Victoria Ocampo: A Lady of the Sea sulle sponde italiane

Abstract

We know the deep fascination the Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo experienced throughout his life by French culture and language. However, the imprint that Italian culture and language engraved in his spirit was also very deep. The writer traveled to Italy several times and found a fertile soil in intellectuals, many of whom engaged in friendships there. Its Sur magazine also constituted a major agent of diffuser of contemporary Italian literature in Argentina. But his passion for Dante and his Divine Comedy was the stronger bond that linked it to the Italian peninsula. In this article we will present, in the first paragraph, a brief overview of the relations of the Argentinean writer with Italian culture and, in the second, as echo of his love for the Florentine and his capital work, we delve into the diegetic resources used to build in his Autobiografía III — where she recounts his affair with Julián Martínez— an image of herself, in line with the great literary heroines that transgressed universal marriage laws, among which excels the figure of Francesca da Rimini, protagonist of «Canto V» of Dante’s Inferno.