Two Voices Salon: Daniel Balderston on Argentine Author Silvina Ocampo
Center for the Art of Translation | 582 Market Street, Suite 700 | San Francisco, CA
We’ll talk via Skype with Daniel Balderston, translator of Silvina Ocampo’s Thus Were Their Faces, a new release from NYRB Classics.
Thus Were Their Faces is a collection of Ocampo’s short fiction. Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993) was an Argentine writer “considered one of the twentieth century’s great masters of the story and the novella.”
Audio Table of Contents
0:00 Introductions
1:24: Daniel’s history with Silvina Ocampo and Argentina during the era of Bioy, Borges, and Ocampo
9:22 The details of Ocampo’s neglect during her life in Argentina, and the huge expansion of interest after her death
15:10 How the word “cruel” relates to Ocampo’s work and why people like to call her work “cruel”
18:50 The strangeness of the child narrators in Ocampo’s stories and preponderance of strange deaths (often narrated in a “light” way)
20:20 The element of the fantastic in Ocampo’s work
22:05 What distinguishes Ocampo’s fantastic literature from that of Borges and Bioy, and the relationship of Ocampo’s Irene to Borges’s Funes the Memorious
26:25 The fortune that Ocampo read for Daniel
27:15 The reasons Ocampo was overlooked during her lifetime
30:15 Ocampo’s relationship to Alejandra Pizarnik: influence on one another’s writing and their love affair
32:20 Ocampo’s ability to write about horror in a deadpan way and its influence on Pizarnik
34:40 The question of femininity and femininism in Ocampo’s writing
37:25 The selection criteria for the NYRB Classics volume
42:30 Bioy’s impact on Ocampo’s writing and revisions of her work
43:50 What untranslated books by Ocampo would you like to see translated into English?
45:50 The question of madness in Ocampo’s works
47:05 Challenges to translating Ocampo, in particular with regards to Ocampo’s use of gender, and the most difficult-to-translate sentence in the entire collection
52:15 Ocampo as a poet
56:40 William Carlos Williams as a translator of Ocampo’s poetry
1:01:10 Q & A
Daniel Balderston is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh, where he chairs the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures and directs the Borges Center. He is currently completing his seventh book on Borges, titled How Borges Wrote. He has edited numerous books, including Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature, and has also translated books by José Bianco, Juan Carlos Onetti, Sylvia Molloy, and Ricardo Piglia.
Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993) was a central figure of Argentine literary circles. She was an early contributor to Argentina’s Sur magazine, where she worked closely with its founder, her sister Victoria Ocampo; Adolfo Bioy Casares, her husband; and Jorge Luis Borges. (Photo credit: Adolfo Bioy Casares)