An American Place: Victoria Ocampo's Editorial Politics, the Foundation of Sur, and Hemispheric Alliances

An American Place: Victoria Ocampo's Editorial Politics, the Foundation of Sur, and Hemispheric Alliances Gortca Majstorovic is Assistant Professor of Spanish at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Her areas of expertise include ¿die nineteenth and twentieth -century Latin American literature, particu^ly in the context of migration and national identity. Her publications have appeared in Latin American Research Review, Profemina, andher current book manuscript is entitled Cosmopolitanism and the Nation in Argentine Literature (1920-1940): Reading die Tower of Babel and Babylon Tropes. In 1927, Argentine painter XuI Solar paints "Otro horóscopo Victoria (Ocampo)." This canvas depicts four encircled spaces. The first space depicts a shape that resembles the map of South America. The second space frames a face with the Argentine flag coming out of it. The third space contains another face, which overlaps the previous one. The fourth space resembles a profile, next to which is written "Victoria." I invoke Solar's painting at the beginning of this essay for it visually prefigures the merging of Argentine and continental perspectives that will be announced as programmatic in the first issue of Victoria Ocampo's literary journal. For Ocampo and Solar, as well as for Jorge Luis Borges's early works, national criollismo (manifested in Solar's painting through the representation of the Argentine flag) and internationalism are not opposed notions. In fact, they merge in the paradoxical union to which Beatriz Sarlo has referred as "national universalism" {"Fantastic'). At the beginning of 1931, three years after Solar's painting was made, Victoria Ocampo founded Sur, a literary journal that lasted 45 years and ran for 340 issues. It published Spanish American works and disseminated foreign texts in translation throughout Latin America and the world. Translation, in fact, was one of Ocampo's lifelong interests, to such a degtee that Beatriz Sarlo has referred to the whole production of Ocampo's literary magazine Sur as "a translation machine" {La máquina 93-195). Translation is a survival ofthe living after and beyond the life ofthe original text, as Walter Benjamin writes in his 1926 seminal essay on the task Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 9, 2005 172 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies of a translator. It is to be understood, Bella Brodzki points out, "not as an extension of life but as an infusion, a transfusion, of otherness" (207). Since the foundation of Sur, Victoria Ocampo was not only the main agent of this kind of "transfusion" into Latin America, but also a constructor of the cosmopolitan "bridge" between the Argentine literary production and that of the world. Sur greatly informed Latin American cultural circuits about literatura universal, as world literature is called in Spanish. The most celebrated Latin American writers of the so-called "Boom" unanimously recognize that their key literary influences were those they had read about first in the pages of Sur. Julio Cortázar thus reads Sur as a significant component of the patriotism in one of his Argenrine characrers. That one country's cultural patriotism could so significantly rely on a literary magazine is not an insignificant accomplishment on Victoria Ocampo's part. In the story "Lucas, su patriotismo," Cortázar recalls "la lectura de Sur en los años dulcemente ingenuos" (232). Despite the comment's slightly ironic connotations, it clearly acknowledges Surs capital importance for the intellectual formation of Cortázar 's generation of writers . No other literary journal in Spanish America, not even Vuelta, edited in Mexico by Octavio Paz, has ever reached the scope of influence Sur had generated. Paz himself acknowledged in 1962 that what Ocampo accomplished had never before been achieved in Latin America (279-80). The preparations for the launching of Sur consumed a number of years. Throughout this period, Ocampo persistently consulted fellow intellectuals in Europe and North America about the risks involved in publishing a new literary journal. The feedback she received was mostly supportive, but getting involved in publishing was a courageous project for a woman of her time and social class. At the end ofthe 1920s and beginning of the 1930s, not surprisingly, Ocampo's own father was arguably the strongest opponent to her project. When...