Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993) was born to an old and prosperous family in Buenos Aires, the youngest of six sisters. After studying painting with Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger in Paris, she returned to her native city—she would live there for the rest of her life—and devoted herself to writing. Her eldest sister, Victoria, was the founder of the seminal modernist journal and publishing house Sur, which championed the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, whom Ocampo married in 1940. The first of Ocampo’s seven collections of stories, Viaje olvidado (Forgotten Journey), appeared in 1937 (one of which, “Florindo Flodiola,” is featured in Fiction No. 64); the first of her seven volumes of poems, Enumeración de la patria (Enumeration of My Country) followed in 1942. She was also a prolific translator of Dickinson, Poe, Melville, and Swedenborg, and wrote plays and tales for children. The writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky once wrote, “For decades, Silvina Ocampo was the best kept secret of Argentine letters.”