Silvina Ocampo

by Silvina Ocampo, Jason Weiss (Translator)

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.

Genres: Poetry, Latin American Literature, Spanish Literature, Fiction, Latinx, Female Authors

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 27, 2015

About the author

Silvina Ocampo Aguirre was a poet and short-fiction writer.

Ocampo was the youngest of the six children of Manuel Ocampo and Ramona Aguirre. One of her sisters was Victoria Ocampo, the publisher of the literarily important Argentine magazine Sur.

Silvina was educated at home by tutors, and later studied drawing in Paris under Giorgio de Chirico. She was married to Adolfo Bioy Casares, whose lover she became (1933) when Bioy was 19. They were married in 1940. In 1954 she adopted Bioy’s daughter with another woman, Marta Bioy Ocampo (1954-94) who was killed in an automobile accident just three weeks after Silvina Ocampo’s death.

Reviews

[Hind]

"We live for a house
we won’t be able to build,
for a voyage we won’t take,
and for a book we’ll
never get to write;
like a drawing traced
upon a page too narrow
to make room for
the entire plan."

[Patricia Conor]

Tengo en mí tantos arrepentimientos,
tantos inútiles presentimientos,
una fidelidad ciega de perro,
un corazón que puede ser de hierro
que no conmueve a veces ni la muerte,
ni la alegría, ni la buena suerte.

Si tengo un corazón es para que arda.

(...) yo moriría por tí, ¿Tú vivirías por mí?

🖤

[l]

It might be the translation.

For example, what’s this:
“Gently
breathe in my vague odors
risen from the carpet and the floors,
from the marble and the indifferent iron.”

[Jordan]

Much more romantic than I typically like but there's always the looming spectre of death keeping things from drifting into the saccharine. Her short poems, the epitaphs especially, are particularly lovely.

[Jennifer]

What stood out most to me in these poems was Ocampo's ability to imbue the objects and places with a life and personality of there own. I wouldn't say personify as she isn't making them more human like, but rather she recognizes the strange presence and influence these everyday things have on us. Her poems find the surreal in the all to real.

I do wish that the translation also included the original Spanish as I suspect a lot of musicality was lost in translation.

[Alana]

ngl very much alright. i think i’d enjoy her short stories more to the plume pitch of really where it’s at. would the clairvoyant tree swaying large fronds around ur childhood home in the bush write poems like this? yes, if it is old enough. but only if you tie ribbons of starlight around it with ur eyes before falling asleep.

[Matt Miles]

This selection covers a variety of styles, but Ocampo elevates each poem with her own unique perspective on human limitations, everyday magic in the world around us, and the nature of memory. Each poem contains worlds of meaning and demands to be instantly re-read. In other words, this collection deserves to be a classic.

[Thea Maeve]

I am very happy I stumbled upon this book at a local bookstore. Her poetry is very charming, rhythmic, and delivers a powerful method.

Surely, she should see her place among the classic poets of the 20th Century

[حسن]

Song

Oh, nothing, nothing is mine,
not the tone of my voice, nor my absent hands,
nor my distant arms!
I have received it all. Oh, nothing, nothing is mine.
I am like the reflections of a gloomy lake
or the echo of voices at the bottom of a blue well when it has rained.
I have received it all:
like water or glass that turns into anything,
into smoke, into a spiral,
into a building, a fish, a stone, a rose.
I am different from me, so different,
like some people when they are in society.
I am all the places I have loved in my life.

I am the woman I hated most,
and the perfume that wounded me one night with decrees of an uncertain destiny.
I am the shadows that entered a car,
the luminosity of a port,
the secret embraces hidden in the eyes.
I am the knife of jealousy,
and the aches red with wounds.
Of the long eager glances I am the sparkle.
I am the voice I heard behind the blinds,
the light, the air above the cypress trees.
I am all the words that I adored on the lips,
in the books that I admired.
I am the greyhound that fled in the distance,
the solitary branch among the branches.
I am the happiness of a day,
the whisper of the flames.
I am the poverty of naked feet,
with children going silently away.
I am what they did not tell me and I knew.
Oh, I wanted everything to be mine!
I am everything I have already lost.
But everything’s elusive like the wind and the river,
like the golden summer flowers
that die in your hands.
I am everything, but nothing, nothing is mine,
not the pain, nor the joy, nor the terror,
not even the words of my song.



Some images in this poem convey to my mind a wonderful poetic expression by the great Argentinian writer Borges:

I am not sure that I exist, actually.
I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited.

[Jack Malik]

A wonderful collection. There were many conventional expression and lines that I resonate with, but the poem as a whole didn’t really cut it.

For the ones I like, however, were all absolute bangers:

The Siesta
Epitaph for a Shipwrecked Sailor
Epitah for a Mariner
Cain’s Words
Epitaph for the Proud One
Song
Apocalypse
Elwgy of the Demolished Grove
Apocryph Immobility
Translucent Alchemy
Imitations
Darkness
The Towns
For an Orchid
Love Pursued
Sleeping Hydra
Inscriptions Cain Read in Abel’s Eyes
Singular Wisdom
Vanity of Vanities
Nocture
Cumulus Nimbus
Your Name

[Clay Wackerman]

I love botanical imagery as much as the next guy, but occasionally, (perhaps this is an effect of the translation) it struck me as a touch overwrought. Nevertheless, I think there are quite a few gems in here. “Your Name” “The Pines” and “Apologia” were some standouts for me.

[Northpapers]

Sabbath Book number 12 for 2018.

I did not expect to like a book with so many poems about trees.

In Ocampo's poems, trees and our own limbs and our loves and lovers all occupy the same plane.

There are lists of attributes that don't seem to belong together, or seem loosely housed in the objects they modify. But once the strangeness is granted its function, the logic of the poems begins to hum. Ocampo's world becomes a space where metaphysics and physics operate on the same surface. Where things are as much about what they are becoming as why, how, or from what they became.

Marilynne Robinson said that an adequate definition of beauty should include that it commands and rewards attention. Ocampo's poems are beautiful. By condensing so many different dimensions into such elegant surfaces, they ask to be read carefully, and each reading offers generous rewards.

Favorites: "Cain's Words" "Autobiography of Irene" and "A Tiger Speaks"

[She Nah]

A stunning collection of hers including some unpublished notes, very worthwhile reading her in her poetic mode

[Peter]

a floral, imagistic poet who uses light, darkness, plants, and animals to touch upon what lies beyond the natural world. a e s t h e t I c

[Carolina]

I love Silvina Ocampo, but I found the translation inapt and rather dull.

[Beluu Huenullan]

Belen

[Jase]

i didn't connect with it till one of the later collections, celestial yellow, but i also question the translation

[Macaria]

Review to come

[mina]

In the bosom of the afternoon the sun illuminated her like a conflagration in the engraving of an ornate Bible.

[Sameen Shakya]

Silvina Ocampo was an Argentinian writer whose short storuy collection, Thus Were Their Faces, made me an ardent fan and supporter. What made Ocampo stand out was the cruelty of her stories. She truly put her characters through the wringer. Tortured them, even. Not in a horror or gore way but in an existential manner that made her stories a pleasure to read.

When I found out that she wrote poems too and, not only that, but a translation of her poems had been published in the NYRB Poets series, I ran to get the book. Sadly, the poems collected herein lack the power of her stories but they are good nonetheless.

They're good in the traditional sense.

Nothing she is doing is groundbreaking. I fear, reading her short stories made me ask too much of her poetry. Thus, I was a bit unsatisfied.

[Iniesta]

She's a giant master of a poet. All canons need to be revised to include her. Autobiography of Irene is doubtlessly among the biggest poems of the 20th century.

Note on the book as an object:

I quite like this minialist edition of NYRB/Poets series (let alone the titles coming out in it with Zurita, Vvedensky, Borbély, etc.). As for the translation: Jason Weiss made a tremendous and excellent job: the musical strangeness and grammatical twistedness of the original poetic language has been perfectly replanted.
I can confidently tell this speaking and reading in both Spanish and English (unlike, I strongly suspect, the other reviewers having criticised the translation below).

[Nate D]

Some of these glide by unnoticed on graceful description, but Ocampo has a great feel for everyday sense of mystery, and the inexplicable natural world besides our own (albeit often metaphorically harnessed.

[Sarah]

The imagery of this woman's poetry is exquisite!