Synopses & Reviews
Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993) was born to an old and prosperous family in Buenos Aires, the youngest of six sisters. After studying painting with Giorgio di Chirico and Fernand Léger in Paris, she returned to her native city—she would live there for the rest of her life—and devoted herself to writing. Her eldest sister, Victoria, was the founder of the seminal modernist journal and publishing house Sur, which championed the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and in 1940 Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo were married. The first of Ocampo’s seven collections of stories,
Viaje olvidado (Forgotten Journey), appeared in 1937; the first of her seven volumes of poems,
Enumeración de la patria (Enumeration of My Country) in 1942. She was also a prolific translator—of Dickinson, Poe, Melville, and Swedenborg—and wrote plays and tales for children. The Argentine critic Ezequiel Martínez Estrada wrote that “everything in Silvina Ocampo’s poetry carries with it her reminiscence of a lost paradise, of an inferno traveled in dreams.”
Thus Were Their Faces, a collection of Ocampo’s stories and novellas, is published by NYRB Classics.
Jason Weiss is the author of five books, including Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk’, the Most Outrageous Record Label in America and The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris. Among his translations are the stories of Marcel Cohen and the poems of Luisa Futoransky. He lives in Brooklyn.
Synopsis
Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993) was a poet, fiction writer, translator, and playwright. Born into an elite Buenos Aires family, she at first studied art in Paris under Fernand Léger and surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico before marrying the Buenos Aires author Adolfo Bioy Casares. Ocampo published several volumes of short stories and poetry, as well as collaborative anthologies with Bioy Casares and close friend Jorge Luis Borges.
Thus Were Their Faces, a collection of Ocampo’s stories, will be available as an NYRB Classic in the fall of 2014.
Jason Weiss is a translator and the editor of Steve Lacy: Conversations and Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader. He lives in Brooklyn.