Forgotten Journey
Forgotten Journey
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Overview
"The world is ready for her blend of insane Angela Carter with the originality of Clarice Lispector."—Mariana Enriquez, LitHub
Delicately crafted, intensely visual, deeply personal stories explore the nature of memory, family ties, and the difficult imbalances of love.
"Both her debut story collection, Forgotten Journey, and her only novel, The Promise, are strikingly 20th-century texts, written in a high-modernist mode rarely found in contemporary fiction."—Lily Meyer, NPR
"Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature."––Jorge Luis Borges
"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."—Italo Calvino
"These two newly translated books could make her a rediscovery on par with Clarice Lispector. . . . there has never been another voice like hers."—John Freeman, Executive Editor, LitHub
" . . . it is for the precise and terrible beauty of her sentences that this book should be read.A masterpiece of midcentury modernist literature triumphantly translated into our times."—Publishers Weekly * Starred Review
"Ocampo is beyond great—she is necessary."—Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance and Associate Director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University
"Like William Blake, Ocampo's first voice was that of a visual artist; in her writing she retains the will to unveil immaterial so that we might at least look at it if not touch it."—Helen Oyeyemi, author of Gingerbread
"Ocampo is a legend of Argentinian literature, and this collection of her short stories brings some of her most recondite and mysterious works to the English-speaking world. . . . This collection is an ideal introduction to a beguiling body of work."—Publishers Weekly
This collection of 28 short stories, first published in 1937 and now in English translation for the first time, introduced readers to one of Argentina's most original and iconic authors. With this, her fiction debut, poet Silvina Ocampo initiated a personal, idiosyncratic exploration of the politics of memory, a theme to which she would return again and again over the course of her unconventional life and productive career.
Praise for Forgotten Journey:
"Ocampo is one of those rare writers who seems to write fiction almost offhandedly, but to still somehow do more in four or five pages than most writers do in twenty. Before you know it, the seemingly mundane has bared its surreal teeth and has you cornered."—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World: Stories
"The Southern Cone queen of the short-story, Ocampo displays all her mastery in Forgotten Journey. After finishing the book, you only want more."—Gabriela Alemán, author of Poso Wells
"Silvina Ocampo's fiction is wondrous, heart-piercing, and fiercely strange. Her fabulism is as charming as Borges’s. Her restless sense of invention foregrounds the brilliant feminist work of writers like Clarice Lispector and Samanta Schweblin. It’s thrilling to have work of this magnitude finally translated into English, head spinning and thrilling."—Alyson Hagy, author of Scribe
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780872868021 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | City Lights Books |
| Publication date: | 10/22/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 670 KB |
About the Author
Silvina Ocampo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1903. A central figure of Argentine literary circles, Ocampo's accolades include Argentina’s National Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. She was an early contributor to Argentina’s Sur magazine, where she worked closely with its founder, her sister; Adolfo Bioy Casares, her husband; and Jorge Luis Borges. In 1937, Sur published Ocampo’s first book, Viaje olvidado. She went on to publish thirteen volumes of fiction and poetry during a long and much-lauded career. Ocampo died in Buenos Aires in 1993. La promesa, her only novel, was posthumously published in 2011.
Carmen Boullosa (born in Mexico City in 1954) is one of Mexico's leading novelists, poets, and playwrights. She has published fifteen novels, the most recent of which are El complot de los románticos, Las paredes hablan, and La virgen y el violin, all with Editorial Siruela in Madrid. Her second novel, Antes, won the renowned Xavier Villaurrutia Prize for Best Mexican Novel. Her works in English translation include They’re Cows, We’re Pigs; Leaving Tabasco; and Cleopatra Dismounts, all published by Grove Press, Jump of the Manta Ray, with illustrations by Philip Hughes, published by The Old Press, and Texas: The Great Theft, published by Deep Vellum. Her novels have also been translated into Italian, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese, Chinese, and Russian.
Katie Lateef-Jan is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara in Comparative Literature with a doctoral emphasis in Translation Studies. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Latin American literature, specifically Argentine fantastic fiction. She is the co-editor with Suzanne Jill Levine of Untranslatability Goes Global: The Translator’s Dilemma (2018). Her translations from the Spanish have appeared in Granta; Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas; and ZYZZYVA.
Suzanne Jill Levine is the General Editor of Penguin’s paperback classics of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry and essays (2010) and a noted translator, since 1971, of Latin American prose and poetry by distinguished writers such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, and Adolfo Bioy Casares. She has published over 40 booklength translations not to mention hundreds of poetry and prose translations in anthologies and journals such as the New Yorker (including one of Ocampo’s stories in their recent flash fiction issue).
Levine has received many honors, among them PEN awards, several NEA and NEH grants, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and more recently the PEN USA Translation prize for José Donoso’s posthumous novel The Lizard’s Tale.
Founder of Translation Studies at UCSB, she has mentored students throughout her academic career (including Jessica Powell and Katie Lateef Jan). Levine is author of several books including the poetry chapbook Reckoning (2012); The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (1991; 2009); Manuel Puig and the Spiderwoman: His Life and Fictions (FSG, 2000, 2002). Her most recent translation is Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (2020) for Seven Stories Press.
Read an Excerpt
"Sarandí Street"
I have no recollection of the evenings, save those autumn nights that have left their imprint, so much so that they block out all the rest. The gardens and houses looked as if a move were afoot; invisible trunks seemed to float on the breeze and white dust covers already began to enshroud the dark wood furniture inside. Only the poorest houses were spared those winter farewells. On those cool afternoons when I was a girl, they would send me to buy rice, sugar or salt, and the last yellow rays of sunlight – the same dusky yellow I see now – would wrap around the trees of Sarandí Street. My hands were clenched tightly around the leaves I had pulled from the fences along the way, for fear of dropping something. After a while I came to believe I carried a mysterious message, a fortune in that crumpled leaf, which, in the warmth of my hand, smelled of summer grass. In the middle of my walk from our house to the market, a man would appear. He was always in shirtsleeves, hissing catcalls at me, chasing after my bare legs with the willow branch he’d use to swat mosquitoes. That man was a part of those houses, always there, like an iron gate or a staircase. Sometimes I’d take another longer route that followed the river’s edge, but all too often the rising waters would prevent me from passing and I’d have to take the direct route. I had six sisters then. Some married and moved away, others were dying of strange diseases. After living bedridden for months on end they would emerge, their bodies withered away and covered in deep blue bruises, as if they had endured long journeys through thorny forests. My health filled me with obligations to them and to the house.
Waves carried by the wind shook the trees of Sarandí Street. The man leaned out of his front door, hiding an invisible knife in his twisted face and I smiled out of terror as it slowly pulled me closer, as if in a nightmare, to the walkway leading up to his house.
One afternoon, darker and deeper into winter than the others, the man was no longer outside. A voice sounded from one of the windows, muffled by distance, pursuing me. I didn’t turn around but I could feel someone running after me, who grabbed my neck, directing my paralyzed steps into a house shrouded in smoke and gray cobwebs. At the center of the room stood a cast-iron bed and an alarm clock that read half past five. The man was behind me, the shadow he cast on the floor growing larger and larger until it reached the ceiling, ending in a small round head wrapped in cobwebs. I didn’t want to see anymore, so I shut myself up in the dark little room of my hands until the alarm clock rang. The hours had tiptoed by. The faint breath of sleep invaded the silence. Around the kerosene lamp fell slow drops of dead butterflies, and through the windows of my fingers I saw the stillness of the room and a wide, untied pair of shoes on the edge of the bed. I still had to face the horror of crossing the street. I took off running, letting my hands fall away from my face, knocking over a wicker chair the color of daybreak as I went. Nobody heard me.
After that day I never saw the man again. The house became a watchmaker’s shop whose owner had a glass eye. One by one my sisters continued to leave or pass away, disappearing along with my mother. I went on washing the floors and the laundry and mending the socks, until destiny imperceptibly took hold of my house, carrying everyone away except my oldest sister’s son. There was nothing left of them, save a few stray socks and darned nightgowns and a photograph of my father surrounded by an unknown family in miniature .
Today I look in this cracked mirror and still recognize the braids I learned to do when I was little, thick at the top and tapered at the bottom like the bottle-shaped trunks of silk floss trees. I have always had the pale face of an old woman, but now my forehead is crossed with lines, like a road ridden over by many wheels – creases that were once grimaces caused by the sun.
I recognize this forehead, never smooth, but I no longer know my sister’s boy, once gentle. I believed he would always be a newborn when they handed him to me wrapped in a flannel blanket, light blue for a boy. I woke those mornings to his bouyant laughter, bathed in the clearest waters, and his crying blessed my nights.
But the clothes that families would give me to wash or mend, vanilla-pod patterns on napkins and tablecloths, the stitching, encroached on my days as my sister’s boy started crawling, learned to walk and went to school. I didn’t realize that his voice had dropped, spiraling down to a deeper tone when he turned sixteen, like the voice of one of his classmates who came over to help with his homework. I didn’t realize until the day he was giving a speech at a school party, I heard him rehearsing – until then I had believed that the dark voice was coming from his bedside radio.
How many vanillas must I have stitched or baked, vanilla stitches, vanilla shortcakes (as I mustn’t miss opportunities to sell my cakes or pastries when I can), how many hems and cuffs must I have shortened, how much white foam must I have beaten washing the clothes and the floors? I don’t want to see anymore. This boy, who was almost my own, now has that unfamiliar voice that bellows from the radio. I’m trapped in the dark little room of my hands and through the windows of my fingers I see a pair of men’s shoes on the edge of the bed. That boy who was almost my own, that voice giving a speech on politics from a radio nearby, is surely that same man with his willow branch for swatting mosquitoes. And that empty crib, wrought of iron . . .
I close the windows, shut my eyes and see blue, green, red, yellow, purple, white, white. White foam, blue. Death will be like this, when it drags me from the little room of my hands.
Copyright © in the Spanish text by the Estate of Silvina Ocampo Translation copyright © 2016 by Katie Jan and Suzanne Jill Levine