Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993) was an influential Argentine writer, translator, and playwright who published more than twenty books of poetry, fiction, and children’s stories. Born into an elite Buenos Aires family, she studied art in Paris with Fernand Léger and the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. Italo Calvino wrote of 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.” The first of seven short story collections, Viaje olvidado (Forgotten Journey), appeared in 1937, and her first collection of poetry, Enumeración de la patria (Enumeration of the Homeland), appeared in 1942. Other story collections include Las invitadas (The Guests, 1961), La furia (The Fury, 1999), Y así sucesivamente (And So Forth, 1987), and Cornelia frente al espejo (Cornelia Before the Mirror, 1988). A prolific translator, Ocampo brought works by Dickinson, Poe, Melville, and Swedenborg into the Spanish language.
Along with her friend Jorge Luis Borges and her husband, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ocampo came to epitomize proto–magic realist Latin American fantastical literature, a form later made famous by, among others, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. Her sister Victoria Ocampo founded and edited Sur, and many of Silvina Ocampo’s literary works appeared in that august journal. Silvina Ocampo also coedited the classic Antología de la literatura fantástica (1940) with Borges and Bioy, later published in English as The Book of Fantasy (1988).
In the two decades since her death, Ocampo’s reputation in Latin America has grown tremendously. Many previously unpublished works—including stories, a verse autobiography, aphorisms, and a novel—have been published in Argentina. Critical essays about Ocampo have appeared widely in Spanish, English, and French, and her work has been adapted for the theater and the screen. Ocampo’s writing has recently become more widely known in English, with the release from New York Review of Books Classics of Silvina Ocampo (2014), selected poems translated by Jason Weiss, and Thus Were Their Faces, collected stories translated by Daniel Balderston, with an introduction by Helen Oyeyemi and a preface by Borges. Silvina Ocampo was the first English translation of her poetry, compared by Oyeyemi to the work of William Blake. Ocampo’s verse often verges on the phantasmagorical and surreal. Thus Were Their Faces—dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque—includes a mysterious and previously unpublished novella, “The Imposter.”
In her introduction to Thus Were Their Faces, Ocampo writes, “Am I an outsider or liar, a giant or a dwarf, Spanish dancer or an acrobat? 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.” She also notes that she fought with her teacher de Chirico over the way he “sacrificed everything for color” and that she turned away from painting to writing so she could more clearly see “the forms amid the color.”
“The Waves” (1959), published here in English for the first time, might be Ocampo’s only outright science fiction story, a dreamlike future fable that also comments on the present. It is particularly interesting for portraying in a few short pages a dystopia of progress, along with ideas verging on the surreal, like the abolition of countries and wars played out using atmospheric disturbances like storms or droughts.