Everything we do in this blog, and globalization in general, was not born in recent years, there were people who dedicated themselves to finding ways to achieve it, without the technological means available to us today: Victoria Ocampo was one of them.
Victoria Ocampo was an Argentine writer and intellectual, publisher of the legendary literary magazine Sur. In 1931 she founded Sur magazine, which was translated to several languages and was in circulation for four decades.
Sur magazine counted with the collaboration of important figures of the literary and intellectual circles, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Joseph Bianco, Frank Waldo, Walter Gropius, Alfonso Reyes Ochoa Thomas Mann, Thomas Stearns Eliot, André Malraux, Henry Miller, Octavio Paz, among many others.
Guillermo de Torre, Raimundo Lida, Ernesto Sabato, Maria Luisa Bastos, Pilgrim Pastorino, Nicholas Lynch Barrios, Enrique Pezzoni, Eduardo Mallea, Juan Carlos Onetti, Alfonso Reyes Ochoa, Horacio Quiroga, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Aldous Huxley, Carl Gustav Jung, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jack Kerouac or Albert Camus, participated as sub-editors.
Thanks to their work, many writers were known outside their native countries.
Victoria was a close friend of Virginia Woolf (even wrote his biography), worked with many French intellectuals during World War II and participated in the organization of UNESCO in 1946.
Her house, currently considered World Heritage by UNESCO, was frequented by intellectuals such as Albert Camus, Rabindranath Tagore, Graham Greene, Roger Caillois, Arnold Walter Lawrence, Waldo Frank, Federico de Onis, Igor Stravinsky and Indira Gandhi.
Graham Greene dedicated his 1973 novel “The Honorary Consul” to her, “With love, and in memory of the many happy weeks I have passed at San Isidro and Mar del Plata”.
Victoria Ocampo passed away in Buenos Aires in the year 1979, her tomb can be visited at the famous La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.
Luciano Bullorsky has always liked history, politics, economics and general culture. He got his law degree at the age of 23, in the University of Buenos Aires. He gave up with his original idea of being a judge due to burocracy and long term reasons, and now he owns a company of private tours in Argentina. Showing his country and exchanging ideas with very experienced travelers and highly intellectual people from all over the world opens his mind everyday. So, now he wants to share some opinions, points of view and knowledge.