Silvina Ocampo (28 July 1903 – 14 December 1993) was an Argentine short story writer, poet, and artist. Ocampo's friend and collaborator Jorge Luis Borges called Ocampo "one of the greatest poets in the Spanish language, whether on this side of the ocean or on the other." Her first book was Viaje olvidado (1937), translated as Forgotten Journey (2019), and her final piece was Las repeticiones, published posthumously in 2006.
Before establishing herself as a writer, Ocampo was a visual artist. She studied painting and drawing in Paris where she met, in 1920, Fernand Léger and Giorgio de Chirico, forerunners of surrealism.
She received, among other awards, the Municipal Prize for Literature in 1954 and the National Poetry Prize in 1962.
Personal life
Ocampo was born to a wealthy family in Buenos Aires, the youngest of six daughters (Victoria, Angélica, Francisca, Rosa, Clara María, and Silvina) of Manuel Silvio Cecilio Ocampo and Ramona Aguirre Herrera. Her family resided on the Canary Islands before moving to Argentina in the mid-19th century. Ocampo was the sister of Victoria Ocampo, the founder and editor of the prestigious Argentine journal Sur.
Ocampo was educated at home by tutors and in Paris. Her family belonged to the upper bourgeoisie, a fact that allowed her to have a very complete education. She had three governesses (one French and two English), a Spanish teacher, and an Italian teacher. Because of this, the six sisters learned to read in English and French before Spanish. This trilingual training would later influence Ocampo's writing, according to Ocampo herself.
Her ancestors belonged to the Argentine aristocracy and owned extensive lands. Her great-great-great-great-grandfather, José de Ocampo, was governor of Cuzco before moving to Virreinato del Río de la Plata. Manuel José de Ocampo (her great-great-great-grandfather) was one of the first governors when independence was declared. Her great-grandfather Manuel José de Ocampo y González was a politician and candidate for president of the country. He was also a friend of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Her grandfather, Manuel Anselmo Ocampo, was a rancher. Another of her ancestors was Domingo Martinez de Irala, conqueror of Asunción and future governor of Río de la Plata and Paraguay. The brother of Ocampo's great-great-great-grandmother, Juan Martín de Pueyrredón, was Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. Another distant relative is Juan Manuel de Rosas who was the main leader until 1852.
Her mother, Ramona Máxima Aguirre, was one of eight children. She enjoyed gardening and playing the violin. Her family was of Creole origins and religious. Her father, Manuel Silvio Cecilio Ocampo Regueira, was born in 1860 and was an architect. He was one of nine children and had a conservative character.
In winter, Ocampo visited her great-grandfather, who lived nearby, daily. During the summer, her family lived in a villa in San Isidro, a modern house that in its time had electricity and running water. Currently, this house (Villa Ocampo) is a UNESCO site and recognized as a historical monument. In the summer, she took classes on the second floor, where she learned the fundamentals that would later help her become a writer.
Two events that had a significant impact on Ocampo in her youth were the marriage of her sister Victoria and the death of her sister Clara. She stated that Victoria's marriage had taken away her youth: "Hubo un episodio de mi niñez que marcó mucho nuestra relación. Victoria me quitó la niñera que yo más quería, la que más me cuidó, la que más me mimó: Fanni. Ella me quería a mí más que a nadie. Fanni sabía que yo la adoraba, pero cuando Victoria se casó y se la llevó con ella nadie se atrevió a oponérsele" [There was an episode from my childhood that strongly marked our relationship. Victoria took away the nanny that I loved the most, the one who cared for me the most, the one who pampered me the most: Fanni. She loved me more than anyone else. Fanni knew I adored her, but when Victoria married and took her with her, no one dared to oppose her]. She also stated that she began to hate socializing once Clara died. Among her friends was the Italian writer Italo Calvino, who prefaced her stories. Back in Buenos Aires, she worked on painting with Norah Borges and María Rosa Oliver. She held various exhibitions, both individual and collective. When Victoria founded the magazine Sur in 1931, which published articles and texts by many important writers, philosophers, and intellectuals of the 20th century, Ocampo was part of the founding group. However, like Borges and Bioy Casares, she did not have a prominent role in the decisions about the content to be published, which was a task performed by Victoria and José Bianco.
In 1934, Ocampo met her future husband, the Argentine author Adolfo Bioy Casares. [That puts her in a handicapped place. The relationship with Bioy was very complex; she had a fairly full love life [. . . ] The relationship with Bioy Casares could make her suffer, but it also inspired her].
Ocampo and Bioy remained together until her death, despite her husband's frequent infidelities. In 1954, Bioy's extramarital daughter, Marta, was born. Ocampo adopted Marta and raised her as her own. Marta Bioy Ocampo died in an automobile accident shortly after Ocampo's own death. Bioy Casares's son by another mistress, Fabián Bioy, later won a lawsuit for the right to the estates of Ocampo and Bioy Casares; Fabián Bioy died in 2006.
Career and literary works
Ocampo began her career as a short story writer in 1936. Sur played a foundational role in the life of Ocampo, facilitating her connections with Borges, Bioy, Wilcock, and others in her circle. It was in this magazine where the first stories, poems, and translations of Ocampo appeared. Despite this, the book did not have much impact at the time of its appearance. Two years earlier she had written a crime novel with Bioy Casares, Los que aman, odian.
After several years of publishing only poetry (Los sonetos del jardín, Poemas de amor desesperado, Los nombres, which won the National Poetry Prize) she returned to writing stories in 1959 with La furia, with which she finally obtained some recognition. La furia is often considered the point in which Ocampo reached the fullness of her style.
The 1960s and 70s
Ocampo was somewhat less active in terms of editorial presence in the 1960s, as she only published the volume of short stories, Las invitadas (1961), and the poetry book, Lo amargo por dulce (1962). In contrast, she was somewhat more fruitful during the 1970s. During these years, Ocampo published the poems Amarillo celeste, Árboles de Buenos Aires, and Canto escolar. She also published the story Los días de la noche and a series of children's stories: El cofre volante, El tobogán, El caballo alado, and La naranja maravillosa.
Last years and posthumous publications
The publication of her last two books, Y así sucesivamente (1987) and Cornelia frente al espejo (1988), coincided with her onset of Alzheimer's disease. The illness gradually reduced her faculties until leaving her debilitated during her last three years. She died in Buenos Aires on 14 December 1993, at the age of 90. She was buried in the family crypt of the Recoleta Cemetery, a cemetery where Bioy Casares is also buried.
Volumes of her unpublished texts appeared posthumously, including poetry and short novels. In 2006, four of her works were published: Invenciones del recuerdo (an autobiography written in free verse), Las repeticiones (a collection of unpublished short stories that includes two short novels), El vidente, and Lo mejor de la familia. In 2007, the novel La torre sin fin was published for the first time in Argentina, and in 2008, Ejércitos de la oscuridad appeared, a volume that includes various texts. All the material was edited by Sudamericana, which also reissued some of her short story collections. In 2011, La promesa was published, a novel that Ocampo began around 1963 and that, with long interruptions and rewrites, finished between 1988 and 1989, pressured by her illness. The edition was in the care of Ernesto Montequin.
Critical reception
For most of her career, Argentine critics did not recognize the merit of Ocampo's works. Due to some extent to her relationship with Borges, her stories were criticized as not being "Borgesian enough." It was the veneration of Borges and her sister Victoria that prevented critics from understanding the formal and thematic originality of her stories. Instead, they saw them as a failure in their attempt to copy the style of these other writers. Critics wanted a firm statement about her position with respect to the "literary norm" so that they would know how to read her works and ensure that they were properly interpreting them, Suárez-Hernán bases her opinion on the context of Ocampo's literature, stating that Ocampo's literature contains a deep reflection on femininity and numerous demands for women's rights, as well as a critique of her situation in society.
Ocampo reportedly said that the judges for Argentina's National Prize for fiction in 1979 adjudged her work "demasiado crueles"—too cruel—for the award. Ocampo also experiments with the consequences of living in a world separated from adult society in "La raza inextinguible," but she also explores elements involved in the aging process and alludes that there are positive effects implicit in the characters who mix childhood traits with those of adults.
Metamorphosis
In many of her stories, Ocampo uses physical and psychological changes (characterized as metamorphosis) to transform many of her characters. These include the transition from people to plants (the human-plant hybridism in "Sabanas de Tierra"), into animals (the human-feline hybridism in "El rival"), into machines (the human-inanimate hybridism "El automóvil"), and in other people (for example, "Amado en el amado").
Ocampo uses gradual changes in her short story "Sabanas de tierra" to highlight the metamorphic process of a gardener in a plant. These changes are typically noted by their transitions in senses and actions, for example, sound, smell, visual changes, and taste. According to Juan Ramón Vélez García, many of these processes of metamorphosis indicate biblical connections in Genesis. Vélez García interprets the transformative features of the characters as a cycle or return, highlighting the biblical phrase "pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris" (Vélez García K.R. 2006). The characters in "Sabanas de tierra" do not have proper names. Ishak Farag Fahim believes that this reflects an attempt to generalize the ideas and worldview that the story seeks to communicate.