Forgotten Journey - Softcover

Ocampo, Silvina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872867722 ISBN 13: 9780872867727

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 2019

Synopsis

Forgotten Journey, a collection of 28 short stories first published in 1937, was the world’s introduction to Silvina Ocampo, considered one of Argentina’s most original and iconic authors. With it, Ocampo initiated a personal, idiosyncratic politics of memory, writing in what would become her signature lyrical, oneiric, and slightly menacing style, a theme to which she would return again and again over the course of her long and productive career. Plots give way to the wiles of events being narrated, protagonists are often unaware of what’s going on, and the atmosphere almost always borders on a nightmarish, fantastical dimension.

The collection takes its title from its eponymous story of a girl who struggles to recall the events of her birth in order to regain the memory of her identity. In this vein, Forgotten Journey follows girls and women at different stages of life, grappling with identity, memory, and the cruelty of the worlds they inhabit. Helpless children, faithful servants, gardeners and governesses, circus performers and lovers: Ocampo writes characters at the margins of what would optimistically be called “the believable,” crafting unrealities and warping language to realize a logic of dreams, memory, and a child’s imagination.

Delicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply Argentine in their tone as well as for their autobiographical content, the stories in Ocampo’s first book anticipate the future work of one of the Spanish-language world’s most brilliant writers.

About this title

About the Author:

Silvina Ocampo, the youngest of six sisters, was born in 1903 in Buenos Aires, Argentina to a famous and affluent family. Her older sister founded Sur magazine with the help of Jorge Luis Borges, an intimate friend of Adolfo Bioy Casares, whom Ocampo married in 1940, and with whom she collaborated on various writing projects. Ocampo published her debut collection of short stories, Viaje olvidado (Forgotten Journey), in 1937, and her first collection of poetry, Enumeración de la patria (Enumeration of My Country), in 1942. She published fourteen collections and novels before her death in 1993.

Katie Lateef-Jan is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara in Comparative Literature with a doctoral emphasis in Translation Studies. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Latin American literature, specifically Argentine fantastic fiction. She is the co-editor with Suzanne Jill Levine of Untranslatability Goes Global: The Translator’s Dilemma (2018). Her translations from the Spanish have appeared in Granta; Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas; and ZYZZYVA.

Suzanne Jill Levine is General Editor of Penguin’s paperback classics of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry and essays, and a noted translator of Latin American prose and poetry by distinguished writers such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Jose Donoso, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Director of Translation Studies at UCSB, Levine is author of several books including The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction, Manuel Puig and the Spiderwoman: His Life and Fictions. Her most recent published translation is Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Taiga Syndrome (The Dorothy Project, 2018).

Review:

On Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories by Silvina Ocampo

“Dark, masterly tales. . . . a (very good) introduction. . . . Ocampo’s technique is beyond all reproach; an author has to keep masterly control when letting events veer off beyond the quotidian (the phrase 'magic realism' seems inadequate when applied to her).” —Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

"These stories are feverish, cruel, and wry, set among the surrealisms of puberty, disability, and precarity."—Joshua Cohen, Harper's

Praise for Silvina Ocampo:

“Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.”—Jorge Luis Borges

“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 humor.” —Alberto Manguel

“Ocampo wrote with fascinated horror of Argentinean petty bourgeois society, whose banality and kitsch settings she used in a masterly way to depict strange, surreal atmospheres sometimes verging on the supernatural.” —The Independent 

Praise for Suzanne Jill Levine’s The Subversive Scribe

“What [Levine] has to say about the linguistic, personal, scholarly, and imaginative elements that the translator must bring to that process is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of translation in particular and creativity in general.... An important and original book.”–Edith Grossman, translator of Love in the Time of Cholera”

About this edition

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0872867722
• ISBN 13: 9780872867727
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144