A short life of the author
Silvina Ocampo (28 July 1903 – 14 December 1993, Buenos Aires) was an Argentine short story writer and poet whose work — cruel, dreamlike, and narrated with a chilling matter-of-factness — constitutes one of the great hidden treasures of twentieth-century literature. For decades, she was known primarily as the wife of Adolfo Bioy Casares, the sister of Victoria Ocampo (founder of the literary magazine Sur), and the friend and collaborator of Jorge Luis Borges. This was a catastrophic critical failure. Her stories are as original, as formally accomplished, and as psychologically penetrating as anything produced by either Borges or Bioy Casares — and in some respects more disturbing, because her vision of human cruelty is more intimate and more unsparingly observed.
Life and Career
Ocampo was born into one of Buenos Aires’s wealthiest families — the same family that produced Victoria, the formidable literary impresario who founded Sur, the most important literary magazine in Latin American history. Silvina studied painting in Paris with Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger before turning to literature — and the influence of de Chirico’s metaphysical painting (its uncanny juxtapositions, its dreamlike stillness, its sense of objects charged with mysterious significance) is visible throughout her fiction.
She married Bioy Casares in 1940, and the couple’s literary circle — which included Borges as its other essential member — produced some of the most important collaborations in Argentine literary history. With Borges and Bioy Casares, Ocampo edited the Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940), one of the most influential anthologies ever published, which established the canon of fantastic literature from which subsequent generations of writers (Cortázar, Calvino, García Márquez) would draw.
Her debut story collection, Viaje olvidado (Forgotten Journey, 1937), was poorly received — Victoria Ocampo reviewed it harshly — and this early discouragement may have contributed to Silvina’s lifelong reticence about her own work. She published steadily but quietly: Autobiografía de Irene (1948), La furia y otros cuentos (The Fury and Other Stories, 1959), Las invitadas (1961), Los días de la noche (1970), and many other collections. Her novel La promesa (The Promise, posthumously published) was completed late in life.
The Stories
Ocampo’s stories are unlike anything else in Latin American fiction — or in any fiction. They are typically short, told in a flat, unaffected prose that makes no distinction between the ordinary and the monstrous. A child narrates the murder of an adult with the same tone she would use to describe a birthday party. A servant describes her employer’s cruelty with detached precision. A woman recounts a metamorphosis as though reporting the weather.
The effect is deeply unsettling. The horror in Ocampo’s stories does not come from Gothic atmosphere or supernatural machinery but from the absence of emotional reaction — the stories present cruelty, violence, and the uncanny as facts of daily life, as things that happen without explanation or moral commentary. Children are her most characteristic narrators, and their innocence is not a sign of goodness but of a moral blankness that makes them capable of anything — they observe, they participate in, and they sometimes commit terrible acts with the same equanimity.
Her subjects include class violence (servants and masters, the wealthy and the poor), the cruelty of children, metamorphosis, the ambiguity of beauty, and the thin membrane between the domestic and the nightmarish. She has been compared to Shirley Jackson (for the domesticated horror), to Flannery O’Connor (for the sudden violence), and to Leonora Carrington (for the surrealist imagery), but she is more economical than any of them — her stories achieve their effects in a few pages, often in a few paragraphs.
Rediscovery
Ocampo’s international reputation has grown dramatically in the twenty-first century, driven by excellent English translations. Thus Were Their Faces (NYRB Classics, 2015), translated by Daniel Balderston, introduced her to English-language readers and was widely reviewed. The Promise (2019) and Forgotten Journey (2019), both from City Lights, further expanded her English-language availability.
Contemporary writers — particularly women working in horror and the fantastic (Carmen Maria Machado, Mariana Enriquez, Samanta Schweblin) — have acknowledged Ocampo as a crucial precursor. Her influence on the current Latin American gothic revival is substantial, and her reputation is now approaching parity with Borges and Bioy Casares among critics and scholars.
Key Works
- Forgotten Journey (1937)
- The Fury and Other Stories (1959)
- Thus Were Their Faces (2015, selected stories)
- The Promise (posthumous)
Collecting Ocampo
Spanish originals — published by Emecé and Sur in Buenos Aires — are the primary collected form; early editions are scarce and bring $50–$200. English translations (NYRB Classics, City Lights) bring $10–$25. Ocampo died in 1993, so signed copies are rare and extremely valuable. First editions of the Antología de la literatura fantástica (Sudamericana, 1940) — co-edited with Borges and Bioy Casares — are major collector’s items.