A Talisman in the Darkness: Selected Stories of Olga Orozco
AUTHOR
Olga Orozco
TRANSLATORS
Mary G. Berg and Melanie Nicholson
Orozco’s stories portray, in impressionistic, and dreamy language, a childhood spent in a small town on the Argentine pampa.
Reviews
“This is a gem of a collection of Olga Orozco stories, beautifully rendered into English. This wise selection of stories reveals Orozco's lyrical as well as mysterious prose. The translators provide an excellent introduction to Orozco's haunting and illuminating saga of childhood on the Argentine pampa.”
— Marjorie Agosín, Wellesley College
“A Talisman in the Darkness presents, for the first time in English, the spell-binding short stories of Olga Orozco (1920-1999), the Argentine surrealist poet, astrologer, and student of Gnosticism. The stories reconstruct scenes from a childhood on the pampas while drawing the reader into an intensely paradoxical universe of mysterious signs and omens, alternately enchanting and unnerving. At the core of the narratives is a girl child who, though episodes of unsought illumination, encounters for the first time aspects of both the visible and the hidden worlds.”
—Naomi Lindstrom
Mary G. Berg's recent translations from Spanish include the edited volume Open Your Eyes and Soar: Cuban Women Writing Now (2003) and the novels I've Forgotten Your Name (2004) by the Dominican Martha Rivera; River of Sorrows (2000) by the Argentinean Libertad Demitrópulos; and Ximena at the Crossroads (1998) by the Peruvian Laura Riesco, as well as stories, women's travel accounts, literary criticism, and collections of poetry, most recently Quincunx and The Book of Giulio Camillo by the Cuban Carlota Caulfield (Cuba). She and Dennis Maloney have translated twentieth-century Spanish poetry, including Antonio Machado's There Is No Road (2003), and The Landscape of Castile (bilingual, 2005). She teaches at Harvard Extension and is a Resident Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, where she writes about Latin American writers, including Clorinda Matto de Turner, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Soledad Acosta de Samper, and contemporary Cubans.
Melanie Nicholson is a translator and associate professor of Spanish at Bard College.
Olga Orozco (1920-1999) is considered to be one of the major Argentine writers of the twentieth century.