Details

ISBN-10: 1590177746
ISBN-13: 9781590177747
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Publish Date: 01/27/2015
Dimensions: 6.90" L, 4.50" W, 0.30" H

Silvina Ocampo

Translator: Jason Weiss

Paperback

Price: $18.00

Overview

Silvina Ocampo possessed her own special enchantment as a poet, and only now is her extraordinary poetic achievement becoming more widely recognized beyond Latin America.

Remarkably, this is the first collection of Ocampo’s poetry to appear in English. From her early sonnets on the native Argentine landscape, to her meditations on love’s travails, to her explorations of the kinship between plant and animal realms, to her clairvoyant inquiries into history and myth and memory, readers will find the full range of Ocampo’s “metaphysical lyricism” (The Independent) represented in this groundbreaking edition.

This English-only edition does not include the poems in their original language.

  • Silvina Ocampo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1903. A central figure of Argentine literary circles, Ocampo's accolades include Argentina's National Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. She was an early contributor to Argentina's Sur magazine, where she worked closely with its founder, her sister Victoria Ocampo; Adolfo Bioy Casares, her husband; and Jorge Luis Borges. In 1937, Sur published Ocampo's first book, Viaje olvidado. She went on to publish thirteen volumes of fiction and poetry during a long and much-lauded career. Ocampo died in Buenos Aires in 1993. La promesa, her only novel, was posthumously published in 2011.

     

     

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Reviews
"It is Ocampo's position as a poet which exalts her prose. . . . Of all the words that could define her, the most accurate is, I think, ingenious." –Jorge Luis Borges

"Like William Blake, Ocampo's first voice was that of a visual artist; in her writing she retains the will to unveil the immaterial so that we might at least look at it if not touch it." –Helen Oyeyemi

"I don't know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us." –Italo Calvino

"Like her friend Julio Cortázar, [Ocampo] wrote with fascinated horror of Argentinian petty bourgeois society, whose banality and kitsch settings she used in a masterly way to depict strange, surreal atmospheres sometimes verging on the supernatural. She could reproduce with devastating accuracy the intonations and the peculiar idiom of the Buenos Aires middle classes. Yet her irony was always so subtle and restrained, it could produce effects of unexpected illumination on the life of her times." –The Independent

"Silvina Ocampo is, together with Borges and García Márquez, the leading writer in Spanish." –Jorge Amado

"Few writers have an eye for the small horrors of everyday life; fewer still see the everyday marvelous. Other than Silvina Ocampo, I cannot think of a single writer who, at any time or in any language, has chronicled both with such wise and elegant humour." –Alberto Manguel

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Details

ISBN-10: 1590177746
ISBN-13: 9781590177747
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Publish Date: 01/27/2015
Dimensions: 6.90" L, 4.50" W, 0.30" H
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