Sarandí Street | Silvina Ocampo | Granta Magazine

Sarandí Street

Silvina Ocampo

Translated by Katie Jan & Suzanne Jill Levine

‘Around the kerosene lamp fell slow drops of dead butterflies.’

Silvina Ocampo

Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993) was one of Argentina’s great twentieth-century poets and short story writers. She emerged onto the Buenos Aires literary scene in 1937 with her first book of short stories, The Forgotten Journey, and later co-authored The Book of Fantasy  with her close friend Jorge Luis Borges. She went on to publish many books of poetry and short fiction and her works have been widely translated. Thus Were Their Faces, an English-language collection of her short stories was published by NYRB Classics in 2015.

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Translated by Katie Jan

Katie Jan is a PhD student in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her doctoral research focuses on Argentinian fantastic fiction, and her translations from the Spanish have appeared in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas.

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Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine

Suzanne Jill Levine is a professor the University of California in Santa Barbara, where she directs a Translation Studies doctoral program. She is a noted translator of Latin American Fiction and author of the literary biography Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions and The Subversive Scribe. Her most recent honour was a PEN award in 2012 for her translation of José Donoso’s The Lizard’s Tale. She is currently translating Eduardo Lalo’s La inutilidad for University of Chicago Press.

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