Alejandra Pizarnik's voice always comes back to me.
Like now, when I do a quick web search to listen to it.
I know what I am going to find, I did the same search many times.
Several options will appear that promise to give us their best version: with improved audio or with original audio;
with background music or with bare sound;
the complete recording or fragments of it forming part of a large number of biographical videos, television programs or podcasts that are concerned with keeping her work alive and current.
In each one of them, Alejandra's deep, slow voice will read the same thing: Arturo Carrera's poem
Escrito por un nictografo
, part of a book that she presented in 1972, the same year she would die.
I know that is the only existing recording.
However, every time I play one of those pieces I imagine for a fraction of a second that perhaps this time she is going to say something else, that she is going to read a poem of hers.
Alejandra Pizarnik affirmed that she stuttered, that is also what all the biographies that I read about her say.
But in this single recording I can only detect, dimly, that she lengthens the vowels in a particular way, as if she were stopping to rest—or think?—about them.
It doesn't surprise me that there are so many options to listen to the same and only audio: the generations of writers contemporary and after Pizarnik have not stopped reading it, commenting on it, studying it, but above all invoking it.
I went to several poetry workshops during my life.
In all it was recommended to read it and also to stop reading it.
It was essential reading but there was also the warning about the strength of that voice, that it could generate the temptation to try to write like her and do nothing but imitate her, as if she had left nothing to do.
Or to read her, and no one else.
The writer Inés Kreplak told me that she has to read it with moderation, because she feels that she wants to take it with her.
Other poets and friends of my generation, Malena Saito and Flavia Calise, told me that they read it when they were 18 or 19 years old, and that their diaries were the first thing that captivated them, where they were surprised to find a vital, ironic and full voice. of humor that contrasted with the image of Alejandra as a depressive and suicidal poet.
She is not, of course, the only writer of whom a representation was built that contradicts what she wrote.
I am thinking, for example, of Katherine Mansfield, of whom a figure of a sick writer was created that differs from the texts about desire that she recorded in her notebooks, and which were in fact left out of the edition of her diary. .
I was also a teenager when I read Pizarnik for the first time, although my first contact was not with his diaries or with his complete poetry, but I approached it in the same way as all the poets through whom I discovered poetry: looking for his loose poems In Internet.
Pizarnik was one of those giant names of Argentine literature that could come to mind, in the mid-2000s, to a sleepless girl looking for something to read in her room at dawn.
Like Cortázar's and Borges's, perhaps Alfonsina Storni's and not many more.
The poems of Pizarnik that first captivated me were those of
Tree of Diana
.
I don't think it is an original confession, but I remember reading them several times attracted by the power of the brief and of something that seemed to me a direct way of saying things, which however did not mean that it was always easy to understand them.
On the other hand, I think that her image, always central among Latin American writers, gave us female poets of later generations the possibility of knowing that she had existed: that she was a woman, the most recognized poet in the country, with an indisputable place.
Famous poems from that book, such as number 13, which says "explain with words of this world / that a ship left me taking me", have not only a unique power, but a way of explaining the poetry that accompanies me and, I think, , accompanies all the generations that came after her.
There is something in the presence of Pizarnik in the contemporary world of Argentine literature that is, I think, insistent.
Like the first image that comes to mind if I think about his physical appearance, which is an anecdote of Fernando Noy that I heard and read so many times that I can quote from memory: he, poet, activist and performer, was a teenager at that time , when he read
Extraction of the stone of madness
and was fascinated.
So he got her phone number and called her.
She asked him who she was calling from, and when he told her that she had no references from her, he invited him to visit her: "finally one that is not recommended."
Noy, then, went to the modest apartment in the ostentatious neighborhood of Recoleta where Alejandra lived, the same one where she would later die.
He must have phoned her from the El Cisne bar, which still exists and was on the corner, because she lived on the seventh floor and didn't have an electric intercom.
When he arrived, several people came out of the building, the last of whom seemed, to Noy, a handsome little boy.
It was Alexandra.
He made a joke: he told her that he had confused her with Brian Jones, her favorite Rolling Stone.
And she replied that she had mistaken him for a German prostitute.
Every time I read or listen to that story (which can be found in Noy's own voice, for example, in the chapter "Bloody Countess" of the Mostras podcast dedicated to Pizarnik) I imagine that scene and Alejandra, always in the same way, almost as if instead of a story he had seen a photo of that particular moment.
It is that this anecdote, among others that Noy and other friends of Alejandra who shared time with her in those intense years tell, are inseparable from her portrait, which is in turn inseparable from her work.
Sometimes it is said about some authors, especially those considered "cursed", that the person or character should not eat the work, that they must be read as well as remembered.
I believe that later generations of poets read Pizarnik, remember her and evoke her.
And that the poems of him,
Without going any further, in
Extraction of the Stone of Madness
, Pizarnik wrote: "The forces of language are the lonely, desolate ladies who sing through my voice that I hear in the distance."
It is that: his voice, which continues to approach the poets, which endures, which is never forgotten.
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS América newsletter and receive all the key information on current affairs in the region.
