‘The world is ready for her blend of insane Angela Carter with the originality of Clarice Lispector.’—Mariana Enriquez, Lit Hub
Delicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply personal stories explore the nature of memory, family ties, and the difficult imbalances of love.
‘Both her debut story collection, Forgotten Journey, and her only novel, The Promise, are strikingly 20th-century texts, written in a high-modernist mode rarely found in contemporary fiction.’—Lily Meyer, NPR
‘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
‘These two newly translated books could make her a rediscovery on par with Clarice Lispector. . . . there has never been another voice like hers.’—John Freeman, Executive Editor, Lit Hub
‘ . . . 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.’—Publishers Weekly * Starred Review
‘Ocampo is beyond great—she is necessary.’—Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance and Associate Director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University
‘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
‘Ocampo 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. . . . This collection is an ideal introduction to a beguiling body of work.’—Publishers Weekly
This collection of 28 short stories, first published in 1937 and now in English translation for the first time, introduced readers to one of Argentina’s most original and iconic authors. With this, her fiction debut, poet Silvina Ocampo initiated a personal, idiosyncratic exploration of the politics of memory, a theme to which she would return again and again over the course of her unconventional life and productive career.
Praise for Forgotten Journey:
‘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. 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
‘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
‘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
About the author
Silvina Ocampo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1903. A central figure of Argentine literary circles, Ocampo’s accolades include Argentina’s National Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. She was an early contributor to Argentina’s Sur magazine, where she worked closely with its founder, her sister; Adolfo Bioy Casares, her husband; and Jorge Luis Borges. In 1937, Sur published Ocampo’s first book, Viaje olvidado. She went on to publish thirteen volumes of fiction and poetry during a long and much-lauded career. Ocampo died in Buenos Aires in 1993. La promesa, her only novel, was posthumously published in 2011.
Carmen Boullosa (born in Mexico City in 1954) is one of Mexico’s leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. She has published fifteen novels, the most recent of which are El complot de los románticos, Las paredes hablan, and La virgen y el violin, all with Editorial Siruela in Madrid. Her second novel, Antes, won the renowned Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for Best Mexican Novel. Her works in English translation include They’re Cows, We’re Pigs; Leaving Tabasco; and Cleopatra Dismounts, all published by Grove Press, Jump of the Manta Ray, with illustrations by Philip Hughes, published by The Old Press, and Texas: The Great Theft, published by Deep Vellum. Her novels have also been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian.
Katie Lateef-Jan is a Ph D 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 the General Editor of Penguin’s paperback classics of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry and essays (2010) and a noted translator, since 1971, of Latin American prose and poetry by distinguished writers such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, and Adolfo Bioy Casares. She has published over 40 booklength translations not to mention hundreds of poetry and prose translations in anthologies and journals such as the New Yorker (including one of Ocampo’s stories in their recent flash fiction issue).
Levine has received many honors, among them PEN awards, several NEA and NEH grants, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and more recently the PEN USA Translation prize for José Donoso’s posthumous novel The Lizard’s Tale.
Founder of Translation Studies at UCSB, she has mentored students throughout her academic career (including Jessica Powell and Katie Lateef Jan). Levine is author of several books including the poetry chapbook Reckoning (2012); The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (1991; 2009); Manuel Puig and the Spiderwoman: His Life and Fictions (FSG, 2000, 2002). Her most recent translation is Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (2020) for Seven Stories Press.
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