires: Sur, 1960.
• Dostoievski-Camus: Los poseídos . Buenos Aires: Losada, 1960.
• Tagore en las barrancas de San Isidro . Buenos Aires: Sur, 1961.
• Juan Sebastian Bach : el hombre. Sur, agosto de 1964.
• Diálogo con Borges . Buenos Aires: Sur, 1969.
• Diálogo con Mallea . Buenos Aires: Sur, 1969.
• Testimonios (10 volumes, 1935-77), in which she becomes the forerunner of this genre in Latin America (cf. later Elena Poniatowska , Rigoberta Menchú etc.)

Autobiography

• Autobiografía (6 volumes, 1979–1984)
• My life is my work. A biography in personal reports. Edited, translated a. commented by Renate Kroll. Construction Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-351-02724-7 .

See also

• Argentine literature
• List of Argentine writers
• List of Spanish-speaking writers

literature

• Marjorie Agosín (Ed.): A Dream of Light & Shadow. Portraits of Latin American Women Writers . University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 1995.
• María Cristina Arambel-Güinazú: La escritura de Victoria Ocampo: memorias, seducción, "collage" . Edicial, Buenos Aires 1993.
• Susan Bassnett (Ed.): Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America . Zed Books, London / New Jersey 1990.
• Julio Chiappini: Victoria Ocampo. Biografía , 2 volumes. Editorial Fas, Rosario 2012.
• Mariela Méndez, Mariana Stoddart: Gender Tights - medias de género. Victoria Ocampo y Alfonsina Storni . Unpublished manuscript of lecture, LASA Meeting in Guadalajara (Mexico), 17. – 19. April 1997.
• Renate Kroll (Ed.): Victoria Ocampo: My life is my work . A biography in personal reports . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-351-02724-7 .

Web links

Commons : Victoria Ocampo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Victoria Ocampo in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Victoria Ocampo in the catalog of the Ibero-American Institute of Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Quoted in Méndez / Stoddart 1997.
2. ^ Victoria Ocampo: Living History [1935]. In: Against the Wind and the Tide , ed. v. Doris Meyer, University of Texas Press, Austin 1990, p. 217.
3. ^ Victoria Ocampo: Living History [1935]. In: Against the Wind and the Tide , ed. v. Doris Meyer, University of Texas Press, Austin 1990, p. 222.
4. ↑ See Bassnett 1990, Agosín 1995.
5. ↑ See Bassnett 1990: 10.
6. ↑ Cf. Arambel-Güinazú 1993: 32f.