Silvina Ocampo

Silvina Ocampo possessed her own special enchantment as a poet. For fifty years she was associated with prominent literary and artistic personalities in Buenos Aires, and content to live as “a famous unknown” far from the public eye, writing furiously, hiding her work, gradually publishing several books of poetry and fiction, and eventually winning all of her country’s major literary prizes. Only now is her extraordinary achievement as a poet becoming more widely recognized beyond Latin America. Ocampo’s poetry occupies a mythical, enigmatic space with its meditations on love’s travails, intuitions of kinship between plant and animal realms, and inquiries into place and family and memory. This is the first collection of Ocampo’s poetry to appear in English and displays the full range of her production—from her first published book in 1942 to her last in 1972, from her early sonnets on native landscape and history to her explorations of myth and classical history and love’s depths, as well as the metaphysical turn in her later verse.

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 Leger 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.