The Promise

"We are made of stories, and, when they are as well-told as Silvina Ocampos, 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 youre 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 Ocampos 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 its out this fall in its first ever English translation. Its 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 seaa reflection of Ocampos own struggles with dementia and her interest in memory and identity. Its said to be Ocampo 'at her most feminist, idiosyncratic and subversive' and I just cant 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 "Its an extraordinary book, for which only Borgess description of her writing will doclairvoyant."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 Ocampos fiction is wondrous, heart-piercing, and fiercely strange. Her fabulism is as charming as Borgess. Her restless sense of invention foregrounds the brilliant feminist work of writers like Clarice Lispector and Samanta Schweblin. Its 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

Silvina Ocampo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1903. A central figure of Argentine literary circles, Ocampo's accolades include Argentinas National Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. She was an early contributor to Argentinas Sur magazine, where she worked closely with its founder, her sister; Adolfo Bioy Casares, her husband; and Jorge Luis Borges. In 1937, Sur published Ocampos 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 Penguins 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 Ocampos 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 Jos Donosos posthumous novel The Lizards 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 Nettels 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 Bentez 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 Nerudas book-length poem, venture of the infinite man, was published by City Lights Books in October 2017. Her most recent translation, of Edna Iturraldes award-winning book, Green Was My Forest, was published by Mandel Vilar Press in September, 2018.