Bourdeilh, Marc
Victoria Ocampo as a Multilingual and Transterritorial Path: The Legacy of Héctor Bianciotti
- 2011.
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The Argentinian author Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979) deserves a place in the pantheon of multilingual writers. This paper shows that her life and writings are a reflection of her passionate, though never definitive, relations to her languages (French and Spanish) and to her territories, principally Argentina and France. She began to write in French, then continued in a form of Spanish in which French played a part. The aim of the paper is to compare her respective relations with her languages and territories of birth and of choice. Clearly, a hierarchy is at play. Through her multilingualism and francophilia, Ocampo blazed a literary trail for Héctor Bianciotti, who was born in Argentina and became a naturalized French citizen, with their respective trajectories being open to comparison.