“Correspondence” collects less than thirty letters that Victoria Ocampo and Virginia Woolf exchanged between 1934 and 1940. Cultured and enterprising, Ocampo and Woolf were animated by desires for freedom and emancipation and by irony. There is great unity of purpose among them, but also some disagreements…
«Querida Virginia…», «Dear Victoria». We are on the side of the world’s literary elite, from one side of the Atlantic Ocean to the other. Virginia Woolf is one of the greatest literary figures of the early twentieth century, Victoria Ocampo, as well as a writer (here we wrote about one of her best-known books), a publisher and a leading cultural agitator, so much so as to launch Borges, Saturday, Cortázar e Bioy Casares. Similar and different, just think of her opposite attitude towards the… photos: Woolf hated having her portrait taken, a reason that caused an unpleasant misunderstanding between the two, which was later clarified in an epistolary manner. The volume with the letters of these two intelligent and sensitive prima donnas, translated into Italian for the first time, is one of the jewels of the new direction of the Medhelan publishing house, an offshoot that arises from the original Settecolori, and is an equally refined and unconventional project. schemes. Correspondence (141 pages, 18 euros) by Victoria Ocampo and Virginia Woolf, is edited lovingly and in detail by Francesca Coppola, and is introduced by a beautiful essay by Nadia Fusini, as well as offering some paratexts in a robust appendix, each more interesting than the last.
Few meetings and a… veneration
Freedom, irony and mutual admiration flow from the less than thirty letters found (mostly written by Virginia Woolf, “survivors” of certain “fires” in Argentina), of the correspondence between Ocampo and Woolf, which they write to each other, in French and English , between 1934 and 1940. Brilliant pages, without any envy, indeed with repeated encouragement and thanks, and with the disappointment of being able to see little of each other and sometimes barely touching each other, without meeting. An exchange of letters which, inevitably, also involves the difficulties experienced by women in establishing themselves in the cultural panorama of the time. Victoria Ocampo, animated by a blatant veneration, will contribute to the diffusion of Virginia Woolf’s works (and not only) in Spanish-speaking countries, entrusting their translations to giants, starting with Borges, who will sign A room of one’s own in 1936 and Orlando in 1937; the subsequent translation of At the lighthouse it will be signed by Antonio Marichalar, in 1938.
The nostalgic and the visionary
They exchange gifts (butterflies and flowers), esteem and ideas, Ocampo and Woolf. The first is more nostalgic and full of admiration, the second decidedly curious and visionary. Aristocratic, rich and, in her youth, an aspiring actress, Victoria Ocampo had not hesitated when she had to ruin her marriage already on her honeymoon. She was a traveller, able to converse in multiple languages, she had privileged relationships with Camus, Malraux, Drieu la Rochelle, she had Faulkner, Graham Greene, Dylan Thomas translated. When she learned of Virginia Woolf’s suicide, Victoria Ocampo – who would do great things for decades to come – couldn’t help but quote the dedication of a novel by her friend:
Because even when I was looking for a phrase, I couldn’t find any that could appear next to his name.
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