Can a writer change her skin half a century after her death?
Alejandra Pizarnik, yes.
After the publication of
Arbol de Diana
, his fourth book, prefaced by Octavio Paz, Pizarnik (Avellaneda, 1936- Buenos Aires, 1972) became an inevitable name in twentieth-century poetry.
The legend of this cult poet, encouraged by a tragic death at 36 years old one night in which the barbiturates were too many, has not stopped growing with the successive appearance since 2000 of her poetry, prose and diaries, in the care of the poet Ana Becciu, executor of the writer.
But the unpublished works kept at Princeton University underscore the feeling that his
identikit
(robot portrait)
creative still has surprises in store.
Alejandra Pizarnik, in her library in an image provided by the Flia D'Amico-Digisi Archive.
Editorial Huso
Some will be unveiled by
Alejandra Pizarnik.
Biography of a myth,
by Cristina Piña and Patricia Venti, which Lumen announces for January 2022, the prelude to the commemorations for the 50 years of their death (it will be published earlier, this July, in Argentina).
Meanwhile, the validity of the poet in Spain explains
Alejandra Pizarnik and her multiple voices
(Huso), a tribute book edited by Mayda Bustamante, which celebrates this April 29 the 85th anniversary of the birth of the author of
El infierno musical
with the gazes of 85 writers from 15 different countries, who give an account of its expansive wave over different generations.
There are infrequent testimonies (that of his sister Myriam, among them) and valuable critical contributions to understand how the image of whom César Aira, the brand-new Formentor Prize, once called "the last luxury object, has changed and enriched itself throughout these decades. of Argentine literature ”.
Choose your own Alejandra
"When she died on September 25, 1972, Alejandra was considered, essentially, a dazzling poet," says Cristina Piña, her biographer, and one of the authors who participates in
Alejandra Pizarnik and her multiple voices
from Buenos Aires
.
"Today we know that she was much more: a fascinating diarist, a shrewd literary critic and, also, the author of deeply transgressive narrative texts that began to be known from 1982."
Pizarnik encrypted his style in the brevity, the logical distortion (learned in the
Voices
of Antonio Porchia) and in a visual power that is both contained and brutal that still impacts: “I have made the leap from me at dawn.
/ I have left my body next to the light / and I have sung the sadness of what is born ",
writes in the first poem of
Tree of Diana
(1962)
.
"You choose the place of the wound / where we speak / our silence./ You make my life / this ceremony too pure",
He says in another of
The Works and the Nights (1965),
incandescent passion in five verses.
Cover of the book homage to Alejandra Pizarnik, illustrated by Diana Balboa and Betzi Arias. Diana Balboa and Betzi Arias / Editorial Huso
The question is no longer who was Pizarnik as when the mystery around his figure was thunderous (the combo emotional fragility, bisexuality, suicide imposed silences that only the passage of time allowed us to process), but what Pizarnik prefers the reader. The transgressor who flirts with obscenity in
La bucanera de Pernambuco
or the sublime poet of “words like precious stones” learned in the French tradition?
The seductress with proverbial vitality and dazzling conversation, who rubbed shoulders in Paris with Cortázar and in Buenos Aires with the surrealist group and that of
Sur
magazine
or the eternal adolescent who, after kissing the writer Ricardo Zelarayán, author of
La gran salina
, alleged What had been “a prescription kiss” to exorcise lesbian desires?
The "little castaway" whipped by her inadequacy to function in the world or the deliberate librettist of the "Alexandrian character" and her own myth that Aira painted in the Omega Literary Lives collection?
The brilliant and self-demanding artist who accurately wielded a samurai language foreign to her home (her parents were Russian immigrants of Jewish origin) and who worked up to 14 hours intervening and commenting on her readings as documented by the Pizarnik Fund (772 books and working papers found today in the National Library of Argentina) or the one who doubted "the importance of 'earning a living' oneself"?
A diamond has many faces.
Pizarnik to laugh
Pizarnik's prose texts began to be studied from
Shadow Texts and Last Poems
(1982).
That anthology prepared with unpublished material by the poets Olga Orozco and Ana Becciu, her friends, was key.
It included the prose writer and playwright of
Los possessados entre lilas
and
La bucanera de Pernambuco or Hilda la Polígrafa.
That book uncovered hilarious pages, with a record that goes from the absurd to the glossolalic games with language and also a return to the sexual theme - which Pizarnik had addressed in
The Bloody Countess
- but now mixed with humor, the popular and rude.
These tones provoked rejection in poetic references of the previous generation, but they frankly admired younger authors.
Alejandra Pizarnik on the lap of her mother, Rosa, next to her father, Elías, who is holding her sister, Myriam. The image comes from the family album given by the poet's sister. Editorial Huso
"With the correspondence, which Ivonne Bordelois began to publish in 1998, another novelty appears: an unknown affective register, which nuances the darkness and anguish of the
Diaries,"
says Piña.
“
The letters dismantle the idea of a Pizarnik who only cared about herself. She is affectionate and generous with her friends, as can be seen in the ones she directs to Antonio Beneyto ”, the researcher emphasizes. The role of Beneyto, a surrealist artist who died in October 2020 from covid, is essential to understand Pizarnik's course in Spain, which is addressed in an interesting essay by Fanny Rubio, included in Huso's choral book.
Magnetic, Pizarnik can be dangerous, Piña acknowledges: “When you're developing your writing, it permeates a lot.
But it cannot be imitated, as Rimbaud and Lautrémont cannot be imitated: they were cursed in the sense that they united life and literature.
She too.
For Pizarnik life and poetry are the same thing. "
An anniversary with news
A lover of notebooks and colored inks, Alejandra Pizarnik underlined, annotated and drew her books. In 2018, Myriam, her sister, donated 122 volumes and several work folders of the poet to the Argentine National Library, which were added to the 650 books acquired by the institution in 2007. These pieces will star in 2022 the tributes for the fiftieth anniversary of his death. Evelyn Galiazo, director of research at the library and author of a critical study on these material traces, defines them as an "essential part" of Pizarnik's work, "which is revealed in them in a state of permanent 'work in progress' ( elaboration)".
In 1999, Princeton University bought the private papers of the writer that Julio Cortázar, his great friend, had recommended taking out of Argentina. "Neither the prose nor the poetry nor the newspaper that we know are complete," says the researcher. "The Princeton material is essential and there is much unpublished," says Cristina Piña. These novelties, he promises, make up his
Alejandra Pizarnik. Biography of a myth
.