In 1930, Victoria wrote to José Ortega y Gasset: “I have here my project: to publish a magazine that looks at, principally, themes of the Americas, from various angles, and in which people of this hemisphere who have something to say collaborate with Europeans who have an interest in the Americas. That will be the leitmotiv of the magazine, but, naturally, it will treat other issues as well.”

The name Sur (meaning South) was selected, from afar, by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. But the idea for the publication itself was that of the North America novelist Waldo Frank, a left-wing intellectual who convinced Victoria to bring the project to fruition. Sur would become one of the most important cultural reviews of the twentieth century, publishing works by the foremost literary, philosophical, historical, and artistic thinkers not only of Latin America but also of North America and Western Europe. In addition, Sur would serve as a medium for the translation of many prestigious authors of the era, introducing Latin American literature to a European audience, and vice versa.

Sur was modelled on the Nouvelle Revue Franaise, created in Paris 1909 and on Revista de Occidente, which was founded by Ortega y Gasset in 1923. The publication survived for more than four decades and represented, according to Octavio Paz, “the freedom of literature before all earthly powers. Something less than a religion and something more than a sect.” The first edition of the review appeared in the austral summer of 1930-31, with a white cover that bore a green arrow piercing the black letters of ‘Sur.’ The 199 pages were printed quarterly, and included contributions from Drieu La Rochelle, Borges, Waldo Frank, Eugenio D’Ors, Ansermet, Walter Gropius, and Alfonso Reyes, among others. Though the publication aimed to be apolitical, publishing both right- and left-wing authors, it was sometimes subject to harsh criticism. It was said, among other things, that the quarterly was elitist and catered to foreign readers. In fact, Sur was able to open itself to the world, going beyond the realms of strictly regional or national trends to explore both European and Latin American movements. The author and essayist Blas Matamoro writes in his Genio y figura de Victoria Ocampo that: “One cannot think of the group behind Sur as the embodiment of a certain social class, as some critics have attempted to do. To claim that Sur was a publication of the Buenos Aires oligarchy, or of its intellectual outcroppings, is misguided. The Buenos Aires oligarchy was never interested in pursuing this sort of enterprise, and Sur was brought to life by people from a wide variety of social classes.”

Victoria worked continually to make her publication diverse and democratic. When the Argentine government adopted the Peronist stances first introduced by Juan Peron in 1946, Victoria didn’t mask her disgust. The editors-in-chief of Sur were Eduardo Mallea – who had Guillermo de Torre as his secretary, José (Pepe) Bianco with a tenure of 23 years, Borges, Raimundo Lida, Ernesto Sábato, María Luisa Bastos, and Enrique Pezón. By the early thirties Sur was known to publish the best literature of the era, including writing by Borges, Sábato, José Bianco, Juan Carlos Onetti, Horacio Quiroga, Bioy Casares, D.H. Lawrence, Jung, Virginia Woolf, García Lorca, Camus, and Nabokov.

In 1971 the regular publication of Sur was ended. The quarterly’s founder was now more than eighty years old, and Argentina was on the brink of one of its darkest decades.

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