A young woman, Veronica, 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. After her rescue, she begins to write, only to find that remembering is not a straightforward process. A repertoire of miracles and threats, people and places parade tumultuously through her mind, and little by little, her imagination begins to commandeer her memories, ultimately freeing them from the strictures of realism.
The Promise reveals, as Ocampo once wrote, that “there are certain forms of forgetting that enrich memories more than memory itself.” As Veronica’s memory reveals its duplicity and sinister sleight of hand, she describes the story she writes as one might describe Ocampo’s life; as about a woman in a “fight against a world of conventional ideas.”
By turns autobiographical, fantastical and lyrical, The Promise is Silvina Ocampo’s final work, published posthumously in 2011. Over the course of twenty-five years, nearly up until the time of her death in 1993, Ocampo worked quietly to perfect her sole stand-alone novella, which she called a “phantasmagorical novel.” Touching on themes of childhood, death and the unreliability of memory, and suffused with Ocampo’s unique take on the intrusion of the fantastic into the mundane, The Promise, translated into English for the very first time, showcases Ocampo at her most feminist, idiosyncratic and subversive.
On 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:
“Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.”—Jorge Luis Borges
“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 or in any language, has chronicled both with such wise and elegant humor.”—Alberto Manguel
“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
