Forgotten Journey
“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 in any language, has chronicled both with such wise and elegant humor.”––Alberto Manguel, author of Packing My Library
“Silvina Ocampo’s fiction is wondrous, heart-piercing, and fiercely strange. Her fabulism is as charming as Borges’s. Her restless sense of invention foregrounds the brilliant feminist work of writers like Clarice Lispector and Samanta Schweblin. It’s thrilling to have work of this magnitude finally translated into English, head-spinning and thrilling.”—Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe
“The Southern Cone queen of the short story, Ocampo displays all her mastery in Forgotten Journey. After finishing the book, you only want more.”—Gabriela Alemán, author of Poso Wells
“There is literature that takes the known world (a dinner party or a walk with a dog, first love or a visit to friends) and shows it in a way we’ve never seen before; there is literature that takes us to a place we’ve never been (early twentieth-century Buenos Aires or adrift in the middle of the ocean) and makes it somehow familiar. The marvel of Silvina Ocampo’s fiction is that it does both things simultaneously, its deepest context the confluence of the things of this world (‘a heavy wool dress embroidered with flowers, the sleeves poorly attached,’ ‘a big box full of nails, newspaper clippings and old pieces of wire,’ ‘vanity tables without legs . . . old pharmaceutical flasks . . . chess pieces, chandeliers, miniatures’) and the ineffable mystery of mortality (‘I close the windows, shut my eyes and see blue, green, red, yellow, purple, white, white. White foam, blue. Death will be like this, when it drags me from the little room of my hands.’)”—Kathryn Davis, author of The Silk Road
“Ocampo is one of those rare writers who seems to write fiction almost offhandedly, but to still somehow do more in four or five pages than most writers do in twenty. Very little seems to happen and you are quickly lulled to relax, which makes the way these stories creep up behind you even more surprising. Before you know it, the seemingly mundane has bared its surreal teeth and has you cornered.”—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World: Stories
“Readers will delight in this whimsical and fantastical collection of short stories by Silvina Ocampo. Forgotten Journey, her first published collection now in English, is superbly translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan. Through these fantastical tales the narrator explores the life of young girls, their friendships, their inner solitudes, as well as the constant quest to understand the duality of life and the imagination. These stories transport you to a place that perhaps you have known in dreams. Now you can enter them through the lucid and fantastical world and words of Silvina Ocampo.”—Marjorie Agosín, author of I Lived On Butterfly Hill
“Silvina Ocampo’s richly textured world shimmers with childhood sweetness and sorrow. Her narrator’s hyper-observant gaze travels through the multiplying interiors of houses, mirrors, dresses, adult giants, dream figures, and nimble acrobats, in search of love stolen by bad magic. Ocampo inhabits and brings to life a hyper-real, surreal, and resolutely feminine world ruled by unapologetic beauty and pervading sadness. She is a close kin of Remedios Varo and Frida Kahlo, weavers of the magical Latin American art that bewitches us time after time. This beautiful translation fully renders that magic.”—Andrei Codrescu, author of No Time Like Now: New Poems
“This translation opens up the wonderful sepia-tinted strangeness of Ocampo’s complete first book of stories to a readership that may already know her fiction from Daniel Balderston’s anthologies, Leopoldina’s Dream (1988), and Thus Were Their Faces (2015), which presented two stories from Forgotten Journey including the title story and ‘A Strange Visit.’ Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan’s vivid translation of the whole of Forgotten Journey captures well Ocampo’s unsettlingly topsy-turvy world, peopled by precocious children who act with the self-possession of adults, and adults cowed by the fears and phobias of childhood. In their carefully crafted version, Ocampo’s idiosyncratic governesses, servants, circus performers and children act out intense dramas, influenced by the palpably malignant force of the objects surrounding them. Loss of innocence is a perpetual threat, and the translation savors this pervasive unease. With stories like ‘The Dead Horse’ and ‘The Two Houses of Olivos’ the reader can place Ocampo in relation to other key figures in Argentinian literature in translation, such as Julio Cortázar in his ‘End of the Game’, or Jorge Luis Borges and Cortázar’s fascination with doubles.”—Fiona Mackintosh, author of Childhood in the Works of Silvina Ocampo and Alejandra Pizarnik
“Silvina Ocampo was once called the ‘the best kept secret of Argentine letters,’ and was, through her own work and that of those she championed, a key figure of modernism. Known primarily in the English-speaking world as a friend of Borges and wife to his collaborator Bioy Casares, the translation of more of her work into English is a reason to celebrate her for her own right, as one of the most singular writers of the 20th century.”—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books, CA
“Ocampo (1903–1993) is a legend of Argentinian literature, and this collection of her short stories brings some of her most recondite and mysterious works to the English-speaking world. Many of these are glancing sense impressions, such as ‘The Enmity of Things,’ a dreamlike vision of sinister windows in a rotting, cavernous house filled with secret rooms, or ‘The Olive Green Dress,’ which briefly follows a scandalous schoolteacher. Other stories are more forthcoming, though just as strange: in ‘The Lost Passport,’ a 14-year-old girl and a streetwalker together board a doomed cruise ship, managing a kind of mystic transference before the inevitable wreckage. ‘Landscape of Trapezes’ follows the story of a tightrope walker and her monkey, while two girls, rich and poor, trade places in ‘The Two Houses of Olivos’ as their guardian angels lie sleeping in the garden; and in the title story, a child struggles to recall the moment of her own birth. Common topics for Ocampo include children’s first encounter with death and disease and the secret malevolence of certain clothing items (a cardigan provokes a feeling of misery in one character; a bathing suit reminds another character that the sea is ‘a device of endless torture’). In Ocampo’s prose, every detail indicates a hidden world just beyond waking. This collection is an ideal introduction to a beguiling body of work.”—Publishers Weekly
“The first English translation of Argentinian surrealist Ocampo’s debut book.By any account, Ocampo is an underrecognized literary innovator. Born in Buenos Aires in 1903, she trained as a visual artist under the tutelage of Giorgio de Chirico in Italy but returned home to launch a career as the lucid chronicler of Argentina’s characters, colors, and drifting seasons. Her legacy is often overshadowed by her association with her sister, the well-known editor Victoria Ocampo, her marriage to acclaimed novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares, and her friendship with Jorge Luis Borges, but Ocampo’s short vignettes—determinedly dreamlike, constitutionally opposed to traditional structures, quietly feminist in their focus on domestic menace and the underrecorded lives of women, children, and the laboring class—hold their own as masterworks of midcentury modernism. In her debut collection, originally published in 1937, Ocampo introduces the reader to singular characters like Miss Hilton, the world-traveling tutor undone by her apparent lack of modesty, who ‘blushed easily, and had translucent skin like wax paper, like those packages you can see through to all that’s wrapped inside’; or Mademoiselle Dargere, the caregiver to a ‘colony of sickly children,’ who is haunted by the vision of a man’s head wreathed in flames; or Eladio Rada, the caretaker of a stately country home who measures the seasons of his life by the house’s relative emptiness. Ocampo’s landscapes are just as central to the stories’ thematic development as her unforgettable characters. Set on the streets of Buenos Aires itself, in the decaying summer homes of the country’s interior or the fishing villages along its coast, Ocampo’s stories lovingly detail the landscape that nurtures, haunts, or condemns her characters within the spiral cycles of their lives. Often these stories culminate in dreams or dreamlike violence—as in ‘The Lost Passport,’ in which 14-year-old Claude dreams of the fire that sinks her trans-Atlantic ship, or ‘The Two Houses of Olivos,’ in which two young girls take advantage of their guardian angels’ siestas to escape to heaven, ‘a big blue room with fields of raspberries and other fruits,’ riding on the back of a white h orse. Sometimes Ocampo’s play with surrealism and metaphysical symbolism is more overt, as in ‘Sarandí Street,’ in which the speaker’s entrapment in her family’s house is blamed on her sisters, ‘dying of strange diseases,’ who emerge from their rooms with ‘their bodies withered away and covered in deep blue bruises, as if they had endured long journeys through thorny forests.’ Indeed, it is Ocampo’s skill with the blurred line between dream and memory that marks her oeuvre and distinguishes her from contemporaneous masters of the modernist vantage like Virginia Woolf or Katherine Mansfield. Yet regardless of the author’s historical importance, it is for the precise and terrible beauty of her sentences that this book should be read.A masterpiece of midcentury modernist literature triumphantly translated into our times. “ —Kirkus Reviews, * Starred Review
“Year by year, more of the great Argentinian Silvina Ocampo is restored to us, like the lost work of a luminously dark seer. Borges and Calvino were in her thrall: the fantastic Mariana Enriquez has written an entire book on her. Yet Ocampo remains an obscure writer to most. Yet what work she wrote, what an incredible life she lived. These two newly translated books could make her a rediscovery on par with Clarice Lispector. In The Promise, a woman falls overboard a transatlantic ship and confronts her regrets and longings as she bobs in the freezing water. Forgotten Journey gives us 28 short stories, translated into English for the first time, providing a surprising glimpse of the birth of gothic fiction in Latin America, which dates back to the 1930s. Lusciously strange, uncompromising, yet balanced and precise, there has never been another voice like hers.”—John Freeman, Executive Editor, LITHUB
“Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.”—Jorge Luis Borges
“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 William Blake, Ocampo’s first voice was that of a visual artist; in her writing she retains the will to unveil immaterial so that we might at least look at it if not touch it.”—Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread
Copyright © 2019 by the Heirs of Silvina Ocampo
Translation copyright © 2019 by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan
All Rights Reserved.
First published in Spanish as Viaje olvidado in 1937.
This work was published with the sponsorship of the “Sur” Translation Support Program administered by the Argentine Republic’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship. / Obra editada en el marco del Programa “Sur” de Apoyo a las Traducciones del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto de la República Argentina.
Cover photo of Silvina Ocampo courtesy of the Estate of Silvina Ocampo
Cover design by Elizabeth Knafo/Noctiluna Design
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ocampo, Silvina, author. | Levine, Suzanne Jill, translator. | Lateef-Jan, Katie, translator.
Title: Forgotten journey / Silvina Ocampo ; translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan.
Description: San Francisco : City Lights Books, [2019] | Translated into English from Spanish. | Summary: “Delicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply personal stories explore the nature of memory, family ties, and the difficult imbalances of love”— Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019027249 (print) | LCCN 2019027250 (ebook) | ISBN 9780872867727 (paperback) | ISBN 9780872868021 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Ocampo, Silvina—Translations into English.
Classification: LCC PQ7797.O293 A2 2019 (print) | LCC PQ7797.O293 (ebook) | DDC 863/.62—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027249
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027250
An earlier version of the translation of “Sarandí Street” was published in Granta, August 2016
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133
www.citylights.com
CONTENTS
Foreword by Carmen Boullosa
Skylight
Esperanza in Flores
The Olive Green Dress
The Backwater
The Dead Horse
The Enmity of Things
Eladio Rada and the Sleeping House
The Lost Passport
Florindo Flodiola
The Poorly Made Portrait
Landscape with Trapezes
The Two Houses of Olivos
The Acrobats
Siesta in the Cedar Tree
The Head Pressed Against the Window
The Wide and Sunny Terrace
Nocturne
A Strange Visit
Sarandí Street
The Statue Salesman
Saint’s Day
Diorama
The Pavilion on the Lakes
The Sea
Forgotten Journey
The Linio Milagro Family
Bare Feet
Where the Streetcars Sleep
FOREWORD
Silvina, Faithful to the Imagination
In general, I’m at least faithful to the imagination.
—Silvina Ocampo
The extraordinary stories you are about to read are by Silvina Ocampo (1903-93), the youngest of six sisters who grew up in Argentina when it was one of the richest countries in the world, and when the Ocampo family was one of the richest families in Argentina.
Silvina was part of a magical circle whose nucleus was formed by Jorge Luis Borges and, among others, the younger man who would become her husband, Adolfo Bioy Casares. Each member of this circle created his or her own works, and also worked in collaboration. While each writer had his or her own style, as a group, known as the Sur group—around the important journal Sur founded by Silvina’s eldest sister Victoria in consultation with the New York writer Waldo Frank—they shaped a literary cultural identity and a new literary genre. In their collaborative work, the trio of Silvina Ocampo, Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares became a quartet with the creation of yet another writerly persona (or personae). For example, Bioy and Silvina (married in 1940; he was eleven years younger) wrote with four hands a detective thriller spoof, literally Those Who Love, Hate. In 1940, Borges, Bioy and Silvina published a famous anthology of Fantastic Literature, and when Bioy and Borges wrote together, the writer they created had various pseudonyms (taken from the names of their ancestors) like “Bustos Domecq” or “Benito Suarez Lynch.” Silvina contributed to those literary ventures and inventions as well, but she didn’t sign on as an official contributor, perhaps because her collaboration was exclusively oral.
For many years, Victoria was the only famous Ocampo sister, a celebrity in the intellectual circle coalescing in the 1930s and 40s, known as much for her elegant beauty as for her intelligence. Among the illuminati whose friendship she cultivated were José Ortega y Gasset, Virginia Woolf, Paul Valéry, Lawrence of Arabia, Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, and Rabindranath Tagore; she had passionate affairs with a number of distinguished writers (including Roger Caillois, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle who, unlike Victoria and most of those close to her, was pro-Axis and committed suicide at the end of WW II); she commissioned Borges to translate Woolf’s Orlando and other works (we readers in Spanish have read that version for generations, and are familiar with the legend that Borges crafted it with his mother, another four-handed duet). In addition to being an editor in chief and a cultural entrepreneur, Victoria was a self-styled patroness, and her generosity was legendary, as when, for example, Tagore visited Buenos Aires in 1924, and Victoria sold a diamond tiara to put him up in a luxury hotel for two months.
In contrast with her sister’s flamboyant life, Silvina wanted to go unnoticed, to be invisible. She believed she was ugly and refused to go to parties most of the time, saying “where would I be going with a face like this?” She would also claim “I am the etcetera of the family,” “I do not like to socialize, I prefer intimacy.” According to Mariana Enriquez (a member of the Ocampo family and author of Silvina’s biography, The Kid Sister) “she preferred dim, shadowy places, especially in her damp apartment in the Recoleta Quarter.”
But Silvina was no hermit. She was a seductive woman who enjoyed the company of her male friends (great writers, of course), though her intimate world was very different from her older sister’s. While Victoria wrote her memoirs in several volumes, Silvina shied away from the public eye, and perhaps nothing damaged Silvina’s prestige more than the first review of her first book, written by Victoria, in which the latter defines her stories as “autobiographical” and classes her narratives as awkward (totally not true, I must add, because Silvina’s first book, this book, is masterful). The fact is that the book written by the youngest Ocampo sister, which you the reader now hold in your hands, has nothing to do with “memoirs”: the author is not telling us the story of her life here, although, like all writers, she has pillaged the trunk filled with her memories.