{"id":304306,"date":"2016-05-03T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-03T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2016\/05\/03\/silvina-ocampo-by-silvina-ocampo-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:15","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:15","slug":"silvina-ocampo-by-silvina-ocampo-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2016\/05\/03\/silvina-ocampo-by-silvina-ocampo-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":""Silvina Ocampo" by Silvina Ocampo [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win<\/a> series, is by Katrine \u00d8gaard Jensen, BTBA<\/span> judge, journalist, writer, and translator from the Danish. She previously served as editor-in-chief of<\/em> Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and as blog editor at<\/em> Asymptote and<\/em> Words without Borders. She is currently an editor at the Council for European Studies and teaches creative writing at Columbia University. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

Silvina Ocampo<\/em><\/a> by Silvina Ocampo, translated from the Spanish by Jason Weiss (Argentina, NYRB<\/span>)<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is in Silvina a virtue usually attributed to the Ancients or the people of the Orient and not to our contemporaries: that is clairvoyance.\u201d This high praise of Argentinian Silvina Ocampo\u2019s writing came from Jorge Luis Borges, who also made the distinction that it was her condition as a poet which exalted her prose. To the English-speaking world, Ocampo has become known through her short stories as a writer of the surreal, the fantastic, and the grotesque\u2014while Silvina Ocampo<\/em>, published by New York Review Books and translated by Jason Weiss, is Ocampo\u2019s first collection of poems to appear in English. <\/p>\n

Upon reading this collection\u2014and “discovering” Ocampo\u2019s poetry for the very first time\u2014I was struck by the ease with which Ocampo shifts between the quotidian and the dreamlike. These shifts sometimes occur between poems, sometimes within poems\u2014even within lines\u2014guiding the reader through equal amounts of personal desperation and wild mythology. In \u201cThe Infinite Life\u201d, for instance, the poem begins in a seemingly realistic present where the speaker ponders the meaning of life as well as life after death\u2014but soon enough, the reader meets Atropos, the Greek goddess of fate and destiny \u201cwith her black butterfly face\u201d; a winged horse which \u201cpasses like a beam of light through glass\u201d; the distant empire of China and the monks in Tibet; victims of witchcraft, and the \u201clustrous Mediterranean.\u201d Then, the reader is suddenly pulled back into a familiar reality: <\/p>\n

\n

It will not be the same river over the mud,
\nthe burning of trash nor the cart,
\nthe dogs in the suburban nights that
\nlose their way beside a cruel blond boy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Yet just as the reader thinks she\u2019s back on solid ground, Ocampo takes her on a new journey in the very next couplet:<\/p>\n

\n

There will be no queens of Egypt, nor coins
\npreserving their likeness, nor will there be silks.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

The poems that enchanted me most, however, were Ocampo\u2019s earlier work from 1942\u2014arranged in the first section of this collection under the title “Enumeration of My Country.” This entire section consists of poems describing Argentina\u2019s vast and stunning landscapes in such rich detail\u2014and with such a powerful, almost forceful, voice\u2014that the reader might be led to believe these poems were, in fact, written by some kind of deity. The result? I am left awestruck by both Ocampo\u2019s Dickensonian authority as a poet (I was pleased and not at all surprised to discover in Weiss\u2019s introduction that Ocampo\u2019s final book of poetry was not her own writing but translations of six hundred poems by Emily Dickinson) as well as Weiss\u2019s capacity to render Ocampo\u2019s utterly unique poetic voice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series, is by Katrine \u00d8gaard Jensen, BTBA judge, journalist, writer, and translator from the Danish. She previously served as editor-in-chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art and as blog editor at Asymptote and Words without Borders. She is currently an editor at the Council […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[18416,35996,61536,49386,1796,1646,24286],"class_list":["post-304306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-best-translated-book-award","tag-btba","tag-btba-2016","tag-btba-poetry","tag-new-york-review-books","tag-review","tag-silvina-ocampo"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":315946,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304306\/revisions\/315946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}