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 romnticos, 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 Cortzar, 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 Jose Donoso's posthumous novelThe 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 chapbookReckoning(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'sBezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (2020) for Seven Stories Press.
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 Independentt 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