The Promise

by Silvina Ocampo, Suzanne Jill Levine (Translator), Jessica Powell (Translator), Ernesto Montequin (Foreword by)

Overview

A dying woman's attempt to recount the story of her life reveals the fragility of memory and the illusion of identity.

"Of all the words that could define her, the most accurate is, I think, ingenious."—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

"Few writers have an eye for the small horrors of everyday life; fewer still see the everyday marvelous. Other than Silvina Ocampo, I cannot think of a single writer who, at any time in any language, has chronicled both with such wise and elegant humor."—Alberto Manguel

"This haunting and vital final work from Ocampo, her only novel, is about a woman's life flashing before her eyes when she's stranded in the ocean. . . . the book’s true power is its depiction of the strength of the mind and the necessity of storytelling, which for the narrator is literally staving off death. Ocampo’s portrait of one woman’s interior life is forceful and full of hope."—Gabe Habash, Starred Review, Publishers Weekly

"Ocampo is beyond great—she is necessary."—Hernan Diaz, author of In the Distance

"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

"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

A woman traveling on a transatlantic ship has fallen overboard. Adrift at sea, she makes a promise to Saint Rita, "arbiter of the impossible," that if she survives, she will write her life story. As she drifts, she wonders what she might include in the story of her life—a repertoire of miracles, threats, and people parade tumultuously through her mind. Little by little, her imagination begins to commandeer her memories, escaping the strictures of realism.

Translated into English for the very first time, The Promise showcases Silvina Ocampo at her most feminist, idiosyncratic and subversive. Ocampo worked quietly to perfect this novella over the course of twenty-five years, nearly up until the time of her death in 1993.

Praise for The Promise:

"A woman examines her life piecemeal, putting it together like a puzzle missing half its pieces--but the resulting image is all the more mesmerizing because of it. A deft and subtle novel that holds together as airily as a spider's web."—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World: Stories

"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:	9780872868038
Publisher:	City Lights Books
Publication date:	10/22/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	504 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.

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.

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.

Jessica Powell has published dozens of translations of literary works by a wide variety of Latin American writers. She was the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in support of her translation of Antonio Benítez Rojo's novel, Woman in Battle Dress(City Lights, 2015), which was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Translation. Her translation of Wicked Weeds by Pedro Cabiya (Mandel Vilar Press, 2016), was named a finalist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award and made the longlist for the 2017 National Translation Award. Her translation of Pablo Neruda’s book-length poem, venture of the infinite man, was published by City Lights Books in October 2017. Her most recent translation, of Edna Iturralde’s award-winning book, Green Was My Forest, was published by Mandel Vilar Press in September, 2018.

Jessica Powell has published dozens of translations of literary works by a wide variety of Latin American writers. She was the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in support of her translation of Antonio Benítez Rojo's novel, Woman in Battle Dress(City Lights, 2015), which was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Translation. Her translation of Wicked Weeds by Pedro Cabiya (Mandel Vilar Press, 2016), was named a finalist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award and made the longlist for the 2017 National Translation Award. Her translation of Pablo Neruda’s book-length poem, venture of the infinite man, was published by City Lights Books in October 2017. Her most recent translation, of Edna Iturralde’s award-winning book, Green Was My Forest, was published by Mandel Vilar Press in September, 2018.

Read an Excerpt

I’m such an ignoramus. How could I publish this text! What publisher would accept it? I think it would be impossible, unless a miracle occurs. I believe in miracles.

“I love you and I promise to be good,” I used to tell her, to gain her sympathy when I was a child and for a long time afterwards whenever I’d ask her for a favor, until I learned she was famous for being an “arbiter of the impossible.” There are people who don’t understand that you speak to a saint as you would to anybody. If they’d known all my prayers they would have said they were sacrilegious and that I am not a devout believer in Saint Rita.

The statues or statuettes usually depict this saint holding a mysterious wooden book in her hand, which she presses against her heart. I never forgot the detail of this pose when I made her the promise that, if I were saved, I would write this book and finish it by the time my next birthday came around. That date is almost a year away. I’ve begun to feel anxious. I thought it would be a big sacrifice to keep my promise. To make this dictionary of memories that are at times shameful, even humiliating, would mean giving over my intimacy to anyone. (Perhaps this anxiety was unfounded.)

I don’t have a life of my own; I only have feelings. My experiences were of no importance, neither throughout my life, nor even on the threshold of death, but rather the lives of others become mine.

Copying these pages on the typewriter would be a thankless task, as I don’t have the money to pay a typist to make the copies (neither do I have altruistic friends who know how to type). Presenting the manuscript to editors, to any publisher in the world who might refuse to publish the book, so that I would have to pay for it inevitably with the sale of objects I value or with some menial work, the only work of which I’d be capable, would mean sacrificing my sense of pride.

How distant are those happy days when I would eat the chocolates in the Keystone Cop wrappers or the chewy white candies with my little nephews in Palermo, swinging on the swings, or sliding down the slide. Those times when I felt unhappy, now seem to me so joyful, when my nephews would get their hands so filthy playing in the dirt, that when we’d go back home to my sister’s house, instead of taking a bath or going to the movies, I would have to clean their nails with Carpincho saddle soap as if they had been in the Police Department Headquarters after leaving fateful fingerprints.

I, who always considered it useless to write a book, find myself committed to doing this today in order to keep a sacred promise to myself.

Three months ago, I boarded the Anacreonte bound for Cape Town, to visit the less tedious side of my family: a consul and his wife, cousins who always looked out for me. Everything we want too much turns out badly, or never happens at all. I got sick and had to return as soon as I arrived, because of an accident I had during the trip over there. I fell into the ocean. I slipped on the deck where they store the lifeboats when I leaned over the handrail to catch a brooch that hung from my scarf and had fallen off. How? I don’t know. Nobody saw me fall. Maybe I fainted. I came to in the water dazed by the blow. I couldn’t even remember my name. The ship was calmly moving away. I shouted. Nobody heard me. The ship seemed more immense than the sea. Fortunately, I’m a good swimmer, though my form is quite deficient. After the first shock of cold and fear had passed, I glided slowly through the water. The heat, the noonday light helped me along. I almost forgot my fearful predicament because I love sports and I tried all the styles of strokes. At the same time I thought of the dangers the water could inflict upon me: sharks, sea serpents, jellyfish, waterspouts. The ebb and flow of the waves had a calming effect on me. I swam or floated on my back eight straight hours, waiting for the ship to return to pick me up. I sometimes wonder how I managed to nurture that hope, and honestly I don’t know. At first I felt so much fear I couldn’t think, then thoughts came to my mind haphazardly: I thought of schoolteachers, noodles, movies, prices, theater productions, the names of writers, titles of books, buildings, gardens, a cat, an unhappy love affair, a chair, a flower whose name I couldn’t remember, a perfume, a toothpaste, etc. Memory: how you made me suffer! I suspected that I was about to die or that I had already died in the confusion of my memories. Then I noticed, upon feeling a sharp burning in my eyes caused by the salt water, that I was alive and far from dying since those who are drowning, it is known, are happy and I was not. After getting undressed, or being undressed by the sea in that way the sea undresses people as if with a lover’s hands, there came a moment when sleep or the craving to sleep took hold of me. In order not to sleep, I imposed an order on my thoughts, a kind of mental journey or itinerary I now recommend to prisoners or patients who cannot move, or to the desperate who are on the verge of suicide.

Editorial Reviews

★ 07/08/2019

This haunting and vital final work from Ocampo (1903–1993), her only novel, is about a woman’s life flashing before her eyes when she’s stranded in the ocean. The nameless narrator has fallen off a ship, and as she floats, her mind takes over, presenting a flotilla of real and imagined memories about the people in her life in the form of a version of the book she promises herself she’ll finish . The book’s main thread is a woman, Irene, and a man, Leandro, with whom both Irene and the narrator get involved. But the fluid narrative also encompasses brief snapshots of a murder mystery, the narrator’s grandmother’s eye doctor (“In profile, his intent rabbit face was not as kind as it was head-on.”), her hairdresser, her ballerina neighbor, and the fruit vendor to whom her brother was attracted as a boy (“it was a fruit relationship, perhaps symbolizing sex”). The narrator’s potent, dynamic voice yields countless memorable lines and observations: “The only advantage of being a child is that time is doubly wide, like upholstery fabric”; “What is falling in love, anyway? Letting go of disgust, of fear, letting go of everything.” But the book’s true power is its depiction of the strength of the mind (“what I imagine becomes real, more real than reality”) and the necessity of storytelling, which for the narrator is literally staving off death: “I told stories to death so that it would spare my life.” Ocampo’s portrait of one woman’s interior life is forceful and full of hope. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"We are made of stories, and, when they are as well-told as Silvina Ocampo’s, they will remain after we are gone."—Dorothy Potter Snyder, Reading in Translation

" . . . a bold phantasmagoria, marked by Ocampo's insight that in extremis, delirium can be the highest form of truth."—Laura Kolbe, New York Review of Books

"Diamonds, Dionysus, and Drowning: . . . every sentence glints with precision . . . what you’re after are the sentences, which have the feel of epigrams . . . I think I took a photo of nearly every other page so as not to forget them."—Rhian Sasseen, The Paris Review

"Suzanne Jill Levine, working with Jessica Powell on The Promise and Katie Lateef-Jan on Forgotten Journey, has produced a translation that beautifully captures the elegance and strangeness of Ocampo’s style. . . . The results are intoxicating."—Miranda France, The Times Literary Supplement

"These are the moments that elevate The Promise into a higher echelon of letters; simultaneously, death proves evasive and nostalgia serves as a survival tactic. All the while readers get to witness the wondrous tightrope act Ocampo performs, traipsing back and forth between past and present."—John Gibbs, Zyzzyva

"Legend Silvina Ocampo worked on perfecting this novel [The Promise] over the course of 25 years, right up until her death in 1993, and it’s out this fall in its first ever English translation. It’s being published alongside Forgotten Journey a collection of short stories by Ocampo translated by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan. In The Promise, a woman reminisces about her life, and lets her imagination get away with her, after falling overboard into the sea—a reflection of Ocampo’s own struggles with dementia and her interest in memory and identity. It’s said to be Ocampo 'at her most feminist, idiosyncratic and subversive' and I just can’t wait to get my hands on it and Forgotten Journey."—Pierce Alquist, Book Riot

"A woman examines her life piecemeal, putting it together like a puzzle missing half its pieces—but the resulting image is all the more mesmerizing because of it. A deft and subtle novel that holds together as airily as a spider's web."—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World: Stories

"It’s an extraordinary book, for which only Borges’s description of her writing will do—clairvoyant."—Brian Dillon, 4Columns

"Her obliquely-focused narrative lens requires readers to experience the off-kilter sensation of a slant perspective, lending a cinematic quality to her gothic themes."—Dorothy Potter Snyder, "Reading in Translation"

"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

"Forgotten Journey and The Promise by late Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo are cornucopias, outpourings of words with the same concision we ascribe to nature. Descriptions pour forth not like water but sap, ensuring the reader will pause and savor, not just in a portrait but every paragraph, each word."—Ana Castillo, Women's Review of Books

"A masterpiece from an extraordinary author who deserves to be read over and over. A gem."—Marjorie Agosin, author of I Lived On Butterfly Hill

"Ocampo inhabits and brings to life a hyper-real, surreal, and resolutely feminine world ruled by unapologetic beauty and pervading sadness."—Andrei Codrescu, author of No Time Like Now: New Poems

"Silvina Ocampo was once called the 'the best kept secret of Argentine letters,' and was, through her own work and that of those she championed, a key figure of modernism. Known primarily in the English-speaking world as a friend of Borges and wife to his collaborator Bioy Casares, the translation of more of her work into English is a reason to celebrate her for her own right, as one of the most singular writers of the 20th century."—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books, CA

"Only a masterful storyteller could pull off what Silvina Ocampo does in The Promise; a woman lost at sea drowns in her memories, while the water—never threatening—cradles her with echoes of the past. A novel that is not a novel; a hypnosis, really."—Gabriela Alemán, author of Poso Wells

"There is literature that takes the known world (a dinner party or a walk with a dog, first love or a visit to friends) and shows it in a way we've never seen before; there is literature that takes us to a place we’ve never been (early twentieth-century Buenos Aires or adrift in the middle of the ocean) and makes it somehow familiar. The marvel of Silvina Ocampo’s fiction is that it does both things simultaneously, its deepest context the confluence of the things of this world . . . "—Kathryn Davis, author of The Silk Road

Praise for Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories by Silvina Ocampo:

"Dark, masterly tales. . . a (very good) introduction. . . . Ocampo’s technique is beyond all reproach; an author has to keep masterly control when letting events veer off beyond the quotidian (the phrase 'magic realism' seems inadequate when applied to her)." —Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

"These stories are feverish, cruel, and wry, set among the surrealisms of puberty, disability, and precarity."—Joshua Cohen, Harper's

Praise for Silvina Ocampo:

"Ocampo wrote with fascinated horror of Argentinean petty bourgeois society, whose banality and kitsch settings she used in a masterly way to depict strange, surreal atmospheres sometimes verging on the supernatural." —The Independent

Praise for Suzanne Jill Levine’s The Subversive Scribe:

"What [Levine] has to say about the linguistic, personal, scholarly, and imaginative elements that the translator must bring to that process is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of translation in particular and creativity in general.... An important and original book."—Edith Grossman, translator of Love in the Time of Cholera

Praise for venture of the infinite man by Pablo Neruda, translated by Jessica Powell:

"Jessica Powell is the 'distant light that illuminates the fruit' of venture of the infinite man, the twenty-two year old Pablo Neruda's untranslated third book. One part quest and one part inner map, in Powell's hands the delicious and strange language of the original dances effortlessly in English. Readers can now experience the moment Neruda evolved from being only a brilliant singer of love poems into a maker of rich, stunning worlds. This book is a treasure."—Tomás Q. Morín, author of Patient Zero

"This book has the fascination of being Neruda becoming Neruda. It's the brilliant young poet who made himself famous at nineteen and twenty with Twenty Love Poems, beginning to absorb the lessons of the new surrealism and making his way to the world poet he would become in Residence on Earth. So it is a leap into the imagination of one of the crucial poets of the twentieth century as he is feeling his way."—Robert Hass

From the Publisher

★ 2019-08-19
A woman relives the people and places of her life while stranded in the middle of the ocean.

The premise of Argentinian writer Ocampo's posthumously published novella, which she worked on for the final 25 years of her life, is a grand metaphor for the authorial condition. On her way to visit family in Cape Town, the nameless narrator somehow slips over the railing of her trans-Atlantic ship and regains consciousness in the water, watching "the ship…calmly moving away." Adrift, facing almost certain death, she makes a pact with St. Rita, the "arbiter of the impossible," that she will write a "dictionary of memories," and publish it in one year's time, if she is saved. What follows is an intensely focused series of vignettes in which the characters of the narrator's life once more walk through their dramas. There's Leandro, a handsome and feckless young doctor with "a face as variable as the weather"; Irene, his intensely focused lover and a medical student in her own right; Gabriela, Irene's obsessive daughter; and Verónica, a not-so-innocent ingénue. These central characters' stories entwine and begin to form the basis of a tale that includes our narrator—who is present as a voyeur but never an active participant—but her drifting consciousness is just as likely to alight upon less crucial secondary characters like Worm, Gabriela's countryside companion, or Lily and Lillian, devoted friends who fall in love with the same man because "instead of kissing him they were kissing each other." As the narrator's memories progress, and sometimes repeat, they grow increasingly nightmarish in their domestic surrealism. Meanwhile, as all chance of rescue fades, her sense of self is diluted by the immense mystery of the sea. Completed in the late 1980s, at a time when Ocampo was grappling with the effects of Alzheimer's, the book can be read as a treatise on the dissolution of selfhood in the face of the disease. However, its tactile insistence on the recurrence of memory, its strangeness, and its febrile reality are themes that mark the entirety of Ocampo's oeuvre and articulate something more enduring even than death. "I'm going to die soon! If I die before I finish what I'm writing no one will remember me, not even the person I loved most in the world," the narrator exclaims in the final pages. This urgency and despair seem to sum up the central tenet of the artist's condition—even in the final extreme, the act of making is a tonic against obscurity. Art is the cure for death.

A seminal work by an underread master. Required for all students of the human condition.

Kirkus Reviews