ENUMERACIÓN DE LA PATRIA

Ocampo's fascination with childhood is wide-reaching and permeates both her fiction and poetry; the idiosyncratic use of a child's narrative perspective, apparent in such early stories as ‘Cielo de claraboyas’, is also a feature of her first published poetic work, Enumeración de la patria. This representation of ‘la patria’, a kind of poetic marking-out of her territory, appears to set itself up as quirky – even prosaic – subverting more conventionally laudatory and lyrical works of this type. The title poem describes the national territory as ‘violentísimo y párvulo’ (p. 9), thus highlighting a juxtaposition of traits (the violent and the infantile) which is to become one of the hallmarks of Ocampo's work. She creates a space of artistic freedom which she can then fill richly from her poetic imagination, including nostalgia, young girls and excessive sunsets in her idiosyncratic evocation:

Moving to the physical geography of her country she literally maps it out with the fresh enthusiasm of a child's pen:

This action of a child drawing the landscape recurs in the much later poem ‘Canto escolar’, from the collection of that name, which is accompanied on the facing page by a photograph of a child's schoolbook and the tracing of a map: ‘Yo dibujé tu mapa, mi Argentina’ (Canto escolar, p. 9). The country landscape of estancias and quintas leads her to further evocation of childhood memories:

which crystallize key elements of her later stories, that is, unexpectedly prosaic or domestic details and restless experiences of the childhood world imposed by adult routines and rituals such as siestas.