Silvina Ocampo, Argentinian Surrealist Writer & Poet

By Katharine Armbrester | On April 1, 2025 | Comments (0)

Silvina Ocampo (July 28, 1903 – December 14, 1993) spent most of her life in Buenos Aires, the cosmopolitan capital of Argentina. Born into wealth and privilege, she developed a unique body of work inspired by the avant-garde art and literary movements of her time, including Surrealism and Magical Realism.

Too often, Silvina Ocampo has been mentioned only in relation to her sister, Victoria Ocampo—an intellectual, activist, and publisher; and her husband, Adolfo Bioy Casares, a successful writer and frequent collaborator with Jorge Luis Borges (the pioneering short story writer and translator who brought Spanish-language literature to global prominence).

Ocampo’s work is has been been translated into English more frequently of late. Her short stories reveal astonishing originality, gifts for humor and vivid descriptions, and subtle commentary on social issues of her time.

Childhood, early influences, and art

Silvina Ocampo was born in Buenos Aires to a prominent, wealthy family with aristocratic roots. She was the youngest of six girls, all extensively educated at home by tutors. From an early age, Ocampo spoke and eventually wrote in Spanish, French, and English.

Ocampo’s knowledge of English gave her access to classic American writers, including Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe—all of whom she would later translate into Spanish. Like Poe, many of her later poems and stories feature foreboding atmospheres, unusual deaths for her characters, and sly commentary on the moral hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie.

While growing up, Ocampo and her large family relocated to San Isidoro in the summers, taking up residence in a picturesque villa inspired by European architecture. Years later, Victoria moved in permanently and hosted some of the most influential artistic and literary personages of the 20th century. Ocampo later wrote that her childhood ended after Victoria married and another sister died unexpectedly: “Children have their own hell.”

In her stories, Ocampo rarely described women as naturally maternal or children as charming and innocent. Mothers are often absent and ambivalent; children sense danger close at hand in their sheltered world. In her story “The Prayer,” Ocampo makes this observation: “Children’s crimes are dangerous. Children use any means to reach their ends. They study dictionaries. Nothing gets by them. They know everything.”

When Victoria reviewed her sister’s first story collection, Forgotten Journey, she wrote: “Silvina Ocampo’s stories are memories masked by dreams; dreams of the kind we dream with our eyes open. The friendship or enmity of inanimate things – which cease to be – populate these stories as they populated our childhood or as they populate the lives of savage tribes.”

At the tender age of five, Ocampo made the long journey from Argentina to Paris by ocean liner, and she returned to study art in 1920 when she was seventeen. She studied painting with Giorgio de Chirico and Férnand Leger, both early practitioners of Surrealism. Upon her return to Buenos Aires, she continued painting and frequently participated in exhibitions.

In his preface to Ocampo’s short story collection Leopoldina’s Dream, Borges noted that her artistic skills influenced her writing. “Like Rossetti and Blake, Silvina has come to poetry by the luminous paths of drawing and painting,” he wrote, “and the immediacy and certainty of the visual image persist in her written pages.”

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Silvina in the 1930s (photo courtesy of Wikmedia Commons)
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Sur and Adolfo Bioy Casares

In 1931, Victoria founded the literary magazine Sur, which, until 1992, published articles by leading writers, philosophers, and intellectuals. Victoria was her sister’s first publisher, and after the latter made her literary debut in Sur, she decided to devote her life to writing.

Ocampo met the aspiring author Adolfo Bioy Casares in 1934, when she was thirty-one and he was twenty. When they married in 1940, they shocked both their families and the bourgeoisie society. Casares was devoted to his wife’s writing and equally admired his sister-in-law’s accomplishments as a publisher and intellectual.

Casares’ support of his wife’s career and their age difference weren’t the only unusual factors of their marriage. He was frequently unfaithful and fathered at least two children by other women. Ocampo adopted his daughter Marta and raised her as her own, and Casares’ extramarital son Fabián was later awarded the right to the estates of both his father and Ocampo.

In her only novel, The Promise, Ocampo wrote: “What is falling in love, anyway? Letting go of disgust, of fear, letting go of everything.” Her writing reveals a hyperawareness that men in Latin American society got away with far more misbehavior than women ever could. Perhaps rejecting societal expectations for marriage was something else Ocampo let go of to remain with a man who took her writing seriously. Casares always returned to Ocampo after his affairs, and they remained married for fifty-three years.

One must read Ocampo’s stories carefully to discern her heroines chafing at the rules that don’t apply to the men in their lives, and how emotional repression and internalized misogyny often lead to acts of violence. Her stories reveal a dedication to depicting the interior monologues of her female characters — often with a shocking disregard for social mores and the intensely Catholic, patriarchal society that foreshadowed that foreshadows the novels of Ukrainian-born Brazilian Clarice Lispector and the bestselling Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende.

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Silvina with Bioy Casares, date unknown
(photo courtesy of Wikmedia Commons)
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Jorges Luis Borges and Ocampo’s writing life

Jorge Luis Borges was often published in Sur, and throughout his celebrated career he maintained close friendships with Ocampo, her husband Casares, and Victoria. Between the four of them, they spoke some ten languages. Borges was renowned for his love of Old English and Norse. They critiqued one another’s works, and wrote prefaces for and reviews for each other.

One of their most significant joint projects was Antologia de la literatura fantástica, published in 1940, later translated as The Book of Fantasy It was jointly edited by Ocampo, Borges, and Casares. They selected some eighty stories by familiar writers including Lewis Carroll and James Joyce, as well as obscure authors spanning ancient China and Imperial Rome. Trailblazing science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin admired the collection and wrote a foreword for the English translation in 1988.

In 1946, Ocampo and her husband co-wrote a subversive detective story that brilliantly broke all the conventions of the genre, titled Los que aman, odian, which was translated in 2013 as Where There’s Love, There’s Hate. The main character is Humberto Huberman, a name strikingly reminiscent of Humbert Humbert, the antihero of Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel Lolita, published nine years later. Both characters act as unreliable narrators in their respective stories.

In addition to her numerous translations of foreign literature into Spanish and her poetry, which Borges greatly admired, Ocampo diligently revised her work with the discerning eye of both an author and an artist. Despite her extensive literary output spanning nearly six decades, only a small fraction has been translated into English. Ocampo wrote eloquently about the importance of writing:

“When you write everything is possible, even the very opposite of what you are. I write so that other people can discover what they should love, and sometimes so they discover what I love. I write in order not to forget what is most important in the world: friendship and love, wisdom and art—a way of living without dying, a way of death without dying. On paper, something of us remains, our soul holds onto something in our lives: something more important than the human voice, which changes with health, luck, muteness, and, finally, with age.”

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Short stories, and a novel 25 years in the making

With the eye of a painter, even in her briefest stories Ocampo takes time to vividly describe the Argentinian scenery in her tales: grim ancestral portraits and spiral staircases in rotting mansions; flamingoes, llamas, and nights “smelling of mint and rain”; groves of eucalyptus, palm, and rubber trees alongside fields of white carnations and orange gladioli.

Amid all the natural beauty in her tales, terror and cruelty hover nearby. The lingering effects of colonialism are present in several of her stories, when fair-skinned and blonde Argentinian women are treated with more respect than pueblos, or indigenous women, and privileged young men are allowed to use various substances, and beat their pets and servants without consequences.

In 1982, Ocampo wrote in a letter to a friend: “I don’t like conventions, that a novel needs to have an ending, for example.” Widely read in multiple languages, along with her astonishing literary connections, she was fully aware of standard literary conventions and traditions. However, she was as determined to break rules in her novel, as she did in her short stories.

Ocampo revised her only novel, The Promise, over a span of twenty-five years, never explicitly stating that she considered her book finished. She revised it most assiduously from 1988–89, after receiving the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. In many of her short stories, time is rarely linear but rather something that an author can fold, wrinkle, or smooth at will. The same is true of The Promise.

Like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, Ocampo’s nameless heroine is acutely aware of her hypnotic storytelling powers: “I told stories to death so that it would save my life.” For the duration of the novel, the heroine is stranded in the ocean and memories of her life flood back to her, and it is not revealed how many of the narrator’s memories are true or false.

Only rarely does the narrator comment on the ocean in which she is slowly drowning, such as observations of flying fish, or pondering if mermaids exist. “Horrible, beautiful, divine?” she asks herself. In this eerie tale, the narrator’s descriptions of the sea around her resemble staccato notes in a piece of music that make sense only to the conductor.

Echoing her earlier collaboration with her husband, a murder mystery is woven through The Promise, but isn’t as essential to the plot as it is to revealing glimpses into the character’s personality and motivations. Like in her stories, Ocampo is less interested in Realism than in chiseling away at the absurdity of reality. She wields elements of Surrealism, Magical Realism, and 19th-century Gothic literature with the self-assurance of a master.

“I don’t have a life of my own; I have only feelings,” boldly states her narrator at the beginning of the novel. “My experiences were never important—not during the course of my life nor even on the threshold of death. Instead, the lives of others have become mine.”

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Villa Ocampo in San Isidro
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“A luminously dark seer”— Silvina Ocampo’s legacy

In her short stories and The Promise, Ocampo often writes movingly of older women, who “always look like they’re in disguise.” She died on December 14, 1993 at the age of ninety after a three-year decline from Alzheimer’s disease. She was buried in her family’s crypt. Casares was laid beside her after his death six years later.

The Ocampo family home was bequeathed by Victoria to UNESCO in 1973, and Villa Ocampo was fully restored in 2003. It is now open to the public as a cultural center. Among the resplendent home’s many attractions are the high-ceilinged music room, with its grand piano, where Igor Stravinsky and Arthur Rubinstein played. The extraordinary library, featuring some 12,000 books, many of which are signed by the greatest authors of the 20th century.

The Hesburgh Libraries at the University of Notre Dame houses an extensive collection of Ocampo’s writings, including “first editions of her short story publications, poetry collections and collaborative works,” and an undated diary, with a section that “tells the story of two intimate, female friends as they travel to Paris in search of adventure.”

In 1979, her literary oeuvre was denied Argentina’s National Prize for Literature because the judges deemed it “demasiado crueles”—too cruel. Victoria had been nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970 and 1974, both times losing to male authors. On the latter occasion, Victoria was one of nine nominated women out of more than one hundred writers, illustrating the vast gulf that women writers faced at the time.

In her lifetime, Ocampo witnessed Borges’ work translated into European languages and English, while her own body of published work received little attention outside of Argentina. In addition, it was often unfavorably compared to the work of Borges. Victoria, Casares, and Borges championed her work; the latter wrote: “Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.”

The Cuban-born Italian writer and journalist Italo Calvino also admired Ocampo: “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.”

Ocampo’s work has being increasingly translated in the 21st century. In 2015, the New York Review of Books Classics published a collection of her poetry as well as Thus Were Their Faces, a collection of short stories. In 2019, City Lights Books published Ocampo’s only novel, The Promise, and Forgotten Journey, her debut collection of short stories first published in 1937.

When The Promise and Forgotten Journey were translated, John Freeman provided a glowing review. “Year after year, more of the great Argentinian writer Silvina Ocampo is restored to us, like the lost work of a luminously dark seer … Lusciously strange, uncompromising, yet balanced and precise, there has never been another voice like hers.”

Ocampo published eleven collections of poetry during her lifetime, but only one has been translated into English—Silvina Ocampo, published by New York Review Books in 2015.

She frequently contributed to children’s story collections and literary anthologies. Still, arguably her most famous—and, as of this writing, the only one translated into English—is Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940), on which she collaborated with Casares and Borges, and which was translated as The Book of Fantasy in 1988.

At one point in The Promise, the narrator exclaims, “If I die before I finish what I’m writing, no one will remember me, not even the person I loved most in the world.” Was this fear Ocampo’s own? Perhaps it haunts every writer, but in her case, she need not have feared.

Thirty years after Silvina Ocampo’s death, there is growing interest in her finely crafted, unsettling tales. For centuries, South America has been renowned for its gold. Today, the testimonies and literary contributions of its women are being unearthed, and their vibrant words shine far brighter than any metal.

Contributed by Katharine Armbrester, a 2022 graduate of the MFA creative writing program at the Mississippi University for Women. She is a devotee of Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Atwood, and loves periodicals, history, and writing.

Literary Ladies Guide

An archive dedicated to classic women authors and their work

Silvina Ocampo, Argentinian Surrealist Writer & Poet

By Katharine Armbrester | On April 1, 2025 | Comments (0)

Childhood, early influences, and art

Sur and Adolfo Bioy Casares

Jorges Luis Borges and Ocampo’s writing life

Short stories, and a novel 25 years in the making

“A luminously dark seer”— Silvina Ocampo’s legacy

Further Reading and Sources

Categories: Author biography

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