About Sur

Sur

Sur was a literary and cultural magazine published in Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 1931 and 1992. It was founded by the writer Victoria Ocampo and it reached 371 issues over the course of its life. Published in Spanish from the Argentine capital, it became widely regarded as Argentina's most influential literary magazine and as one of the most important literary reviews in Latin America in the twentieth century. Its name, meaning South, announced its position from the start: a magazine made in the south that intended to speak, without apology, to the literary world of Europe and the Americas on equal terms.

This profile is written entirely in the past tense because Sur closed in 1992. The record that survives for the magazine is unusually rich compared with many other Argentine reviews of its era. Its founder, its publisher, its dates, its issue count and many of its contributors are well documented in library holdings, in the archives of its publishing house and in a large body of scholarly study. Where detail is set out below, it rests on that documented record. Where the record does not support a precise figure, such as a reliable circulation total for a particular year, no figure is offered.

Founding in Buenos Aires in 1931

Sur was first published in 1931. Its founder and principal backer was Victoria Ocampo, a writer from one of Argentina's oldest and wealthiest families who used her own resources to sustain cultural projects. Ocampo founded the magazine and, two years later, founded its companion publishing house, Editorial Sur, in 1933. The magazine and the publishing house then worked as a pair: the magazine discovered, translated and debated writers, and the publishing house issued many of the same writers in book form for Spanish-speaking readers.

The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset supported the new magazine intellectually, and many of its earliest editions carried the colophon of his Revista de Occidente. That connection mattered. It placed a new Buenos Aires review inside an existing transatlantic conversation from its first issues, rather than leaving it to build authority slowly from the periphery. Ocampo herself directed and financed the magazine for decades, and it remained closely identified with her judgement, her friendships and her willingness to spend her fortune on literature that had no guaranteed commercial return.

Editorial identity and programme

Sur was a literary magazine in the broadest sense of that term. It published fiction, poetry, essays, criticism, philosophy and commentary on art, music, cinema and theatre. Its defining editorial practice was translation. From the outset it presented foreign writers in Spanish, often for the first time, alongside Argentine and Latin American writers, and it treated translation not as a secondary service but as a central act of Argentine cultural creation. Scholarship on the magazine has stressed this point repeatedly: through Sur, Buenos Aires readers encountered modern European and North American writing in carefully made Spanish versions, and Argentine writing was in turn reframed by that encounter.

The magazine also had a recognisable intellectual posture. It favoured a cosmopolitan, liberal and humanist culture, it defended the autonomy of literature from direct political instruction, and it took a clear stance against political extremes during the turbulent decades of its middle life. It became an important home for Spanish Republican exiles after the Spanish Civil War and it published writing opposed to fascism and antisemitism at a time when nationalist and antisemitic propaganda also circulated in Argentina. That posture brought it admirers and critics in equal measure, and both reactions are part of its documented history.

Contributors and the Sur circle

The list of contributors documented for Sur explains much of its reputation. Among Argentine writers, Jorge Luis Borges was its most famous and most constant presence. Borges contributed from the first issues, served at times in editorial roles, and first published in Sur many of the stories that later made his international reputation. Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ernesto Sábato, Silvina Ocampo, Eduardo Mallea, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada and José Bianco were also closely associated with the magazine, as were H. A. Murena, Raimundo Lida and Guillermo de Torre, Borges's Spanish brother-in-law, who all took part in its editorial life at different moments.

Foreign contributors and translated authors included Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabokov, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence and Jean-Paul Sartre, together with Gabriela Mistral, Alfonso Reyes, Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez among Latin American voices named in the magazine's record, and Alejandra Pizarnik among the later Argentine poets it published. The mixture was deliberate. A single issue could place an Argentine story beside a European essay and a translation, and the Notes section, which grew to occupy a substantial share of the magazine by the 1940s and 1950s, reviewed Argentine, Spanish-language and foreign books together. The effect, over hundreds of issues, was to train a readership to judge Argentine literature inside world literature rather than apart from it.

Editorial Sur and the book programme

Editorial Sur, founded in 1933, extended the magazine's work into books. A large share of the books it issued were translations, and its catalogue carried many of the foreign authors the magazine had introduced as essayists and reviewers into the hands of readers as novelists, poets and thinkers in their own right. The relationship between magazine and publishing house was therefore not incidental. The magazine tested, framed and argued for writers; the publishing house gave those arguments permanence on the shelf. For historians of Argentine publishing, the pair together form one of the clearest examples in the country of a privately financed cultural project that operated continuously, at a high editorial standard, for more than half a century.

That continuity depended heavily on one person. Ocampo's money, houses, correspondence and personal diplomacy held the project together. She corresponded with writers across Europe and the Americas for decades, hosted visiting writers in Buenos Aires and used her social position to protect a magazine that often had little in common with the tastes of the class into which she had been born. Borges's tribute on her death in 1979, that she had dedicated her considerable fortune to the education of her country and her continent, captured how contemporaries understood that role.

Sur and Argentine politics

Sur was never a party magazine, but it did not exist outside politics. In the 1930s Ocampo herself expressed an early admiration for Benito Mussolini, whom she met in Rome in 1935, and then became disenchanted with fascism with the approach and outbreak of the Second World War. During the war she supported anti-Nazi publishing activity from Argentina, and in 1946 she attended the Nuremberg trials. In 1953 she was briefly imprisoned for her open opposition to the government of Juan Domingo Perón. Each of these episodes is documented in biographical accounts of Ocampo, and each left its mark on how the magazine was read: for supporters, as proof of independence; for critics on the nationalist and left traditions, as evidence of an elite, Eurocentric liberalism distant from Argentine social realities.

Later Argentine reviews defined themselves partly against Sur. Contorno in the 1950s subjected the Sur model of the detached, universal writer to sustained criticism and argued for a literature engaged with Argentine history and society. That polemic did not diminish Sur's archive, but it did clarify what Sur had been: a magazine that believed literary value was universal and that the writer's first loyalty was to literature itself. Readers who want to understand twentieth-century Argentine literary debate need both sides of that argument, and Sur is the indispensable first side.

Publication history and rhythm

Sur appeared with interruptions over sixty-one years. Its strongest and most regular period ran from 1931 to 1966, during which 305 issues were published. It began boldly, appeared irregularly for a time, and settled into monthly publication from issue 10 in July 1935. It remained monthly until 1953 and then appeared every two months. After 1966 the rhythm slowed markedly: in the following twenty-six years only 67 further issues appeared. The final issue, number 371, was published in 1992, thirteen years after Ocampo's death in 1979.

That long slowing is itself part of the magazine's history rather than a footnote to it. A personal, patron-financed review could not easily outlive its patron at the same intensity. The magazine continued, respected and increasingly spaced out, until the numbering that had begun in 1931 closed at 371. No revival is recorded in the sources used for this profile, and Sur should be catalogued as a closed historical title.

Place in Buenos Aires magazine culture

Buenos Aires in the decades when Sur began was already a city of magazines. The avant-garde reviews of the 1920s, the popular illustrated weeklies and the Boedo and Florida group journals had made the magazine the natural unit of literary life. Sur differed from most of them in scale and duration. Where Proa or Martín Fierro burned brightly for a few years, Sur institutionalised the literary magazine: it had a publishing house, a stable circle, a recognisable design and an international correspondence network, and it lasted long enough for writers it published as unknowns, above all Borges and later Cortázar's generation, to become classics while the magazine was still appearing.

Its Buenos Aires base also mattered to its meaning. The arrow pointing south on its early covers located the project geographically while its contents refused provincial limits. For foreign writers, publication in Sur was an entry into the Spanish-speaking world; for Argentine writers, it was a claim that Buenos Aires could be a capital of world literature and not only a market for it.

Criticism and reassessment

Scholarly reassessment of Sur has been continuous. Early studies, notably John King's study of the magazine, established its editorial structure and its balance of Argentine and foreign contributions, roughly half and half among its leading articles, and noted how little direct attention it paid, especially in its classic period, to specifically Argentine or Latin American social problems. Feminist and transatlantic scholarship has since recovered other dimensions, including Ocampo's 1936 essay on women and expression, published in Sur, and the magazine's role in circulating women's writing between Europe and Latin America through figures such as Woolf, Mistral and Ocampo herself.

Criticism of Sur's elitism has likewise remained part of the record and should not be edited away. Its writers were accused, in their lifetimes and afterwards, of speaking to a small cultivated readership and of valuing European judgement over local experience. The fairest summary supported by the sources is that both the achievement and the limitation were real: Sur built an unmatched bridge between Argentine and world literature, and it did so from a socially narrow base that later generations of Argentine critics set out, explicitly, to correct.

Legacy and archive

Sur's legacy operated on several levels. It was the original home of many of Borges's best-known stories and therefore sits at the foundation of modern Argentine fiction's world reputation. It launched or consolidated the careers of a generation of Argentine writers, introduced major foreign writers in Spanish translation, and modelled a standard of editorial care that later Argentine cultural magazines, including Punto de Vista, measured themselves against even when they disagreed with its politics. The 371-issue run, preserved in libraries including the holdings recorded by the Biblioteca del Congreso de la Nación, remains a primary source for the literary history of Argentina and of the Spanish-speaking world.

For the directory reader, the essential facts are compact: Sur, Buenos Aires, founded 1931 by Victoria Ocampo, published by Editorial Sur from 1933, 371 issues, closed 1992. Around those facts stands one of the longest and most consequential magazine lives in Argentine history, and any account of Argentine magazines that begins anywhere else must still, very quickly, arrive at Sur.