Silvina Ocampo Read online

  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.

  Silvina Ocampo

  SELECTED AND TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY JASON WEISS

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Selection copyright © 2015 by NYREV, Inc.

  Copyright © 1942, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1962, 1972, 1979, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2015 by the Estate of Silvina Ocampo

  Translation and introduction copyright © 2015 by Jason Weiss

  All rights reserved.

  Some of these translations first appeared in earlier versions in the following journals: Latin American Literary Review, Translation, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Jazz, The Literary Review, Practices of the Wind, Words Without Borders, and The Hudson Review; as well as in the anthology Contemporary Women Authors of Latin America, edited by Doris Meyer and Margarite Fernández Olmos.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ocampo, Silvina.

  [Poems. Selections. English]

  Silvina Ocampo / by Silvina Ocampo ; translated and with an introduction by Jason Weiss.

  pages cm — (New York Review Books poets)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-774-7 (alk. paper)

  1. Ocampo, Silvina—Translations into English. I. Weiss, Jason, 1955- translator, editor. II. Title.

  PQ7797.O293A2 2015

  861'.64—dc23

  201401807

  Cover design by Emily Singer

  978-1-59017-805-8

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB/Poets series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  Contents

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  ENUMERATION OF MY COUNTRY / ENUMERACIÓN DE LA PATRIA (1942)

  Enumeration of My Country

  Buenos Aires

  San Isidro

  Sonnets from the Garden

  The Portrait

  The Mirror

  The Hands

  The Siesta

  The Balcony

  The Storm

  The Ride

  Sleepless Palinurus

  Epitaph for a Tree

  Epitaph for a Trapeze Artist

  Epitaph for a Lover

  Epitaph for a Poet

  Epitaph for a Shipwrecked Sailor

  Epitaph for a Mariner

  Epitaph for an Aroma

  To a Person Sleeping

  METRICAL SPACES / ESPACIOS MÉTRICOS (1945)

  Irremissible Memory

  The Infinite Horses

  Cain’s Words

  Autobiography of Irene

  Epitaph for the Proud One

  Epitaph for a Jealous Woman

  Epitaph for a House

  POEMS OF DESPERATE LOVE /POEMAS DE AMOR DESESPERADO (1949)

  Song

  Memory of the Rains

  Dance

  Apocalypse

  Elegy of the Demolished Grove

  Dialogues of the Silence

  THE NAMES / LOS NOMBRES (1953)

  Scales

  The Vision

  The Mosaics

  Apocryphal Immobility

  The Infinite Life

  Sonnets in the Lines of a Hand

  The Dog Okinamaro

  THE BITTER FOR THE SWEET / LO AMARGO POR DULCE (1962)

  Act of Contrition

  Love

  The Music’s Reproaches

  Sleep’s Persuasion

  Translucent Alchemy

  To My Despair

  The Embrace

  Imitations

  Darkness

  Facing the Seine, Recalling the Río de la Plata

  Illusion

  Prisoner Between Glass

  The Towns

  Childhood Home

  CELESTIAL YELLOW / AMARILLO CELESTE (1972)

  In Every Direction

  Mirrors

  For an Orchid

  Vain Warning

  Farewell

  Postcard

  The Crime

  Love

  Dolphins

  A Tiger Speaks

  Xerxes’ Plane Tree

  The Pines

  My Distant Feet

  Love Pursued

  Sleeping Hydra

  Inscriptions Cain Read in Abel’s Eyes

  The Sibyl Speaks to Her Consultants

  TREES OF BUENOS AIRES /ÁRBOLES DE BUENOS AIRES (1979)

  The Trees’ Abode

  Fragrance

  Palm Tree in the Window

  Engraved Messages

  Jacaranda

  Ubiquitous Color

  Apologia

  UNPUBLISHED AND SCATTERED POETRY /POESÍA INÉDITA Y DISPERSA (2001)

  Singular Wisdom

  Apocryphal Picture

  Vanity of Vanities

  Nocturne

  Perplexity

  Complete Forgetfulness

  Cumulus Nimbus

  Your Name

  Death of My Father

  INTRODUCTION

  SILVINA OCAMPO was born in Buenos Aires on July 28, 1903, the youngest of six sisters in a wealthy family. She was educated by private tutors and learned to read in French and English before Spanish. Throughout her writing life, ideas and phrases sometimes came to her in those other languages, to be transmuted into the language she lived in.

  Though she often wrote for her own amusement as a child, Ocampo didn’t come to literature directly. Her first love was music, but her first pursuit as an artist was painting. Like many Argentines and other Latin Americans of that era, she went to Paris to further her studies, arriving in 1931, after her father died; she stayed for nearly two years. There, she attended the atelier of Giorgio de Chirico, and later of Fernand Léger and of André Lhote. Until the mid-1930s she worked assiduously at her art, then grew dissatisfied and turned away from painting.

  During Ocampo’s time abroad, her eldest sister, Victoria, founded the influential literary journal Sur (South) and its homonymous publishing house, which operated for six decades and counted among its earliest and most frequent collaborators Jorge Luis Borges. In Paris, meanwhile, Ocampo became close friends with his sister, Norah Borges, w
ho later illustrated several of her books. Through Victoria, Borges met the young writer Adolfo Bioy Casares—and on returning to Buenos Aires, so did Ocampo. Though she was eleven years older than him, they soon became lovers and moved in together. After she showed him some poems she’d written, he encouraged her to persevere with literature. By 1937 Sur published her first book of stories, Viaje olvidado (Forgotten Journey), and would subsequently publish her first books of poetry in the following decade. In 1940, she and Bioy Casares married; Borges was his best man and became their regular dinner guest for the next five decades.

  In her lifetime, Ocampo published seven books each of poetry and stories, in addition to five books of children’s stories, chapbooks, translations (Donne, Baudelaire, Verlaine), and various collaborative projects, including the landmark Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940; The Book of Fantasy, 1988), edited by Borges, Bioy Casares, and Ocampo, and the playful mystery novel she wrote with her husband, Los que aman, odian (1946; Where There’s Love, There’s Hate, 2013). Since her death, another half-dozen books of her writing have appeared posthumously: poems, plays, stories, novellas, a novel, notes, and aphorisms.

  Ocampo’s early poetry explored, in part, the landscape and history of her native Buenos Aires, a concern shared by other Argentine writers at the time. Often her poems treated intensely personal subjects, involving the nature of memory, family relations, and a shifting sense of place and self. Along these lines, the perpetual imbalances of love proved an inexhaustible realm of poetic inquiry for her. Writing mostly in fixed metrical forms, including many sonnets, she also took up themes and figures from the classical literature of various traditions to offer new perspectives. In her later books of the 1960s and ’70s, free verse predominated with a greater inclination toward metaphysical reflections. While childhood proved a common ground for much of her fiction, with its perverse and intuitive logic, in her poetry a sort of sentient kinship with plants and animals rose to the fore—her last book of new poems published in her lifetime was titled Árboles de Buenos Aires (Trees of Buenos Aires, 1979).

  Yet despite praise from eminent writers (Borges, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, José Bianco, Italo Calvino) and even though her poetry received national prizes, her work remained little known by the reading public. In the 1960s, a new generation of writers began to take an interest in her, and Ocampo became close to the poet Alejandra Pizarnik as well as the novelist Manuel Puig. Many years later, another young friend from that time, the writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky, recalled that “for decades, Silvina Ocampo was the best kept secret of Argentine letters.” If her work was long overshadowed by the illustrious company she kept, she seemed to prefer it that way, being a rather shy and private person. Besides, her poetry and fiction did not easily align with the styles of her peers. She was very much her own creature, in her own time. As Cozarinsky observed in the newspaper La Nación in 2003: “It’s possible that the people closest to Silvina Ocampo resigned themselves to her exceptional nature, with that mix of reverence and distance inspired by visionaries or children.” This echoes what Borges said long before: “There is in Silvina a virtue usually attributed to the Ancients or the people of the Orient and not to our contemporaries: that is clairvoyance.” He also made the distinction that it was her condition as a poet that exalted her prose.

  Ocampo lived her love poems in all their terrestrial torments, shadowed by jealousy and fears of betrayal. Los Bioy, as the couple was famously known, were very devoted to each other for sixty years, though he had other lovers and she also had dalliances. Unable to bear children, she was always worried he would leave her. Eventually, he had two children from affairs with other women: a daughter born in 1954 and adopted by Ocampo as her own, and a son born in 1966 who never knew her or his sister—both children died around the age of forty. Clearly love between Los Bioy was never simple, with all its insecurities and manipulations and fleeting joys. The complicated arrangements of a marriage not unlike her own drew more sustained focus in her posthumously published novel, La promesa (The Promise, 2011), in which a drowning woman, fallen overboard and lying out on the open sea, recalls stories from her life for the book she will write as a promise to Santa Rita if she is saved. Ocampo began the novel in the 1960s and only finished it in the late 1980s, as she struggled against the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Her final book of poetry was not her own writing but translations of six hundred poems by Emily Dickinson (Poemas, 1985). Ocampo passed away at home in Buenos Aires on December 14, 1993, with her husband at her side.

  ◆◆◆

  My own long history with Silvina Ocampo began more than thirty-five years ago, during my last term as an undergraduate at Berkeley in a class on translating poetry. In the library stacks looking for something to translate, I found her sonnet “Palinuro insomne” (Sleepless Palinurus) in an anthology of Spanish-language verse. I was enchanted by its open vowel sounds and its rhythms like the rolling sea: las olas y las algas y las alas.

  I sought out Ocampo’s books and translated more of her poems. As if it were all that simple, I sent my translations to literary journals, and a few were even accepted. One editor broke it to me that I had to get permission from the author, so I wrote to her. Thus began an exchange of nine letters between us over the next four years.

  Ocampo was delighted to see her work in English, a language whose literary tradition she dearly admired. William Carlos Williams had translated her poem “The Infinite Horses” in 1958 for New World Writing, but since then nothing else had appeared in English (by the late 1970s three editions of her stories were available in Italian and French). Excited by my discovery, I set out to translate a selection of her poems as well as a selection of stories.

  As more of my translations appeared in magazines, I tried to find a publisher for both books. Fortunately, I never did. Ocampo was unknown in the United States, so editors were difficult to convince; even in Argentina, according to the critic and novelist Noemí Ulla, hardly anyone was writing about her in academia. But the bigger problem was my translations: I was still too much of a novice. My versions of her prose tended to get stuck between languages, the syntax sounding unwieldy; and while the poetry fared a bit better, my translations often felt stiff.

  In her letters, meanwhile, she told me how she read my translations to her friends, who were all impressed. She kept offering suggestions for editors and publishers I might approach. Soon enough, she was addressing me by the familiar tu instead of the formal usted, saying we were becoming friends through the poems and that she would go back to usted when we didn’t agree. In another letter, she sympathized about my move far away from my college girlfriend while suggesting that instead of calculating the distance in miles, I should calculate it in tears. That letter, dated October 1978, opened with the curious tale of her only visit north:

  I was in the United States for three weeks a century ago and I didn’t like it at all, but that’s not surprising because I think if I arrived in heaven for the first time I wouldn’t like it either. I traveled on an American boat and we were forced to have fun on board whether we wanted to or not. Eating so much ice cream day and night, I ended up getting sick by the time I arrived in New York and I went to a doctor who made me get X-rays of all my organs and endless tests, so that I spent the time waiting until the doctor told me to go eat a fried egg in order to take the X-ray of my bladder and follow the course of the disgusting liquid I had to swallow so that they could see how long it took for me to digest the ill-fated egg. After discovering that I had nothing too serious, except for being a person, they sent me to a pharmacy for some prescriptions that bore no labels or directions, which is the only thing that helps or hurts me in any medicine.

  Eventually, it could not be helped, those manuscripts were relegated to my shelf where they remained for two decades. Then one day, a few months before the centenary of Ocampo’s birth as it turned out, I received an e-mail from a young Scottish professor, Fiona Mackintosh, who had written her dissertation o
n Ocampo and Pizarnik and was familiar with some of my translations published long before. She asked if I had any more as she wanted to use them for an upcoming course. Her encouragement, along with the growing interest in Ocampo’s work, inspired me to retrieve the poetry translations from my basement. I revised the entire manuscript and tried once more to find a publisher. After much effort I ended up abandoning it again: another decade had to pass, with more revisions still, before the manuscript finally found a home.

  Upon this long, circuitous path, there are several indispensable individuals to whom I owe my deep thanks. First, the late and lamented Gregory Kolovakos, the former managing editor of Review: Latin American Literature and Arts at the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York, cheered me on for years after I first contacted him in 1977. Later, of course, Fiona Mackintosh helped revive what seemed a lost cause. But the outcome of this epic quest involves one other champion: Jeffrey Yang at New York Review Books. I had first sent him my Ocampo translations back in 2003, and eight years later he asked me to submit them to the new poetry series. Additionally, two longtime friends showed endless patience with my queries: Argentine writer Luisa Futoransky illuminated many fine points of regional usage and Ocampo’s own particular quirks, and throughout my final revisions fellow translator Elizabeth Bell proved remarkably resourceful in suggesting countless further improvements.

  —Jason Weiss

  Enumeration of My Country

  (Enumeración de la patria, 1942)

  Enumeration of My Country

  Oh, immeasurable territory,

  so violent and young. I show you

  in an unfaithful mirror: your rustic

  splendors, your fields and summers

  resonant with fragile neighing,

  your deserted nights and roads

  with flocks of constellated eyes.

  Among stands of hybrid trees,

  among numerous shadows and rubbish,

  I show you with stunned nostalgia,