ARGENTINA : PERCEPTION AND REPRESENTATION 01/14/2010
 Victoria Ocampo, the Argentine intellectual creator of SUR, recalls in a memoir how Virginia Woolf asked her to describe the blue butterflies of the pampas, ( Woolf probably found this information in a travel book by Darwin) butterflies that Ocampo had never seen and that probably had never lighted on any of pampas flowers. To please Woolf, whom she idolized , Ocampo made the British writer a gift of a set of mounted butterflies, feeding the fantasy that would give her entry into Woolf’s company. She would trade butterflies and the fanciful Argentina they represented for access to the Europe of her own desires. Ocampo recounts: " the people sent to bring the large package to Tavistock Square were a cousin of mine and an English governess. Neither one looked mysterious or strange. But with Virginia it was hard to foresee what kind of person she would invest with a mystery that flowed from her, or what her antennae captured. On this occasion she writes to me: “ Two veiled ladies I underline because I have never seen my cousin or Miss May wearing veils), two mysterious women arrived in the hall of my house…these ladies handed me a large package and after murmuring some unintelligible musical words they disappeared”. ( here I will make a note. My cousin speaks English. Miss May was as English as Virginia. Unintelligible? Let us follow after this parenthesis, the author of Orlando; her imagination is more seductive that our overly matter of fact vision.) It took me - she continues - ten minutes to realise that it was a gift, and that this gift was a box filled with butterflies under glass. Nothing could have been more fantastically unreal. ( Nothing but you yourself, Virginia, I thought.) " Kazminsky 2008, p. 3 | ArchivesSeptember 2011 Categories |
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