The writer-translator condition: Victoria Ocampo under the American drama sign

Abstract

As Antoine Berman states it, the biographical reconstruction of translators sheds light on the relationship between the latter, their writing, their mother tongue and other languages. In the particular case of Victoria Ocampo’s autobiography, the links between Spanish, French and English are presented under the sign of a drama that she defines as American. The picture of this drama refers to the discomfort that the writer felt, as a South American cosmopolitan who lived among languages and learned to read and write in French and English before doing so in her mother tongue. Taking into consideration the «disorders of identity» that, according to Derrida, can be traced through phenomena such as «belonging or nonbelonging to the language» or «affiliation», I analise translation —in a methaphorical sense— in the context of Ocampo’s own writing. I am particularly interested in the role of writer-translator, because it has allowed me to explore this double-sided condition that is concomitant with the problem of «language duality».