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Half a century without Pizarnik, the poet who wrote against fear

2022-09-25T10:42:35.810Z


Argentina pays tribute to the author of 'Tree of Diana' 50 years after her death with exhibitions, talks and new biographies


“I don't want to go/ nothing more/ than to the bottom,” Alejandra Pizarnik wrote on her blackboard before ingesting 50 barbiturate pills.

The great Argentine poet committed suicide at the age of 36, on September 25, 1972, with an overdose of seconal.

Pizarnik threw herself that night into the arms of death, whom she had watched for years with childlike fascination and had baptized with innumerable names.

Fifty years after his death, Argentina pays tribute to one of its literary legends with exhibitions, presentations and readings of that poetry that captivated readers such as Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar, Olga Orozco and Silvina Ocampo.

Her myth continues to expand, fueled by unpublished material that makes the tragic poet shed her skin and can also be seen as an ironic, irreverent woman, a lover of plastic arts and a feminist.

"In a lost town: EYES ALBA" (1970), by Pizarnik.

Collage from the Graciela Maturo collection exhibited at the National Library.

“Who was really Pizarnik?

The polygrapher of "pure words" and forger of her own legend? Or the existential, pornographic, tremendous writer, who managed to deceive and hide certain aspects of her life-work? "Patricia questions Venti in

Alejandra Pizarnik.

Biography of a myth

(Lumen, 2021), the most complete book to date on her life.

To find answers, Venti and Cristina Piña delved into the

Pizarnik Papers

that are preserved from the poet at Princeton University and interviewed her friends and family.

"Pizarnik oscillated between a literary destiny relegated to the private sphere and another exposed to public life that contrasts sharply with that first recording," continues Venti.

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 a couple of Russian Jews who had fled Europe two years earlier.

Migrating saved their lives.

The two families were massacred first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets.

Pizarnik was too young to understand the horror of the Holocaust that anguished her parents across the Atlantic, but that homely darkness marked her early years.

Childhood later became one of the central axes of her poetry, to which she always returned.

“I don't know about childhood / more than a luminous fear / and a hand that drags me to my other shore.

// My childhood and her perfume / a caressed bird”, she wrote in

Tiempo

, a poem dedicated to Olga Orozco, one of the poets she trusted the most.

In her last years, Pizarnik called her at dawn, helpless, to confess her fears.

In order to ward them off, Orozco issued her "white witch certificates" that protected her from any evil forces.

Nearly two decades earlier, a teenage Pizarnik wondered which way to go.

She began her degree in Philosophy, she went on to Journalism, then to Letters and also tried painting in the workshop of the Catalan Juan Batlle Planas.

She did not progress in any of these studies and abandoned all of them she devoted herself fully to the task of writing.

She had already discovered her fondness for pills.

The first ones of hers were to lose weight, but she discovered shortly after that they also gave her lucidity in the nights given to her notebooks and she didn't leave them anymore.

“Pizarnik took pills for everything.

To sleep, to wake up.

From a certain point in her life she is a living cocktail and, obviously, there is a deterioration that deepens, ”says Piña, her main biographer.

He was 19 years old when he published

La tierra más ajena

(1955), his first book of poems, which he later reneged on.

It was followed by

A Sign in Your Shadow

(1955),

The Last Innocence

(1956) and

The Lost Adventures

(1958).

She was an emerging poet when in 1960 she sailed to Paris, where she lived the happiest years of her life, surrounded by Latin American writers and devoted to the verses of her masterpiece,

Tree of Diana

.

It was published in 1962 with a laudatory prologue by Octavio Paz.

Those who knew her remember that Pizarnik battled body to body with language until she found the exact word.

“She had not met anyone capable of doing what she did with Spanish: the sonority that she found in the language is unique.

I think that Alejandra is the Rimbaud of Spanish: she took the language to places where no one else went”, describes her friend Ivonne Bordelois in the profile written by Mariana Enríquez in

Malditos

(Diego Portales University).

His papers allow to know closely his method of work.

“As for inspiration, I orthodoxly believe in it, which does not prevent me, quite the contrary, from concentrating for a long time on a single poem.

And I do it in a way that recalls, perhaps, the gesture of plastic artists: I adhere the sheet of paper to a wall and I CONTEMPLATE it;

I change words, delete verses.

Sometimes by deleting a word, I imagine another in its place, but without knowing its name yet.

So, waiting for the desired one, I make a drawing in its emptiness that alludes to it”, Pizarnik wrote in a fragment of his notebooks reproduced on the walls of the National Library, which houses the exhibition

Alejandra Pizarnik, between the image and the word

.

“His way of working resorts to cutting and pasting, to extraction and in many cases to mutilation.

She was very irreverent with the object book, whether it was hers or others”, says Evelyn Galazo, curator of the exhibition and one of the great researchers at Pizarnik.

In the room dedicated to the exhibition, you can see her green notebook, full of clippings and underlined, crossed out, translated and copied words from other authors that she later appropriated.

“cathartic” drawings

He gave his life to writing, but he never stopped drawing.

On paper, in the margins of books, she makes “elementary and cathartic, “childish and clumsy” drawings—in her own words—of which she was proud.

“The material was organized looking for the image to take the word to remove from invisibility the lesser-known facet of Pizarnik, that of a plastic artist, and to account for the plasticity of his writing, which calls for drawing and collage as a declaration of principles”, adds Galazo.

Visitors can appreciate some of the few pictorial works that are preserved by Pizarnik and reproductions of paintings that inspired him, such as

The Garden of Earthly Delights

, by Hieronymus Bosch.

One of Pizarnik's late collections of poems,

Musical Hell

(1971), refers to the right side of the famous triptych by the Dutch painter.

Another of them,

Extraction of the stone of madness (1968),

coincides with the title of one of his works.

The National Library has 800 volumes from her personal collection and the National Library of Maestras y Maestros, another 400. There you can visit the exhibition

Flora Alejandra: Los Jardines de Pizarnik

, created from the interventions that the poet made in her books .

"What is still current and alive, which is something that began to be worked on a few decades ago, is the theme of irony and humor in Pizarnik, which is the reverse of the tragic myth," says Galazo.

His humor appears recurrently in the testimony of his friends.

“Our friendship happened because I was always serious and she was always joking.

I liked what she said jokingly, and what I said seriously she liked”,

the Argentine writer Elvira Orpheé recalled in the aforementioned

Malditos profile about the years they shared in Paris.

Among the best-known anecdotes of the friendship that united her with Fernando Noy is her first meeting.

"I confused you with a Rolling Stone, with Brian Jones," Noy told him.

"I mistook you for a German prostitute," she replied, between laughs.

They were both very drugged and the mirrors in the hall of their apartment made a kaleidoscopic aleph.

In his poetic work, on the other hand, humor is buried under layers of fear and anguish.

—”I write against fear.

Against the clawed wind / that lodges in my breath, ”she says in

Primitive Eyes

— .

She emerges much more explicitly at the end of her life, in posthumous texts such as La bucanera de Pernambuco or Hilda la poligrafa.

"Congratulate fellatio", "Enough of misunderstandings, piece of Wittgenstein", "the lame woman was not intimidated by some superculiferous brushstrokes and other nietzchedades" are some of the puns that appear in that text.

It reveals a wilder and more sexual side, but at the same time it also shows her psychic collapse with an experimentation of language taken to the maximum.

"It was bad for him, for something he did not publish any," says Piña.

a bisexual poet

Among the most unknown aspects of Pizarnik are his love relationships.

Although some are still in a chiaroscuro, the biography of Piña and Venti expands on their bisexuality.

He had a teenage relationship with the lawyer and writer Juan Jacobo Bajarlía and a Parisian romance with the Colombian poet Jorge Gaitán Durán, which was cut short by his death in a plane crash in 1962. But he was also in a relationship with the photographer and translator Marta Moia and his last great passion was the youngest of the Ocampo sisters, Silvina, with whom he spent hours on the phone.

Her diaries reveal that she faced a clandestine abortion as a result of a relationship "with C. in a perfect state of intoxication," according to an entry from September 1963. "Having sought and found the most sordid, most painful way," she continues in reference to the voluntary interruption of the pregnancy to which she underwent in the French capital.

"Each one is the owner of his own body, each one controls it as he wants and as he can", she answered in an interview published in the

Sur Magazine

in 1970 when questioned about abortion.

Pirovano Hospital in Buenos Aires, where Pizarnik was hospitalized in his last months of life.Juan Ignacio Roncoroni (EFE)

The death of his father in 1966 and the brief return years later to a Paris that was no longer the city of light that he knew had a harsh impact on Pizarnik.

She attempted suicide in 1970 and tried it again in 1971, when she was admitted to the psychiatric ward of the Pirovano Hospital for several months.

“and since I am so intelligent that I am no longer good for anything / and since I have dreamed so much that I am no longer of this world / here I am, among the innocent souls of room 18, / persuading myself day by day / that the room, the pure souls and I have meaning, we have destiny”, says the poem

Psychopathology Room

that he wrote there in 1972.

On September 25, from her home, she called several close friends and even made plans with Orozco to go to the movies together the next day.

At the agreed time, the poet called her over and over again without getting an answer.

“The night is me and we have lost / so I speak, cowards.

/ Night has fallen and everything has been thought of”, she wrote in one of her last poems.

Shortly after, she descended to the bottom.

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Source: elparis

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