Alejandra Pizarnik
Alejandra Pizarnik
- One of the most significant contributors to twentieth-century Argentine poetry, Alejandra Pizarnik made a name for herself through her dark themes and diction. Heavily influenced by Rimbaud and Artaud, Pizarnik believed that suffering was intrinsic to the creation of great poetry. This concession to misery was apparent in her work as her writing was often filled with themes of solitude, estrangement, madness, and death—yet also included moments of tenderness. During her short lifetime she wrote seven books of poetry and one book of prose, as well as numerous translations, short stories, essays, and drawings. In 1968 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and later in 1971 she received a Fulbright Scholarship. Pizarnik struggled with depression and ended her life in 1972.
On September 25, 1972, the great Argentine poet, Alejandra Pizarnik, committed suicide with an overdose of sedatives. At age 36 she threw herself into the arms of death, which she had observed for years with childish fascination and baptized with innumerable names.
Fifty years after her passing, Argentina is paying tribute to one of its biggest cultural figures with exhibitions, seminars and recitals of poems whose admirers included literary giants such as Octavio Paz and Julio Cortázar. Her legend continues to grow, fed by unpublished material that continues to be released, bit by bit, and adds nuance to her image as a tragic poet by showing another side of her as an ironic, irreverent woman who was a feminist and a fan of the visual arts.
“Who was Pizarnik in reality? The
polygrapher of “pure words” and forger of her own legend? Or the existential,
pornographic, tremendous writer who managed to hide certain aspects of her life
and work?” Patricia Venti asks in Alejandra Pizarnik: Biography of a myth, the
most extensive book about the poet’s life. To find answers, literary scholars
Venti and Cristina Piña delved into Pizarnik’s papers – held at Princeton
University – and interviewed her friends and family.
Flora Pizarnik – the future Alejandra
– was born in Avellaneda, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, on April 29, 1936.
She was the second daughter of Russian Jews who had fled Europe two years
earlier. Migrating saved their lives: the relatives who stayed behind were
massacred by the Nazis and the Soviets. Pizarnik was too young to understand
the horrors that chased her parents across the Atlantic, but that darkness that
she could feel at home marked her early years. Childhood later became one of
the central elements of her poetry:
- Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) was a leading voice in twentieth-century Latin American poetry. Born in the port city of Avellaneda, in the province of Buenos Aires, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Pizarnik studied literature and painting at the University of Buenos Aires and spent most of her life in Argentina. From 1960-1964 she lived in Paris, where she was influenced by the work of the Surrealists (many of whom she translated into Spanish) and participated in a vibrant community of writers including Simone de Beauvoir and fellow expatriates Julio Cortázar and Octavio Paz. Known primarily for her poetry, Pizarnik also wrote works of criticism and journalism, experimental fiction, plays, and a literary diary. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968 and a Fulbright Scholarship in 1971. Her complete works in Spanish have been published by Editorial Lumen. Six books of her poetry have been translated into English: Diana’s Tree, The Most Foreign Country and The Last Innocence / The Lost Adventures (Ugly Duckling Presse); and A Musical Hell, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972, and The Galloping Hour: French Poems (New Directions). A Tradition of Rupture (UDP), a collection of Pizarnik’s critical prose in English translation, was published in fall 2019. She died in Buenos Aires, of an apparent drug overdose, at the age of 36.
