The passport of writer Victoria Ocampo
Passport Argentinian Victoria Ocampo
Victoria Ocampo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1890. She published close to twenty books, mostly collected essays, including Testimonios (Testimonies) (1935-1977), which is a ten-volume series that is in equal parts political commentary, literary criticism, and autobiography. She is best known for founding the prestigious literary magazine Sur(South) (1931) and a publishing company by the same name (1933). Editorial Sur was the first to publish several Argentine writers, including Jorge Luis Borges. In its forty-five-year run, the journal introduced readers to new Latin American, North American, and European authors. She translated many works herself, including some by William Faulkner, DH Lawrence, and Albert Camus. She was an avid supporter of women’s rights and co-founded the Argentine Women’s Union. Ocampo was awarded the Argentine Society of Writers’ Honorable Grand prize, the Alberti and Sarmiento prize, and was inducted into the Argentine Academy of Letters. She died in 1979 in Buenos Aires. Passport Argentinian Victoria Ocampo
After 1936, when P.E.N., the International Association of Poets, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists, held its convention in Buenos Aires, new “international” names appeared in the journal, including many of Miss Ocampo’s worldwide circle of intimate friends: Albert Camus, Virginia Woolf, with whom she exchanged feminist views through a lively correspondence; T. S. Eliot, Stefan Zweig, Marcel Proust, and George Bernard Shaw, as well as William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, E. E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, and others.
Accustomed to extravagant impulses, Miss Ocampo drew public criticism from the British House of Commons for lavish spending during a 1940 “good‐will” tour. As a guest of the British Government, she reportedly spent $2,652 in eight weeks for hotel costs alone. In 1966. Miss Ocampo complained in an article in The New York Times:
“Our peso does not buy what it used to. And perhaps for that reason, I am not getting the same kind of cooperation I used to get from the young. Instead, they attack me, saying I publish too many foreigners. Of course, I do not publish people who do not write well. I never have, I never will.”
Passport Argentinian Victoria Ocampo
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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