Victoria Ocampo

The "first lady of Argentine letters," Victoria Ocampo is best known as the architect of cultural bridges between the American and European continents and as the founder and director of Sur, an influential South American literary review and publishing house. In this first biographical study in English of "la superbe Argentine," originally published in 1979, Doris Meyer considers Victoria Ocampo's role in introducing European and North American writers and artists to the South American public—through the pages of her review, through translations of their work, and through lecture tours and recitations. She examines Ocampo's personal relationships with some of the most illustrious writers and thinkers of this century—including José Ortega y Gasset, Rabindranath Tagore, Count Hermann Keyserling, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Monnier, Vita Sackville-West, Gabriela Mistral, and many others. And she portrays an extraordinary woman who rebelled against the strictures of family and social class to become a leading personality in the fight for women's rights in Argentina and, later, a steadfast opponent of the Perón regime, for which she was sent to jail in 1953. Fifteen of Victoria Ocampo's essays, selected from her more than ten volumes of prose and translated by Doris Meyer, complement the biographical study.

The Correspondence of Victoria Ocampo, Count Keyserling and C. G. Jung centres on two pivotal meetings: Victoria Ocampo and Hermann von Keyserling’s in 1929, and Ocampo and Carl Gustav Jung’s in 1934. The first section of the book chronicles these encounters, which proved to be key moments in the lives of the players and had repercussions both private and public. The later sections consist of the correspondence and other writings that preceded and followed these meetings, translated from French, German, and Spanish, much of it for the first time. Jung framed Keyserling’s account of the encounter with Ocampo as "one of the most beautiful animus-anima stories I have ever heard." But that story, told here from the three points of view of the pioneering Argentine intellectual, the Baltic German philosopher, and the Swiss founder of analytical psychology, can also be read in the contexts of early-twentieth-century feminism and of gender and sexual politics, of the colonizing European gaze on the Americas, of Argentina and its cultural complexes, of typological impasses, and of Eros and the power of words. The fraught relationships and power dynamics among three influential figures will be of interest to analytical psychologists, historians of psychological disciplines and of South America, as well as general readers.

Victoria Ocampo's voice in these selections from her writings is personal and refreshingly candid. Her autobiography reveals what it was like to grow up female in Argentina -- a society with rigid preconceptions about the role of women. Her essays disclose her development as a woman, a feminist, and a writer who interacted with major literary figures in the Americas and Europe. As a prolific writer and the founder and publisher of Sur, the Argentine literary review devoted to international exchange, Victoria Ocampo was a key figure in twentieth-century Latin American letters. Until now most of her work has been unavailable in English. Steiner's translations make Ocampo's memoirs, letters, and essays accessible to readers with interests in autobiography, in the literature and culture of Latin America, and in the development of feminist thought.

Presents the powerful Argentine writer and publisher through translations of portions of her autobiography, letters, and essays.

Evoking the famous watchwords of Argentine president Domingo Sarmiento (1868–74), Between Civilization and Barbarism explores the positioning of women within the Argentine nation and argues that women neither sought alliance with the “civilizing” agenda of leading statesmen nor found identity in the extreme poses of “barbarism,” to which some intellectuals had condemned them. Instead, women used literary and political texts to surpass the tightly outlined roles assigned to them. Beginning with literary and journalistic texts written by and about women from the time of Sarmiento, Francine Masiello traces strategic shifts in the discourse on gender at moments of national crisis. She considers not only novels and guides to female behavior written by and for privileged women but also newspapers and political tracts produced by women of the working class. Extending her study into the urban expansion and modernization of the 1920s, Masiello explores the nature of gender relations posited in treatises on crime and public disorder and in the texts of avant-garde and social-realist writers. In addressing such representations of women, as well as the effects of ideology and history on writing, Masiello offers bold new insights into the development of Latin American women’s literature and illuminates the role of women in forming the culture of present-day Argentina.

2005 — Best Book Translation Prize – New England Council of Latin American Studies Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo were the two most influential and respected women writers of twentieth-century Latin America. Mistral, a plain, self-educated Chilean woman of the mountains who was a poet, journalist, and educator, became Latin America's first Nobel Laureate in 1945. Ocampo, a stunning Argentine woman of wealth, wrote hundreds of essays and founded the first-rate literary journal Sur. Though of very different backgrounds, their deep commitment to what they felt was "their" America forged a unique intellectual and emotional bond between them. This collection of the previously unpublished correspondence between Mistral and Ocampo reveals the private side of two very public women. In these letters (as well as in essays that are included in an appendix), we see what Mistral and Ocampo thought about each other and about the intellectual and political atmosphere of their time (including the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the dictatorships of Latin America) and particularly how they negotiated the complex issues of identity, nationality, and gender within their wide-ranging cultural connections to both the Americas and Europe.

This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies