“Younger sister.” A portrait of Silvina Ocampo” (The younger sister. A portrait of Silvina Ocampo), by Mariana Enriquez, translated from Spanish (Argentina) by Anne Plantagenet, The basement, 304 p., €22.50, digital €15.
Brother of the previous one. This is the expression recognized in dictionaries of proper names. It is also the title chosen by the psychoanalyst J.-B Pontalis (Gallimard, 2006) to examine pairs of famous brothers since Abel and Cain and forge in the process the ironic concept of “freakness.”
Mariana Enríquez transfers this approach to the feminine world. In the little sister – which achieves, in France, What we lost in the fire, Our part of the night already Dangers of smoking in bedall brilliantly translated by Anne Plantagenet and published by Editions du sous-sol, in 2017, 2021 and 2023 -, the Argentine writer paints the portrait of Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993), “sister of the previous one” – in this case the great Victoria Ocampo (1890-1979). Writer, editor, patron and founder, in the 1930s, of the literary magazine Sure (“south”), the latter was the introducer to Argentina of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, of the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, friend of Virginia Woolf and, according to Enríquez, “one of the most important women of the 20th centurymy century in Argentina, at the same level as Eva Perón, who could be her mirror image in reverse.
It is not easy, when you have literary pretensions, to be the little sister of the Olympian Victoria. As if that were not enough, Silvina married the writer Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999), the best friend of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), who came every night to dinner at “the Bioys”. Sister of, wife of, friend of…: it is to free Silvina from all these ties that Enríquez becomes interested in her. It brings to light the free, complex and elusive personality of someone who was not only one of the great writers of Latin American literature (such as the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, the Mexican Amparo Dávila or the Chilean Gabriela Mistral). But who today represents a tutelary figure, almost a fetish, for an entire generation of young Argentine authors.
Polyphony
However, it was painting that first attracted him. When her parents, wealthy aristocrats, suggested she study in Paris, Silvina became a student of Giorgio De Chirico and Fernand Léger. Literature comes later. But Silvina’s imagination is not successful: too raw, too deviated, too disheveled, in a time when we like careful prose. “In the library of my childhood home there was only one book by Silvina Ocampo. It was an anthology of stories called The mortal sin »remembers Mariana Enríquez. His mother warns him: “Ocampo is very strange. » Enough to pique the curiosity of Enríquez, who later discovered theAnthology of fantastic literature. (“Anthology of fantastic literature”, 1940, untranslated), signed by Silvina Ocampo, Borges and Bioy Casares. “It was my bible”write: a selection “of a tremendously modern subjectivity and eclecticism.”
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