Colección Támesis

SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 248

ÁRBOL DE ALEJANDRA
PIZARNIK REASSESSED

Thirty-five years after her death, this book reassesses Argentinian poet
Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–72) in the light of recent publications of her
‘complete’ poetry and prose, diaries, and previously unavailable archive
material.
The essays in this volume explore Pizarnik’s work from new angles:
they examine her production as a literary critic, revealing her intense
identificatory strategies as a reader, and the impact of such activities upon
her own creative process. They also weigh up the influence of her ambig-
uous attitudes towards sexuality on her poetic personae, as well as the
ways in which her concern with sex inspires her experimentation with
humorous prose. New approaches are taken to key texts and themes: in
the case of the much-studied work La condesa sangrienta, through a
detailed philosophical reading involving comparisons with Kafka, and, in
the case of the theme of the split subject, through the lens of translation.
By broadening the scope of Pizarnik studies, this book will act as a
catalyst for further research into the work of this compelling poet.

Fiona J. Mackintosh lectures in Hispanic Studies at the University of

Edinburgh and Karl Posso lectures in Spanish American and Brazilian
Studies at the University of Manchester.
 Tamesis

Founding Editor
J. E. Varey

General Editor
Stephen M. Hart

Editorial Board
Alan Deyermond
Julian Weiss
Charles Davis
ÁRBOL DE ALEJANDRA
PIZARNIK REASSESSED

Edited by

Fiona J. Mackintosh

with

Karl Posso

TAMESIS
 © Contributors 2007

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 CONTENTS

Contributors vii
Acknowledgements ix
Abbreviations x

Introduction 1
FIONA J. MACKINTOSH AND KARL POSSO

Gender, Sexuality and Silence(s) in the Writing of Alejandra Pizarnik 13

SUSANA CHÁVEZ SILVERMAN

Different Aspects of Humour and Wordplay in the Work of Alejandra Pizarnik 36

EVELYN FISHBURN

The Tormenting Beauty of Ideals: A Deleuzian Interpretation of 60

Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta and
Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’
KARL POSSO

Alejandra Pizarnik, Surrealism and Reading 77

JASON WILSON

Alejandra Pizarnik, the Perceptive Reader 91

FLORINDA F. GOLDBERG

Alejandra Pizarnik’s ‘palais du vocabulaire’: Constructing the 110

‘cuerpo poético’
FIONA J. MACKINTOSH

Alejandra Pizarnik’s Poetry: Translating the Translation of Subjectivity 130

CECILIA ROSSI

The ‘Complete’ Works of Alejandra Pizarnik? Editors and Editions 148

CRISTINA PIÑA

Afterword 165
FIONA J. MACKINTOSH AND KARL POSSO

Subject Index 167

 CONTRIBUTORS

Susana Chávez Silverman is a professor of Spanish, U.S. Latino/a and Latin

American literature and culture at Pomona College (California). She is the author
of Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories (2004) and co-editor of Tropicalizations:
Transcultural Representations of Latinidad (1997) and Reading and Writing the
Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American and Spanish Culture
(2000). Current book projects include Goodbye, Alejandra: Reading Pizarnik
and (Her) Others.

Evelyn Fishburn is Professor Emeritus of Latin American Literary Studies at

London Metropolitan University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow,
University College London. She has published extensively on Borges; she edited
Borges and Europe Revisited (1998) and, with Psiche Hughes, A Borges
Dictionary (1998). She has articles on Storni, Somers, Castellanos and Pizarnik,
and was the editor of Short Fiction by Spanish-American Women (1988).

Florinda F. Goldberg is a lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the

Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her publications include Alejandra Pizarnik:
‘Este espacio que somos’ (1994) and she is co-editor of the review Noaj. She is
a board member of the Asociación Internacional de Escritores Judíos en Español
y Portugués, and of LAJSA (Latin American Jewish Studies Association).

Fiona J. Mackintosh is a lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of

Edinburgh. Her research interests are focused around twentieth-century Latin
American writing, and she has published Childhood in the Works of Silvina
Ocampo and Alejandra Pizarnik (2003) as well as various articles.

Cristina Piña is a poet and translator, and she lectures at the Universidad
Nacional de Mar del Plata. She has published seven books of poetry and six criti-
cal works, including Poesía y experiencia del límite: leer a Alejandra Pizarnik
(1999) and Alejandra Pizarnik: una biografía (1991). She has won various prizes
for her poetry, translations and critical essays, and she has received scholarships
from the USA and France.

Karl Posso lectures in Spanish American and Brazilian studies at the University
of Manchester. He has published articles on Julio Cortázar, Reinaldo Arenas,
Henri Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari, and the monograph Artful Seduction:
viii CONTRIBUTORS

Homosexuality and the Problematics of Exile (2004) on gender theory and the
work of Silviano Santiago and Caio Fernando Abreu.

Cecilia Rossi is from Buenos Aires. She was awarded a PhD in Literary
Translation by the University of East Anglia in 2007. Her translations of
Pizarnik’s poetry have appeared in Comparative Criticism (2000) and Modern
Poetry in Translation (2005) and received first prize in the John Dryden
Translation Competition (1999), as well as a commendation in the Stephen
Spender Prize for Poetry Translation (2006). She was acting Associate Director
of the British Centre for Literary Translation from June 2006 to March 2007.

Jason Wilson is Professor of Latin American Literature at University College

London. His main publications include Octavio Paz: A Study of his Poetics
(1979), Octavio Paz (1989), Traveller’s Literary Companion to South and
Central America (1993), Buenos Aires, a Cultural and Literary Companion
(1999) and Jorge Luis Borges (2006).
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank the following:

Karl Posso, for exemplary editing, and for more than generously giving of his
time and red ink.
Princeton University Library, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare
Books and Special Collections, for permission to quote from the Alejandra
Pizarnik Papers (CO395), and the Friends of the Library for their generous grant
enabling me to undertake this research. AnnaLee Pauls, Meg Rich and other staff
in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, for their willing help
and friendship during my month’s research leave in Princeton.
The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, the School of Literatures,
Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh and the Argentine
Embassy through the kind offices of Sr. Javier Pedrazzini, for help with publica-
tion costs.

Fiona J. Mackintosh
 ABBREVIATIONS

Correspondencia Ivonne Bordelois, Correspondencia Pizarnik (Buenos

Aires: Seix Barral / Planeta, 1998)

Diarios Alejandra Pizarnik, Diarios, ed. Ana Becciú (Barcelona:

Lumen, 2003)

Poesía Alejandra Pizarnik, Poesía completa (1955–1972), ed. Ana

Becciú (Barcelona: Lumen, 2000)

Prosa Alejandra Pizarnik, Prosa completa, ed. Ana Becciú, prol.

Ana Nuño (Barcelona: Lumen, 2002)

Editors’ Note
Reference to material held by Princeton University Library Department of Rare
Books and Special Collections in the Alejandra Pizarnik Papers (CO395) will be
referred to in the following way:
Princeton, box #, folder #, p. # (p. # only in the case of notebooks where
Pizarnik numbered the pages)
All material from the Alejandra Pizarnik Papers is published with the permis-
sion of Princeton University Library.
 Introduction

Fiona J. Mackintosh and Karl Posso

O jardim era tão bonito que ela teve medo do Inferno.

Clarice Lispector1
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T. S. Eliot2
Si quieres ser feliz como me dices/ No poetices.
Julio Cortázar3

In recent years Pizarnik has come to be widely acknowledged as a key figure

within Argentinian literature. Born Flora Alejandra Pizarnik in 1936 in a Jewish
immigrant district of Buenos Aires, Pizarnik rapidly evolved a distinctive poetic
persona, the ‘personaje alejandrino’ (Correspondencia, p. 53). This poetic self
fed off her intense and eclectic reading which spanned Golden Age Spanish
poetry, poètes maudits such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud, surrealism, and the tor-
tured worlds of Artaud and Kafka. The result was an accentuation of her latent
feelings of estrangement, both from her immediate social environment and ulti-
mately from language itself. In her short lifetime (ended by a fatal overdose in
1972) she published eight collections of poetry, as well as numerous uncollected
poems and a significant number of reviews in literary magazines.
Her first poetry collection was the adolescent La tierra más ajena (1955),
which parades self-consciously modern urban references, for example to ‘la ven-
tanilla tranviaria’ (Poesía, p. 29) or to the ‘puerto de colores impresionistas’
(p. 32). The latter phrase calls to mind Benito Quinquela Martín’s popular paint-
ings of the port area close to where Pizarnik grew up. More specific allusions to
visual art would feature in later poetry, for example poems 24–6 of Árbol de
Diana are prefaced by the phrases ‘un dibujo de Wols’, ‘exposición Goya’, and
‘un dibujo de Klee’ (Poesía, pp. 126–8), and there are references to Hieronymus
Bosch, Marc Chagall, Odilon Redon and others. However, whilst her references
to artists become more concrete, the poetic images associated with these artists
become much less obvious. Pizarnik eventually disowned this early collection,

1 Clarice Lispector, ‘Amor’, in Laços de Família (1960) (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1998),
pp. 19–29 (p. 25).
2 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (1920) (London: Methuen, 1960), p. 125.
3 Julio Cortázar, Rayuela (1963) (Madrid: Cátedra, 1988), p. 609.
2 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH AND KARL POSSO

but some poems from it are worth considering, such as ‘Vagar en lo opaco’
(Poesía, p. 18), which focuses solipsistically on her eyes, or ‘Yo soy’ (p. 30),
which attempts to define the self as a kind of seer. These examples anticipate the
inward-looking direction that her poetry would subsequently take. Rather than
simply looking at ships in the nearby port and dreaming of ‘irse, y no volver’
(Poesía, p. 32), as if wishing physically to leave Argentina’s shores (which she
would in 1960, bound for Paris), her later poetry repeats that trope of leaving, but
the destination gradually becomes a more metaphorical ‘otra orilla’, associated
with death rather than any actual foreign shore.
This early collection was followed in 1956 by La última inocencia, and two
years later by Las aventuras perdidas. In the former, the theme of leaving is reit-
erated, both in the poem ‘Cenizas’, which promises ‘Pronto nos iremos’ (Poesía,
p. 55), and most prominently in the title poem, where the mesmerizing word
‘Partir’ is repeated in each short group of lines, culminating in the exasperated
exhortation ‘Pero arremete, ¡viajera!’ (p. 61). After this desperate attempt to
launch her poetic persona, the fledgling poetic self is eventually named, in what
has become one of Pizarnik’s best known and most frequently quoted poems,
‘Sólo un nombre’ (Poesía, p. 65). The name in question is ‘alejandra’ with its
exotic Russian ancestry, in preference to the homeliness of Flora. Also part of
the process of fashioning this persona is defining the nocturnal realm she will
inhabit. Both this collection and Las aventuras perdidas contain poems which
focus on the night: ‘Noche’, ‘La noche’ and ‘La luz caída de la noche’.
The publication of her next and best known collection, Árbol de Diana (1962),
marks something of a watershed in Pizarnik’s life. It dates from the most intense
and formative period of her life, the time spent in Paris from 1960 to 1964.
During these years her writing matured and she became friends with many writ-
ers, both French, such as André Pieyre de Mandiargues, and ex-patriate Latin
Americans such as Julio Cortázar and Octavio Paz, who wrote the prologue for
this collection. In Árbol de Diana her poems become much sparer; of the thirty-
eight numbered (rather than titled) poems, many are only two or three lines in
length. The concision of Árbol de Diana was followed by Los trabajos y las
noches (1965), a collection in which she once again uses titles, and the presence
of an implied second person gives many of the poems a greater sense of inti-
macy. The title poem of Los trabajos y las noches privileges thirst as the poet’s
emblem. Other key themes are consolidated in this collection, including child-
hood, orphanhood, silence and the problematic nature of language, as indicated
in the poem ‘Fronteras inútiles’, where the poet seems to doubt the substance of
her words as they circle around an absence:

Hablo de
qué
hablo de lo que no es’ (Poesía, p. 185)

Such doubts regarding what and how language communicates are magnified in
the collection Extracción de la piedra de locura (1968), though we also see here
 INTRODUCTION 3

a kind of feverish intensification of poetic activity, associated with the poet’s

realm, the night: ‘Toda la noche hago la noche. Toda la noche escribo. Palabra
por palabra yo escribo la noche’ (Poesía, p. 215). The poem ‘Fragmentos para
dominar el silencio’ perhaps best sums up the tensions experienced by the poet,
through its use of paradoxical statements such as: ‘He querido iluminarme a la
luz de mi falta de luz’ (Poesia, p. 223). This reminds us of the kinds of conceits
common in Spanish Golden Age poetry, in which Pizarnik was well versed.4 The
final two parts of this four-part collection diverge, one consisting of epigram-
matic single-line poems which seem in their elliptical nature to be tending
towards silence, and the other veering towards the excessive and obsessive lan-
guage of madness. The move towards silence in the third part is evident in clipped
sentences which lack a subject or a main verb, or which thematically cluster
around silence: ‘Ninguna cosa. Boca cosida. Párpados cosidos’ (Poesía, p. 242);
‘Pero el silencio es cierto. Por eso escribo’ (Poesía, p. 243). By contrast, the
fourth part, rather than paring language down, draws attention to its shortcom-
ings through repetition:

alguien me vio llorando en el sueño y yo expliqué (dentro de lo posible), medi-

ante palabras simples (dentro de lo posible), palabras buenas y seguras (dentro
de lo posible). Me adueñé de mi persona, la arranqué del hermoso delirio.
(Poesía, p. 252)

The ever-seductive presence of the night is now linked both to death and to music
rather than to a frenzied act of writing: ‘Toda la noche escucho el llamamiento de
la muerte, toda la noche escucho el canto de la muerte junto al río, toda la noche
escucho la voz de la muerte que me llama’ (Poesía, p. 254).
This conjunction of music – or song – and death prefigures the final major
collection published by Pizarnik in her lifetime, El infierno musical (1971).
(Nombres y figuras [1969], her first collection to be published in Spain, had been
published in the interim, but all except three of the poems included in it reap-
peared in El infierno musical.)5 The cornerstone of this important collection is
the ‘Piedra fundamental’ (Poesía, pp. 264–6), in which all of Pizarnik’s earlier
themes and poetic dilemmas re-emerge. The self is irremediably split, language
fails, even music fails, and as if she had never yet managed to leave the docks of
her earliest poetry, the poet is still seeking ‘un lugar desde el cual partir’ (Poesía,
p. 265). (This idée fixe is echoed in the diaries, where Pizarnik confesses to
‘Intranquilidad nueva, como si el barco o el tren estuviera por partir y yo, con el
billete en la mano, aún no he decidido si partir o quedarme’ [Diarios, p. 404]).

4 Her notebooks show that she had read, for example, Góngora’s ‘Soledad segunda’; she
paraphrases parts of it, commenting specifically on lines where ‘la luz del sol’ is alternately
obscured then revealed (Princeton, box 4, folder 3). She had also read San Juan de la Cruz’s
poem ‘Llama de amor viva’ and his commentary on it (Princeton, box 4, folder 9), and many
of Quevedo’s sonnets (Princeton, box 4, folders 3 and 9 particularly).
5 See Cristina Piña’s note to her edition of Pizarnik’s Obras completas: poesía completa y
prosa selecta (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1993; repr. 1994), p. 8.
4 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH AND KARL POSSO

The final section of El infierno musical is entitled ‘Los poseídos entre lilas’;
the dialogues and prose passages which make up this section are extracts from
Pizarnik’s longer work, Los perturbados entre lilas (1969; published posthu-
mously), her only theatrical piece.6 In its use of absurd and puerile humour this
play is naturally paired by critics with the idiosyncratic collection of prose texts
gathered under the whimsical title of La bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la
polígrafa (1970–71; published posthumously). The emphasis in this latter text is
on obscene word play. Some characters are sketchily developed – for example,
Bosta Watson and Flor de Edipo Chú – but they are as much products of linguis-
tic distortion and double entendres as characters with identifiable traits. Absurd
situations which revolve obsessively around sex, lavatorial humour and psycho-
analysis are mixed up with a bewildering array of clashing cultural references.
The sheer linguistic excess of this text, which declares itself as ‘el espacio donde
celebramos la fiesta de mis voces vivas’ (Prosa, p. 97), contrasts sharply with the
notorious prose piece La condesa sangrienta (published for the first time in book
form in 1971), which gained a different audience for Pizarnik from that primar-
ily interested in her poetry. Its fascination lies not only in Pizarnik’s choice of
subject – the notorious sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Báthory who tor-
tured and killed young women – but also in her seemingly detached treatment of
that subject. A brief note Pizarnik made, while reading Valentine Penrose’s book
on which La condesa sangrienta is based, links this text more directly to her own
constant poetic preoccupations: ‘Entre Erzsébet y las cosas un espacio vacío’
(Princeton, box 4, folder 3). This empty space recalls one of Pizarnik’s most
heartfelt and desperate poems (also published in 1971), which sums up the ulti-
mately intractable problems with which she continually struggled as a poet; the
poem ‘En esta noche, en este mundo’ asks simply ‘si digo agua ¿beberé?/ si digo
pan ¿comeré?’ (Poesía, p. 399), and it is into this unbridgeable gap between lan-
guage and the world that her poetry endlessly falls (Poesía, p. 446):

Alguien
cae
en
su
primera caída

In view of Pizarnik’s constant preoccupation with the treacherous nature of lan-

guage, Thorpe Running places her firmly within a Latin American tradition of
critical poetry.7 As Running concludes, the goal which Pizarnik shares with other
poets in this tradition (including Octavio Paz) is that of ‘a language without

6 See Cristina Piña’s essay in this volume regarding why there are two titles in circulation
for this piece, Los poseídos entre lilas and Los perturbados entre lilas.
7 Thorpe Running, ‘The Negative Poems of Alejandra Pizarnik’, in The Critical Poem:
Borges, Paz and Other Language-Centred Poets in Latin America (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 1996), pp. 87–104.
 INTRODUCTION 5

limits’ (p. 104). For Pizarnik, such a language was ultimately equated with
silence or death.

Tradition and Voices

Pizarnik was acutely aware of tradition and of writing in the wake of others. We
can see her as indebted to T. S. Eliot’s notion that ‘the most individual parts of [a
poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets . . . assert their immortality
most vigorously’.8 According to César Aira, Pizarnik ‘vivió y leyó y escribió en
la estela del surrealismo’,9 as well as being a successor to the tradition of French
poètes maudits and to Latin American poets such as Rubén Darío and Alfonsina
Storni. Aside from direct intertextual reference, Pizarnik’s acquaintance with
Darío is obvious in her general penchant for Modernista imagery.10 The legacy
of Storni, meanwhile, can be seen in frequent thematic echoes of her poem ‘La
loba’, and of her resonantly-titled collection Mundo de siete pozos (1934); the
idea that ‘morir es partir’ from Storni’s Diario de navegación (1930) resurfaces
in Pizarnik’s early poem ‘La última inocencia’, discussed above, and informs her
ongoing sense of leaving as dying. Pizarnik’s attitude towards such precursors
was experienced both as a richness and as a very real threat, an anxiety of influ-
ence. An early unpublished poem by Pizarnik entitled ‘Destino de alfonsina’
begins with a tribute: ‘Junto a ti, hermana/ de las olas, dejé unas flores’ (Princeton,
box 4, folder 1). However, she later mocks such an idea of sorority, labelling one
of the characters in La bucanera de Pernambuco ‘No-Alfonsina’ (Prosa, p. 160).
Such ambivalence is symptomatic of the fact that Pizarnik knew that she could
not ‘form [her]self wholly on one or two private admirations’ (Eliot, p. 81), but
had somehow to find her own voice. She comments wryly in her diary ‘Supongo
que pertenezco al género de poeta lírico amenazado por lo inefable y lo incomu-
nicable. Y no obstante, no lo deseo ser’ (Diarios, p. 413).
The question of Pizarnik’s poetic voice, or more aptly voices, is one which
has occupied a prominent place in the substantial critical literature on her work.11
Indeed it has become something of a critical commonplace to contrast the lyrical

8 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), repr. in Twentieth Century
Poetry: Critical Essays and Documents, ed. Graham Martin and P. N. Furbank (Milton Keynes:
Open University Press, 1975), pp. 79–85 (p. 80). Pizarnik published a critical essay ‘Sobre T.
S. Eliot’ in El corno emplumado, 14 (1965), 89, and she refers to him in her diaries and
notebooks.
9 César Aira, Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1998), p. 11.
10 As charted by Alicia Borinsky in ‘Alejandra Pizarnik: The Self and its Impossible
Landscapes’, in A Dream of Light and Shadow: Portraits of Latin American Women Writers,
ed. Marjorie Agosín (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), pp. 291–302.
11 For example, Susan Bassnett’s ‘Speaking with Many Voices: The Poems of Alejandra
Pizarnik’, in her Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America (London: Zed Books,
1990), pp. 36–51; Susana Haydu, ‘Las dos voces de Alejandra Pizarnik’, in El puente de las
palabras: homenaje a David Lagmanovich, ed. Inés Azar (Washington: Organization of
American States, 1994), pp. 245–56.
6 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH AND KARL POSSO

voice of her early poems with the biting, self-destructive and obscene voice of
the later prose and theatrical work. Critics have tended to privilege the former
voice, which Susana Chávez Silverman here aptly characterizes as the ‘overde-
terminedly “Pizarnikian” voice’ in her essay ‘Gender, Sexuality and Silence(s) in
the Writing of Alejandra Pizarnik’. But recent publications and the availability
of manuscript collections allow for a broader and fuller assessment of the many
voices of Pizarnik. The appearance of her Poesía completa in 2000, Prosa com-
pleta in 2002 (including substantial sections devoted to her critical articles, pro-
logues and reviews) and the Diarios in 2003, together with the Pizarnik Collection
housed in the Princeton Library (which first became accessible in 2002), give a
more complex picture.12 They also, as Cristina Piña explores here in her essay
‘The “Complete” Works of Alejandra Pizarnik? Editors and Editions’, raise
timely theoretical and ethical questions about precisely what constitutes an oeu-
vre. Piña notes how some of Pizarnik’s letters can be seen as text in a Barthesian
sense, and have indeed been productively read as such alongside the punning
prose works. Whilst such generic ambiguity enriches the interpretative potential
of both texts, it presents problems of categorization for the would-be editor of
Pizarnik’s ‘complete work’. Piña highlights inconsistencies arising from prob-
lems of classification in the recent Lumen edition of Pizarnik’s poetry and prose,
and also of her diaries, and outlines the issues for the scholar of Pizarnik in deal-
ing with this newly available material.13
One of the main strands of this reassessment of Pizarnik deals with the crucial
importance of her reading, as critic and poet, of other texts, and their subsequent
incorporation or transmutation into her own, what Delfina Muschietti describes
elsewhere using the verb ‘fagocitar’.14 Octavio Paz, in his introduction to Árbol
de Diana, speaks about a ‘cristalización verbal’ (Poesía, p. 101), and this notion
is important to an understanding of Pizarnik’s poetic process. The ‘verbal crys-
tallization’ of what can now be appreciated as a truly vast nexus of intertexts into
something new and individual comes under scrutiny in those essays which here
deal with Pizarnik as both reader and poet in parallel. Pizarnik the careful reader,
already revealed to us in those of her review essays gathered in Piña’s 1993 edi-
tion of Obras completas: poesía completa y prosa selecta, takes on greater sig-
nificance through the substantial section devoted to critical works in the Prosa
completa, especially when read alongside her other critical essays which she
published in diverse journals, but which have not as yet all been collected in a
single volume. We can see through all these readings and through her

12 A finding aid and description of the Princeton Alejandra Pizarnik Papers may be
accessed from http://libweb2.princeton.edu/rbsc2/aids/msslist/maindex.htm
13 Another edition of Pizarnik’s complete works, Obra completa, ed. Gustavo Zuluaga
(Medellín: Árbol de Diana, 2000), was not widely distributed. Zuluaga also edited the
following by Pizarnik: Poemas (Medellín: Endymion, 1986); Prosa poética (Medellín:
Endymion, 1987); Obras selectas (Medellín: Holderlin, 1992; republ. as Obras escogidas).
14 Delfina Muschietti, ‘Las tres caras de Alejandra Pizarnik’, review of Pizarnik’s Poesía
completa (Barcelona: Lumen, 2001), in Página/12 (Argentina, July 2001). Reproduced at
http://www.lainsignia.org/2001/julio/cul_077.htm
 INTRODUCTION 7

unpublished notebooks the configuration of her personal library and ‘private

admirations’ – Artaud, Baudelaire, Breton, Cortázar, Macedonio Fernández,
Mallarmé, Michaux and Paz, amongst others. Obviously many of these prefer-
ences had already been apparent through intertextuality in the poetry, but others
(such as Góngora and Quevedo, many of whose sonnets she copies into her note-
books) were a more latent presence. We also see confirmation of Ivonne
Bordelois’s statement that ‘Alejandra conocía a los grandes marginales, nunca
citados en las bibliografías académicas,’15 represented in an Argentinian context
by such writers as Antonio Porchia, Georges Schehadé, or Georg Christoph
Lichtenberg (to whose ‘waste books’ or ‘Sudelbuch’ we might compare her ‘pal-
ais du vocabulaire’ notebooks).16
The breadth of Pizarnik’s reading and reviewing, and the importance of her
readerly and ‘critical’ voice, is therefore something which is only recently being
investigated by scholars, and it is explored here by Florinda Goldberg’s essay
‘Alejandra Pizarnik, the Perceptive Reader’. Goldberg highlights in particular
the importance to Pizarnik of her readings of Octavio Paz; she also evaluates the
degree of empathy or distancing between reader and text in several of Pizarnik’s
reviews. As Cristina Piña has noted, the degree of closeness to her subject lends
some of her critical essays the character of ‘textos “dobles” ’, telling us as much
about her as about the text being reviewed.17 We could see this critical process
as Pizarnik’s ‘invisible work’, to borrow Efraín Kristal’s term, which is now
being made visible.18 Kristal sees the ‘invisible’ process of translation as more
central to Borges’s literary process than the familiar images of labyrinths, mir-
rors, tigers or encyclopedias, and in the same way, Pizarnik’s ‘invisible’ activity
as reader/critic could be seen to be as central to her poetic development and con-
figuration as the much-discussed images of the night, death, childhood, the
garden.
Jason Wilson’s essay ‘Alejandra Pizarnik, Surrealism and Reading’ also looks
at Pizarnik’s activity as a reader, but focuses in particular on her complex and
contradictory relationship to surrealism as an example of the dynamic between
reading and creating in her life. Although Pizarnik’s ‘clarifying sojourn’ in Paris
(to use Jason Weiss’s phrase) is another of the biographical details by which she
could be seen simply to conform to an Argentine pattern,19 Wilson’s chapter
looks more closely at this Parisian apprenticeship, pointing out that Pizarnik read
not only the surrealists, but also criticism on the surrealists, and she therefore
‘found her voice as a critic of surrealism’ (Wilson). His examination of Pizarnik
places her in a Borgesian readerly tradition, in the sense that the writer is first

15 Cited by Cristina Piña in Alejandra Pizarnik: una biografía (Buenos Aires: Planeta,
1991; 2nd edn Corregidor, 1999), p. 99.
16 Princeton, box 7, folder 42 contains a manuscript entitled ‘Sundelbuch’ [sic].
17 See introduction to Alejandra Pizarnik, Obras completas, ed. Cristina Piña, p. 9.
18 Efraín Kristal, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation (Nashville: Vanderbilt University
Press, 2002).
19 Jason Weiss, The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris
(London: Routledge, 2003), p. 59.
8 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH AND KARL POSSO

and foremost a reader. However, in her case – as Wilson notes with respect to her
re-reading of Breton’s Nadja – the writer is a reader whose intensely identifica-
tory reading strategies threatened to cause anxiety regarding her own creative
voice.
The creative voice about which Pizarnik seems to have been most ambivalent
is the obscene, absurd and humorous voice, mainly known to us through her
later prose works and theatrical pieces. However, far from being a late and spo-
radic experiment, this kind of prose was worked at extensively by Pizarnik
throughout her life; indeed, amongst her manuscripts and notebooks there are
examples of other theatrical pieces, prose pieces and extended humorous prose
works which show Pizarnik’s concerted efforts to express herself in an anti-
lyrical way. Carolina Depetris had already underlined the importance of the late
prose, reading it as ‘el indicio fundamental de una nueva dirección poética ten-
diente a resolver la tensión entre opciones disímiles en la que constantemente se
debate su escritura’.20 Evelyn Fishburn’s essay in this volume, ‘Different
Aspects of Humour and Wordplay in the Work of Alejandra Pizarnik’, gives
Pizarnik’s humorous prose voice its due attention, analysing in depth the lin-
guistic and cultural mechanisms employed in the key texts, Los perturbados
entre lilas and La bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la polígrafa. Fishburn
draws our attention to one specific aspect of Pizarnik’s wordplay which is nota-
bly and surprisingly underdeveloped by her, that is, the Jewish dimension.
Critics have frequently invoked Pizarnik’s own rootlessness and sense of non-
belonging, and have linked this to her Jewish identity.21 As Fishburn notes,
Pizarnik herself felt strongly her lack of roots: ‘la tremenda soledad que implica
no tener raíces en ningún lado’ (Diarios, p. 373), whilst valuing the links she
still had to Jewish culture. Fishburn examines how the poet’s ambivalent
attempts to return to her Jewish roots are surprisingly rarely filtered through
specifically Jewish humour, despite her obvious ease on a domestic level with
that socio-cultural milieu. What emerges far more prominently than issues of
ethnic identity is issues of sexual identity. Sexuality is the predominant seman-
tic field for Pizarnik’s wordplay, and through it she gives reign to another
ambiguous voice among her many voices.
Ambiguous sexuality is an aspect of Pizarnik’s biography which has been the
subject of much discussion, from Cristina Piña’s biography onwards. Piña
alluded to Pizarnik’s lesbian relationships, but resisted reading her work in the
light of these (Piña, Alejandra Pizarnik, pp. 12 and 190). This detached critical
approach was countered by Chávez Silverman and Sylvia Molloy, who both

20 Carolina Depetris, Aporética de la muerte: estudio crítico sobre Alejandra Pizarnik

(Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2004), p. 176.
21 On this topic, see for example Leonardo Senkman, ‘Alejandra Pizarnik: de la morada de
las palabras a la intemperie de la muerte’, in La identidad judía en la literatura argentina
(Buenos Aires: Pardes, 1983), pp. 337–40; and Cristina Piña, Poesía y experiencia del límite:
leer a Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires: Botella al Mar, 1999), pp. 79–85.
 INTRODUCTION 9

opened the door to more overtly lesbian-focused readings of her work.22

Correspondencia Pizarnik includes fifteen increasingly passionate letters from
Pizarnik to Silvina Ocampo, yet through these letters we see only one angle on
what was an amorous but conflictive relationship, one which dominates many
pages of Pizarnik’s later diaries (omitted from the recently published Diarios).23
If we therefore take into account both these suppressed diaries, and her most
overtly lesbian texts – the unpublished texts ‘Diana de Lesbos’ and ‘Harta del
principio femenino’ (which contains the line ‘No es que me siento lesbiana
homosexual’)24 – we can see clear evidence of the gender trouble which feeds
into Pizarnik’s conflicting voices. Chávez Silverman’s essay here revisits sexual-
ity in Pizarnik’s work at a critical distance from her own earlier exposés, explor-
ing Pizarnik’s struggle between containment and dispersal, between negative
and positive ‘configuration[s] of alterity’ which are ‘always linked to notions of
power and powerlessness’.
Part of Pizarnik’s feelings of powerlessness in her poetic writing derive from
a gendered sense of inferiority to, or oppression by, male literary models. That
Pizarnik looks to such male models is clear; her gallery of great writers (Princeton,
box 8, folder 15) is composed entirely of males. She may, for example, have
absorbed ideas from Paz about the split self, such as those found in his poem
‘Escritura’: ‘Alguien escribe en mí, mueve mi mano’.25 Likewise his 1962 poem
‘Aquí’, about the poet hearing his own footsteps like another self in the fog,
which she copies out (Princeton, box 3, folder 9w, p. 260). In terms of gender,
however, she confesses in her diary to finding Paz too virile (Diarios, p. 412).
Her own voice – as is meticulously explored both by Chávez Silverman and by
Cecilia Rossi’s essay ‘Alejandra Pizarnik’s Poetry: Translating the Translation of
Subjectivity’ – is far more elliptical. Indeed, it is perhaps only when we are
shown the difficulties of translating this voice into English – a language in which

22 See Sylvia Molloy, ‘From Sappho to Baffo: Diverting the Sexual in Alejandra Pizarnik’,
in Sex and Sexuality in Latin America, ed. Daniel Balderston and Donna J. Guy (New York
and London: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 250–8; Susana Chávez Silverman, ‘Signos
de lo femenino en la poesía de Alejandra Pizarnik’, in El puente de las palabras: homenaje a
David Lagmanovich, ed. Inés Azar (Washington DC: Organization of American States, 1994),
pp. 155–72; Susana Chávez Silverman, ‘The Look that Kills: The ‘Unacceptable Beauty’ of
Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta’, in ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic
Writings, ed. Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith (Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 1995), pp. 281–305; and Susana Chávez Silverman, ‘The Autobiographical
as Horror in the Poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik’, in Critical Studies on the Feminist Subject, ed.
Giovanna Covi (Italy: Università di Trento, 1997), pp. 265–77.
23 For instance, on page 489 of Diarios, the entry for 2 January 1970 has been suppressed; this
entry deals with her resentful distancing from Silvina Ocampo, and includes a rather sour retraction
of the praise she had given to Ocampo in her article ‘Dominios ilícitos’ (Princeton, Pizarnik
Diaries, box 2, folder 9, 2 January 1970). Other entries detailing the effect that the ongoing
emotional conflict with Ocampo is having on her ability to work have similarly been omitted – for
example, see those entries for 5 January 1970 and beyond (Diaries: box 2, folder 9).
24 Princeton, box 7, folders 10 and 20 respectively.
25 Octavio Paz, Libertad bajo palabra: Obra poética 1935–1957 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1974), p. 66.
10 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH AND KARL POSSO

the potential for leaving the gender of the subject of verbs unspecified is severely
limited – that we realize the full extent of the gender ambiguity of Pizarnik’s
poetic persona, in addition to its split nature. As Rossi observes, ‘the absent per-
sonal pronouns – those implied by the verb form but not explicitly included in
the poem – often bear more meaning than those in the text’.
Another of the ways in which this sense of a split poetic self manifests itself
is in Pizarnik’s constant recourse to imagery expressing a dichotomy between
the internal and the external. Fiona J. Mackintosh’s essay explores how the body
poetic is figured as a kind of dwelling place, in which the poetic voice feels alter-
nately trapped and protected. Imagery of walls, tombs and asphyxiation is coun-
tered by the more positive connotations of her ‘palais du vocabulaire’, the name
she gave to her notebooks of quotations. In her constant striving and search for a
place within and beyond language, for a ‘morada’ within language which will
paradoxically allow the poet to go beyond its limitations, Pizarnik’s poetry has
clear parallels with both surrealism and a typically Hispanic mystic tradition.
The ‘palais du vocabulaire’ reveals the signifant debt Pizarnik’s aesthetic owes to
these and closely related literary traditions, with continual citations from Artaud,
Breton, Char, and Ungaretti, and copying out of poems by San Juan de la Cruz,
Quevedo and Góngora, as previously noted. But concurrent with this visionary
side is the ever-present danger of going too far ‘beyond’ language into madness.
Her poetry thus moves uneasily at the limits of expression, veering towards the
opposing poles of silence and ‘el volcánvelorio de una lengua’ (Prosa, p. 109),
both of which condemn the poet to non-communication. Pizarnik’s situating of
herself at a connection between art and agony re-emerges from a different, com-
parative perspective through Karl Posso’s essay ‘The Tormenting Beauty of
Ideals: A Deleuzian Interpretation of Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangri-
enta and Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” ’. Posso’s innovative reading uses
Kafka’s disconcerting story to elucidate the philosophical intricacies of Pizarnik’s
fascination with death, and her paradoxical reflections on an ‘ideal law of abso-
lute negation’.
This collection of essays therefore explores Pizarnik’s work from new
angles: it examines her serious and detailed activity as a literary critic, reveal-
ing her intense and identificatory strategies as a reader and the ways in which
this activity feeds directly into her own creative process. The volume assesses
the impact of her ambiguous sexuality on her poetic personae, and also how
her concern with sexuality influences her experimentation with humorous
prose. It offers new approaches to key texts and themes; in the case of the
much-studied text La condesa sangrienta through a comparative and detailed
philosophical reading, and in the case of the theme of the split subject through
the lens of translation. By broadening the scope of Pizarnik studies, this book
also hopes to act as a catalyst for further research into the dialogue between
her critical and creative voices and their relationship with certain poetic
traditions.
 INTRODUCTION 11

Bibliography
Aira, César, Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1998)
Bassnett, Susan, ‘Speaking with Many Voices: The Poems of Alejandra Pizarnik’, in
Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America (London: Zed Books, 1990),
pp. 36–51
Borinsky, Alicia, ‘Alejandra Pizarnik: The Self and its Impossible Landscapes’, in A
Dream of Light and Shadow: Portraits of Latin American Women Writers, ed.
Marjorie Agosín (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), pp.
291–302
Chávez Silverman, Susana, ‘Signos de lo femenino en la poesía de Alejandra
Pizarnik’, in El puente de las palabras: homenaje a David Lagmanovich, ed. Inés
Azar (Washington DC: Organization of American States, 1994), pp. 155–72
——, ‘The Look that Kills: The ‘Unacceptable Beauty’ of Alejandra Pizarnik’s La
condesa sangrienta’, in ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, ed.
Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith (Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 1995), pp. 281–305
——, ‘The Autobiographical as Horror in the Poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik’, in
Critical Studies on the Feminist Subject, ed. Giovanna Covi (Italy: Università di
Trento, 1997), pp. 265–77
Cortázar, Julio, Rayuela (1963) (Madrid: Cátedra, 1988)
Depetris, Carolina, Aporética de la muerte: estudio crítico sobre Alejandra Pizarnik
(Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2004)
Eliot, T. S., The Sacred Wood (1920) (London: Methuen, 1960)
——, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), reprinted in Twentieth Century
Poetry: Critical Essays and Documents, ed. Graham Martin and P. N. Furbank
(Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1975), pp. 79–85
Haydu, Susana, ‘Las dos voces de Alejandra Pizarnik’, in El puente de las palabras:
homenaje a David Lagmanovich, ed. Inés Azar (Washington: Organization of
American States, 1994), pp. 245–56
Kristal, Efraín, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation (Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press, 2002)
Lispector, Clarice, ‘Amor’, in Laços de Família (1960) (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco,
1998), pp. 19–29
Molloy, Sylvia, ‘From Sappho to Baffo: Diverting the Sexual in Alejandra Pizarnik’,
in Sex and Sexuality in Latin America, ed. Daniel Balderston and Donna J. Guy
(New York and London: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 250–8
Muschietti, Delfina, ‘Las tres caras de Alejandra Pizarnik’ [review of Pizarnik’s
Poesía completa (Barcelona: Lumen, 2001)], in Página/12 (Argentina, July 2001).
Reproduced at http://www.lainsignia.org/2001/julio/cul_077.htm
Paz, Octavio, Libertad bajo palabra: Obra poética 1935–1957 (Mexico: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 1974)
Piña, Cristina, Alejandra Pizarnik: una biografía (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991; 2nd
edn Corregidor, 1999)
——, Poesía y experiencia del límite: leer a Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires:
Botella al Mar, 1999)
Pizarnik, Alejandra, La última inocencia (Buenos Aires: Poesía Buenos Aires,
1956)
——, Las aventuras perdidas (Buenos Aires: Altamar, 1958)
12 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH AND KARL POSSO

Pizarnik, Alejandra, Árbol de Diana (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1962)

——, Los trabajos y las noches (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1965)
——, Extracción de la piedra de locura (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1968)
——, Nombres y figuras (Barcelona: La Esquina, 1969)
——, El infierno musical (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1971)
——, La condesa sangrienta (Buenos Aires: Acuarius, 1971)
——, Poemas, ed. Gustavo Zuluaga (Medellín: Endymion, 1986)
——, Prosa poética, ed. Gustavo Zuluaga (Medellín: Endymion, 1987)
——, Obras selectas, ed. Gustavo Zuluaga (Medellín: Holderlin, 1992; republ. as
Obras escogidas)
——, Obras completas: poesía completa y prosa selecta, ed. Cristina Piña (Buenos
Aires: Corregidor, 1993; repr. 1994, 1999)
——, Obra completa, ed. Gustavo Zuluaga (Medellín: Árbol de Diana, 2000)
——, ‘Sobre T. S. Eliot’, El corno emplumado, 14 (1965), 89
Pizarnik, Flora Alejandra, La tierra más ajena (Buenos Aires: Botella al Mar, 1955)
Princeton University Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections,
Alejandra Pizarnik Papers (CO395), http://libweb2.princeton.edu/rbsc2/aids/mss-
list/maindex.htm
Senkman, Leonardo, ‘Alejandra Pizarnik: de la morada de las palabras a la intempe-
rie de la muerte’, in La identidad judía en la literatura argentina (Buenos Aires:
Pardes, 1983), pp. 337–40
Running, Thorpe, ‘The Negative Poems of Alejandra Pizarnik’, in The Critical
Poem: Borges, Paz and Other Language-Centred Poets in Latin America
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1996), pp. 87–104)
Weiss, Jason, The Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Writers in Paris
(London: Routledge, 2003)
 Gender, Sexuality and Silence(s) in the
Writing of Alejandra Pizarnik

Susana Chávez Silverman

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

What atonement is this all about?1
Adrienne Rich
¿Qué significa traducirse en palabras?
Alejandra Pizarnik (Poesía, p. 253)

Alejandra Pizarnik fashioned a complex textual self through a variety of genres

and voices. The sense of the radical separateness between these voices has been
a function of canonical and historical (and gendered) habits of reading – reified
not least by the poet herself – which ultimately served as both duenna and closet,
buttressing the notion of a schism between the public and private realms and
maintaining the misconception of two radically discrete voices: the sombre, hier-
atic, disciplined, asexual lyric voice (for years the overdeterminedly ‘Pizarnikian’
voice par excellence) versus the transgressive, humoristic, mainly hypersexual-
ized prose voice. Only quite recently, years after Pizarnik’s death, are scholars
and other readers able to receive – and restore – a more accurate sense of the
nuance and complexity which had been there in Pizarnik’s poetry all along,
thanks to the publication of previously suppressed texts – what I call unauthor-
ized works, both poems (2000) and prose (2002) – as well as some of her private
writing, such as letters (1998) and diaries (2003).
In her book El testigo lúcido, María Negroni describes a process of fixation,
disavowal and return, with regard to Alejandra Pizarnik, very similar to my own.
Ultimately, Negroni arrived at a characterization which constitutes a holistic
approach, respecting the sense of disquiet, deferral and desire in Pizarnik’s
writing:

Pensé que los textos ‘malditos’ se erguían, frente al resto de la obra, como un
testigo lúcido (la expresión es de Aldo Pellegrini) pero no se le oponían . . . el
efecto era de extrañamiento radical y me pareció entender que el objetivo de

1 Adrienne Rich, cited in Jan Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience,
Identity in Women’s Writing (London and New York: Pandora, 1987), p. 162.
14 SUSANA CHÁVEZ SILVERMAN

la transgresión no era simplemente profanar, parodiar, agobiar la intertextuali-

dad, sino . . . escenificar el proyecto siempre irrealizable de la significación.2

Like Negroni, initially I was drawn to Pizarnik’s poetry. Later, I read La condesa
sangrienta for and ‘as’ a lesbian. Most recently, I undertook a re-evaluation of
her poetry, looking for autobiographical signs of lesbian sexuality in poems
Pizarnik had published during her life, as well as in several texts published post-
humously.3 I am still interested in gesturing toward lesbianism (bisexuality, more
accurately), but I want to remain mindful of the taxonomic thrust – indeed, the
possibility of homophobia – underwriting some heteronormative and even les-
bigay readings of homosexuality.4 In the present essay, I do not necessarly privi-
lege lesbianism in my reading of signs of gendered and sexual alterity in
Pizarnik’s writing. And yet, I am fascinated with Valerie Rohy’s conceptualiza-
tion of (lesbianism as) ‘impossibility’:

What would it mean to build a theory . . . on ‘impossibility’? [The question]

asks that we recognize as the task of oppositional criticism the interrogation
not only of meanings handed down by cultural authority but also the socially
constructed category of meaning itself. It implies an effort to conceptualize . . .
a methodology based not on the truth of language and desire but on their
uncertainty. (Rohy, p. 150)

Throughout her entire oeuvre, Pizarnik produces a textual self predicated on

alterity. The signs with which she constructs this self are often overdeterminedly
gendered, sometimes sexualized but always linked to notions of power and pow-
erlessness, of authority versus de-authorization. These signs resemble mirror
images, at the two poles of a spectrum running from negative to positive. The
negative charge, so to speak, is represented by concrete, often miniaturized

2 María Negroni, El testigo lúcido: la obra de sombra de Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario:

Beatriz Viterbo, 2003), p. 12.
3 A more fully developed exploration of this topic may be found in my 1995 essay ‘The
Look that Kills: The “Unacceptable Beauty” of Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta’,
in ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, ed. Emilie Bergmann and Paul Julian
Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 281–305, and in ‘The Autobiographical
as Horror in the Poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik’, in Critical Studies on the Feminist Subject, ed.
Giovanni Covi (Trento: Università di Trento, 1997), pp. 265–77.
4 Paul Allatson’s insights, quoting Annamarie Jagose, are pertinent here: ‘The lesbian . . .
is subject to a graphetic drive, one that perpetuates “a homophobic imperative to know and
mark the lesbian as distinct and identifiable’’ ’. Paul Allatson, ‘ “My Bones Shine in the Dark”:
AIDS and the De-scription of Chicano Queer in the Work of Gil Cuadros’, in Aztlán: A Journal
of Chicano Studies 32: 1 (2007), 23–52, citing Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian
Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 2002), pp. 13 and 143. Further, in Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American
Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), Valerie Rohy reminds us of
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s observation that ‘both straight culture’s and queer critics’ readings
of homosexuality are susceptible to a strategic pose of knowingness whose homophobia
consists in its refusal of difference, of uncertainty, of surprise’ (p. 150).
 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND SILENCE(S) 15

images such as dolls, little girls, mechanized figures (such as ‘la autómata’ and
‘la sonámbula’), Alicia (after Alice in Wonderland), birds, wounded animals. On
a more abstract level, this charge can be perceived in a sense of immobility,
impotence, lack/absence, thirst, asexuality and the very fragmentary, elliptical
nature of much of the lyric poetry – what I call the authorized voice – itself. On
the other hand, the positive charge is embodied concretely by the she-wolf, the
ladies in red, the Bloody Countess, ‘Hilda la polígrafa’, and abstractly by images
of power, corrosive humour, perversity, excess, sexuality and the monstrous.
This charge predominates in the longer prose poems (especially those of
Extracción de la piedra de locura and El infierno musical), and also in what I
call the ‘minotaur voice’5 – prose and some poetry suppressed by Pizarnik dur-
ing her lifetime or occasionally published in small magazines and reviews (but
not collected in book form), particularly in the scathingly humorous, deconstruc-
tive, self-immolating Los perturbados entre lilas and La bucanera de Pernambuco
o Hilda la polígrafa. La condesa sangrienta (1965; 1971) functions as a kind of
bridge or fulcrum. Stylistically it shares the lapidary, highly aestheticized and
static qualities of Pizarnik’s earlier poetry. Thematically, however, it represents
the Rabelaisian and monstrous sexual excess of the positive charge, emblema-
tized in its protagonist, the Hungarian Countess Erzsébet Báthory. In this essay,
I closely examine the presence and function of these ‘bipolar’ images in Pizarnik’s
poetry, comparing and juxtaposing certain textual and chronological instances
with images and phrases from her diaries and correspondence. I do not deal with
La condesa sangrienta, although I want to underscore that it represents arguably
the best known image of what I am calling the positive gendered and sexualized
charge; nor do I look at the later ‘minotaur texts’ (Los perturbados and Hilda),
which have been discussed in detail by María Negroni and others.6
Before proceeding to a detailed reading of these more overdeterminedly gen-
dered signs, at opposite poles of the negative–positive spectrum, the notion of
silence requires elaboration. Many of Pizarnik’s critics have commented on the
overwhelming importance of silence in her work, although few have made a rig-
orous study of its signifying realms, or what poet, rhetorician and critic Paolo
Valesio has called ‘silentiary regions’.7 Like the more obvious images, both
abstract and concrete, with which Pizarnik articulates her gendered, sexualized
self, the abstract notion of silence is actualized in relation to a positive–negative

5 I use this term to characterize a voice the author mainly suppressed during her life (in
terms of publication).
6 Although I agree with Cristina Piña, who has called it ‘una de las obras centradas en la
articulación de sexualidad y muerte más sobrecogedora de nuestra literatura’ (Pizarnik, Obras
completas ed. Piña, p. 9) and with Sylvia Molloy, who considers the work Pizarnik’s ‘most
personal statement’ (‘from Sappho to Baffo’, cited in my ‘The Look that Kills’, p. 302), in the
interest of textual economy I do not include La condesa sangrienta among the works examined
in this present essay. For other analyses of the Condesa, and of aspects of Los perturbados and
Hilda la polígrafa, see the chapters by Posso and Fishburn respectively in this volume.
7 Paolo Valesio, ‘A Remark on Silence and Listening’, Rivista di Estetica, 19–20 (1985),
17–44.
16 SUSANA CHÁVEZ SILVERMAN

spectrum. I have closely examined Pizarnik’s rhetorical use of silence elsewhere;8

in this essay I am interested in looking at Pizarnik’s use of silence in order to
explore its relation to gender and sexuality.
In ‘A Remark on Silence and Listening’, Paolo Valesio describes two main
modes: silence as interruption or rupture and silence as plenitude (Valesio, p. 29).
Both of these modes are amply represented in Pizarnik’s writing, in her poetry,
prose, and diaries. In ‘Muteness Envy’ – a wide-ranging essay which touches on
texts as disparate as John Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and Jane Campion’s
controversial film ‘The Piano’ (1993) – Barbara Johnson explores the overdeter-
mined link between silence and the feminine, noting the textual ideal of ‘the
superiority of silence over poetry’ in canonical poets such as Keats, Mallarmé,
Archibald MacLeish and others, and characterizes this ideal as a ‘muteness envy’
often gendered as female in male poets.9 Since Pizarnik deliberately positions
herself as an outsider with regard to an Argentine or even Hispanic literary tradi-
tion, and as heiress to a Eurocentric canonicity, it is not surprising that one of her
two (contradictory) attitudes toward silence (Valesio’s ‘silence as plenitude’)
echoes Johnson’s reading of silence as textual ideal in canonical European poets
such as Keats and Mallarmé.10 Interestingly, unlike many of the male poets she
admired, Pizarnik does not gender silence as explicitly feminine (by represent-
ing the aesthetic apex in terms of images such as vessels, containers, a mute
female statue, for example). However, as we shall see, she often connects silence
as plenitude to the body, love, and sexual pleasure.
The Poesía completa published in Spain in 2001 is certainly more ‘completa’
than any of the previously published versions (whether called ‘complete’ or not).
It makes available an important selection of poems either previously unpublished
or uncollected in volumes.11 I cannot resist reading the unpublished poem ‘A un
poema acerca del agua, de Silvina Ocampo’ intratextually. In fact, this sort of
reading imposes itself because Pizarnik – as is especially apparent after the
recent publication of her ‘complete’ poetry, her prose, and her correspondence
and diaries – presents a particularly noteworthy case of self-as-palimpsest.12
María Negroni, too, comments on Pizarnik’s intertextuality, her borrowing from
canonical texts to ‘legitimate’ her own writing, as well as noting ‘el recurso nar-
cisista de la intratextualidad: reciclar, absorber todo, sin vacilar (Julia Kristeva

8 ‘The Poetry of Octavio Paz and Alejandra Pizarnik: A Dialogue with Silence’, in Jewish
Culture and the Hispanic World: Essays in Memory of Joseph H. Silverman, ed. Samuel G.
Armistead and Mishael M. Caspi (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2001), pp. 129–44.
9 Barbara Johnson, The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race and
Gender (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 129, 131–2.
10 Many instances of Pizarnik inserting herself – asserting her belonging, although not
always smoothly or unequivocally – into a Eurocentric and predominantly male literary
tradition recur throughout her diaries (see especially Diarios, pp. 27–8, 412).
11 For a discussion of the issue of completeness in Pizarnik editions, see Cristina Piña’s
chapter in this volume.
12 Thanks to Paul Allatson for suggesting this turn of phrase for Pizarnik’s life/work.
 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND SILENCE(S) 17

vio, en la actividad de poetizar, un “canibalismo melancólico”)’ (Negroni, p. 17,

my emphasis).13
These drives appear in the above-mentioned undated poem, which is dedi-
cated to Silvina Ocampo ‘y a la condesa de Tripoli’, and has an epigraph by
Octavio Paz (embedded, in the italicized phrase in the last line of the poem
itself). It is included by editor Becciú in a section of unpublished and uncol-
lected texts written between 1962 and 1972.

Tu modo de silenciarte en el poema.

Me abrís como a una flor
(sin duda una flor pobre, lamentable)
que ya no esperaba la terrible delicadeza
de la primavera. Me abrís, me abro,
me vuelvo de agua en tu poema de agua
que emana toda la noche profecías. (Poesía, p. 356)

The speaker’s direct address of the textual ‘you’ (Silvina Ocampo) is highly
unusual in Pizarnik’s work; far more common is the much commented-upon tex-
tual doubling, in which the ‘you’ is an/other version of the speaker’s ‘I’. Here,
the speaker attributes to the ‘you’ a paradoxical ability to become silent in the
poem. This is Pizarnik’s yearned-for silence as plenitude; the textual muteness
achieved by the ‘you’ in her own poem causes – or is related to – the speaker’s
‘opening’.
The strategic and somewhat pathetic topos modestiae in the third line (paren-
thetically enclosed) notwithstanding, the positive value ascribed to this opening
is undeniable. It can be detected in the simile of the flower (again, a somewhat
unusual image in Pizarnik, except for the omnipresent, stereotypical and post-
Romantic ‘lila’), and in the use of the colloquial Argentine second-person sin-
gular familiar ‘vos’, which immediately conveys a sense of privacy and intimacy,
particularly since Pizarnik generally did not favour its use, even in her private
writing. Lines 4–5 complete and qualify the action of being opened; it is an
unexpected blossoming – a somewhat conventional metaphor for the action of
love, taking place in that equally conventional season of renewal, ‘la primav-
era’. However, any tendency toward sentimentality is tempered by the oxymo-
ron ‘terrible delicadeza’, which suggests the speaker’s unwillingness, or at least
hesitation, in submitting to the transformative and balsamic elixirs of love,
referred to metaphorically (after again underscoring the action of being opened,
and opening herself, in line 5) in the sensually repeated images of water (line 6)

13 Negroni characterizes Pizarnik’s as ‘una obra apoyada . . . en la libre circulación textual

y en el robo multidireccional, perpetrado sobre otros y sobre ella misma’ (pp. 17–18). She
discusses intertextual borrowing at length, particularly in relation to what she calls the ‘textos
de sombra’: La condesa sangrienta, a version of French Surrealist writer Valentine Penrose’s
La comtesse sanglante (pp. 84–86) and Los poseídos entre lilas, which, according to Negroni,
constitutes a re-writing – albeit with significant differences – of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist
End Game (pp. 81–83).
18 SUSANA CHÁVEZ SILVERMAN

and its property: ‘emana[r]’, in the poem’s beautiful – and borrowed – final
line.14
Reading this unpublished poem dedicated to Silvina Ocampo intratextually
with ‘Amantes’ (from Los trabajos y las noches [1965]) reveals much about the
connection, for Pizarnik, between silence (as ideal), gender, and sexuality. An
intratextual reading also opens the signifying possibilities in both texts to a sen-
sual, queer presence:

una flor
no lejos de la noche
mi cuerpo mudo
se abre
a la delicada urgencia del rocío. (Poesía, p. 159)

The titles of both poems, juxtaposed, form an interesting – and tense – counter-
point. The published poem bears the title ‘Amantes’, yet there is no lover, or
addressee, present in the text. On the other hand, the unpublished poem, although
it is dedicated to Silvina Ocampo, is ‘about’ and ‘to’ Ocampo’s poem. It speaks,
at least initially, to the Ocampo in her poem, although by the second line it
appears (also) to speak to Ocampo directly, and the sense of a coupl(ing) is read-
ily available (‘me abrís’; ‘Me abrís, me abro’; ‘me vuelvo de agua en tu poema
de agua’). ‘Amantes’ is stylistically in line with Pizarnik’s well-known voice
from this ‘middle’ phase (the period in which she wrote and published Árbol de
Diana (1962) and Los trabajos y las noches); it is markedly more fragmentary
and static than the unpublished poem. Whereas ‘Amantes’ uses all lower-case
letters, no punctuation and one verb in five lines, ‘A un poema’ follows a some-
what more traditional format in terms of capitalization and punctuation, and has
seven verbs in as many lines. What the unpublished text proffers in abundance
(the fluidity of mutual jouissance, figured in imagery traditionally gendered as
feminine – flower, water – the insistence on a communion-like silence and open-
ness), the ironically-titled ‘Amantes’ withholds.
Or does it dissimulate? The flower is present, but stripped of its perhaps overly
sentimental association with the spring. The flower’s link with the speaker’s body
is considerably weaker in ‘Amantes’ as well. Instead, here, it is spatially and syn-
tactically contiguous to ‘la noche’ (an image Pizarnik associates time and again
with the body and sexuality in her work, as in ‘la noche de los cuerpos’, Poesía,
p. 171), which functions as a sort of fulcrum between the flower and the speak-
er’s body. This construction suggests, but does not concretize, the congruency
between flower and body; it only hints, elliptically, at the realm of sexuality.

14 Pizarnik’s discomfort with conventional experiences (and representations) of love and

sexuality is everywhere in her private writings. Two examples; in her diary entry for 24 July
1962: ‘El deseo sexual es arduo y terrible, aun para quien lo escinde del amor’ (Diarios,
p. 233), and in a letter to María Elena Arias López, dated 25 May 1970: ‘Anoche se unieron
amor y sexo. Conjunción que disgusta a esta enamorada de Bataille’ (Correspondencia,
p. 113).
 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND SILENCE(S) 19

Silence – specifically, muteness – is attributed here to the speaker herself, to her

body. The quality of silence is what allows for her openness to sexual arousal;
just one impersonally constructed ‘se abre’, as against the reiterated and mutual
action of opening in the unpublished poem.
I must remark on the gorgeous starkness of the final line of ‘Amantes’, calling
attention to the attenuation of the oxymoron, with ‘delicadeza’ now in adjectival
form, modifying ‘urgencia’ (which as a noun, at the centre of the final line, is
emphasized), rather than functioning as a noun in the less compact unpublished
poem, where ‘delicadeza’ was modified by ‘terrible’ to describe the more abstract
‘primavera’. The stripped-down quality of ‘Amantes’, the tension between what the
title says and the content only hints at, conveys a more heightened erotic charge
than does the more wordy, literal (unpublished) poem. Or is it that I receive this
charge precisely in the exchange, the back and forth shuttle of intratextuality, in
being able to access the necessary supplementarity of ‘A un poema’, a supplemen-
tarity which was only a blind spot before the 2001 publication of Poesía completa?
The presence of an undercurrent of eroticism and love subtending these two
poems is supported by Pizarnik’s letters to Silvina Ocampo. According to Ivonne
Bordelois, in the relationship between the older Ocampo and Pizarnik, ‘el ero-
tismo y la infancia van jugando alternativamente sus espejos’ (Correspondencia,
p. 190). Bordelois also observes, in her introduction to these letters, that ‘de
todas las cartas de este epistolario, éstas son las únicas donde la amistad rápida-
mente asciende a pasión y se enciende en ella’ (Correspondencia, p. 190). The
clearest example of passionately erotic desire, tinged with abjection, is found in
a letter from Pizarnik to Ocampo, dated 31 January 1972 (scarcely eight months
before her death):

Quisiera que estuvieras desnuda, a mi lado, leyendo tus poemas en voz viva.
Sylvette mon amour . . . yo sé lo que es esta carta . . . Sylvette, no es una calen-
tura . . . haceme un lugarcito en vos, no te molestaré. Pero te quiero, no te
imaginás cómo me estremezco al recordar tus manos (que jamás volveré a tocar
si no te complace puesto que ya ves que lo sexual es un ‘tercero’ por añadidura.
Te beso como yo sé . . . o no te beso sino que te saludo, según tus gustos, como
quieras. Me someto. (Correspondencia, p. 211; original emphasis)

The irreconcilable tension between love and sexual desire – represented as a

yearning and yet ‘sometimiento’ in this letter – is a leitmotiv throughout Pizarnik’s
diaries and correspondence (see note 12). The two poems I have just read, along
with this letter, constitute a sort of intratextual stitching, an ‘arpillera’ of sorts (yet
with some threads missing or unravelled – the poem and letters unpublished dur-
ing Pizarnik’s lifetime), upon the wound of this unspannable chasm.15

15 I have spent considerable time reading and contrasting these three textual instances in
detail not because I am interested in ‘proving’ anything, in terms of the biographical subject
Alejandra Pizarnik’s queerness/bisexuality, but rather because, as Sylvia Molloy has pointed
out in another context: ‘I am interested in the way that desire sees itself, the detours to which
20 SUSANA CHÁVEZ SILVERMAN

To conclude this section (the examination of silence as plenitude or ideal in

Pizarnik, and its relation to gender and sexuality), I want to look, briefly, at sev-
eral diary entries related to this attitude toward silence. On 28 July 1962, Pizarnik
writes: ‘Sólo el sexo merece seriedad y consideración porque el sexo es silencio’
(Diarios, p. 241). The hieratic attitude toward silence and sex manifested here
(and which I have been exploring in several poems, published and unpublished)
can be seen in various other instances in the diaries, although it is even more
frequently undermined and denied, as we shall see later. From 18 November
1963, we read: ‘Su silencio. Ahora sé por qué estoy enamorada. Su silencio es la
presencia de las cosas en vez de su representación imaginaria’ (Diarios, p. 345).
Here, silence is linked expressly with love, rather than sex. In the entry for 12
March 1966, we read: ‘Sé que no hay necesidad de escribir. Quiero decir que
mucho más eficaz sería, para mí, hacer el amor día y noche. El silencio de los
cuerpos’ (Diarios, p. 396). Here, as in ‘Amantes’ and in the unpublished poem to
Silvina Ocampo, Pizarnik connects silence directly to the body and to sex.
Silence/lovemaking is, furthermore, hierarchized as superior to words (‘mucho
más eficaz’); in effect, eroticized silence should replace writing, thus substitut-
ing, erasing the poet’s work.
Pizarnik’s positive attitude toward silence (silence as textual ideal, or pleni-
tude) dovetails with the ideal of (extra)textual muteness found in the male
Symbolists, Modernists and (post)surrealists (such as Octavio Paz) she admired.
Unlike silence in the works of these male poets, however, Pizarnik’s is not repre-
sented as feminine per se; it is often associated, rather, with love, the body, or
sexual pleasure. I now turn to the other attitude toward silence in Pizarnik, what
Valesio calls silence as rupture. According to Alicia Ostriker, for poets, silence
or muteness is a ‘harsh figure for a sense of inadequate existence’.16 She goes on
to specify that for women poets especially, ‘the inability to speak signals . . . a
state of passivity, marginality, self-hate’ (Ostriker, p. 67). Clearly, the muteness/
silence to which Ostriker is alluding, here, corresponds to the second attitude
toward silence.
One of the strongest connections in this silentiary region is with Antonin
Artaud. In the diary entry for 25 December 1959, Pizarnik claims to understand
– and share – the alienation of the one-time (later exiled) Surrealist: ‘Si hay
alguien que puede . . . comprender a Artaud, soy yo. Todo su combate con su
silencio, con su abismo absoluto, con su vacío, con su cuerpo enajenado, ¿cómo
no asociarlo con el mío?’ (Diarios, p. 159). Here we detect her conviction that
Artaud constituted a kind of doppelgänger, in terms of their common experience
(agonistic) of silence – represented here (as Pizarnik often does in all her writing)

it resorts in order to name itself . . . the codes it uses in order to be recognized even as it masks
itself.’ Sylvia Molloy, ‘Disappearing Acts: Reading Lesbian in Teresa de la Parra’, in
¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, ed. Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian
Smith (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 230–56, p. 241.
16 Alicia Ostriker, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986), p. 66.
 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND SILENCE(S) 21

as a void, an emptiness – and of the (alienated) body. This desired/asserted dou-

bling with Artaud on the one hand positions Pizarnik as heiress to the post-Ro-
mantic tradition of the poètes maudits and Surrealists to which Artaud belonged.
And yet, on the other, this doubling paradoxically also installs a sense of fracture
in the continuity of this lineage, both because Artaud was an ‘expelled’ Surrealist
(connected with literal madness) and because Pizarnik herself undermines and
qualifies her connection with him, thus: ‘Pero hay una diferencia: Artaud luchaba
cuerpo a cuerpo con su silencio. Yo no: yo lo sobrellevo dócilmente, salvo algu-
nos accesos de cólera y de impotencia’ (Diarios, p. 159).17 So, although Artaud
was in a sense de-authorized, in terms of masculinist canonicity, by his expulsion
from the Surrealist movement, Pizarnik’s Artaud manifests a larger-than-life sense
of agency in his heroic struggle with silence. Her representation of herself, on the
other hand, in direct contrast to Artaud’s supposed valour, is abject, feminized:
she is ‘docile’ in the way she bears or puts up with silence, except for the occa-
sional temper tantrum or the oxymoronic ‘fit’ of impotence.
In the prose poem ‘Descripción’, from 1964, silence is more an active, men-
acing presence than a yawning void: ‘Caer hasta tocar el fondo último, desolado,
hecho de un viejo silenciar y de figuras que dicen y repiten algo que me alude’
(Prosa, p. 28).18 Silence, here, is an action, a verb, something that happens to the
speaker. It is equal to a liminal end-zone (‘fondo último’) which, paradoxically,
also contains silence’s logical opposite: ‘figures’ which speak and allude to the
‘yo’. This dualistic construction is typical of Pizarnik, in terms of the larger pos-
itive–negative or bipolar spectrum which characterizes her textualization of the
sign of silence itself; at each pole the sign (in this case, silence as rupture) often
subdivides into positively or negatively charged valencies. The third paragraph
of this prose poem reads:

Por eso hay en mis noches voces en mis huesos, y también – y es esto lo que
me hace dolerme – visiones de palabras escritas pero que se mueven, com-
baten, danzan, manan sangre, luego las miro andar con muletas, en harapos,
corte de los milagros de a hasta z, alfabeto de miserias, alfabeto de crueldades
. . . La que debió cantar se arquea de silencio, mientras en sus dedos se susurra,
en su corazón se murmura, en su piel un lamento no cesa. (Prosa, p. 28)

It is interesting to read ‘Descripción’ intertextually with Octavio Paz’s widely

anthologized early poem ‘Las palabras’. The word ‘silence’ never appears in
Paz’s poem, which is constituted, rather, by a torrent of words. ‘Las palabras’ is
a fifteen-line lava flow of fifteen second-person familiar commands to the

17 For a closer look at the Artaud-Pizarnik connection, and madness, see my ‘The Discourse
of Madness in the Poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik’, Monographic Review/Revista Monográfica,
6 (1990), 274–81.
18 The image of falling recurs regularly in Pizarnik, though not always with this negative
connotation. The first section of ‘El hombre del antifaz azul’, for example, is titled ‘la caída’
(Prosa, p. 45). Here, the fall is related to a sense of discovery and transformation.
22 SUSANA CHÁVEZ SILVERMAN

reader/poet: ‘Dales la vuelta,/ cógelas del rabo (chillen, putas)’.19 I shall refrain
from belabouring the exegesis of this over-the-top Modernist classic, except to
remark on its overdeterminedly (hetero)gendered qualities, which are inverted
and diffused in Pizarnik’s ‘Descripción’. In Paz’s poem, silence is a threatening
presence behind the exhausted words – the tools of the poet’s trade – which the
masculine poet–addressee (‘gallo galante’) is exhorted to reinvigorate (also
staving off silence in the process) by bending them to his creative will(power).
This is achieved through a series of violent, degrading, hypersexualized – and
admittedly at times comic – actions, such as: ‘azótalas’, ‘pínchalas’, ‘cápalas’
and so on.
In Pizarnik’s ‘Descripción’ there is also a torrent of words. But rather than
reading a stream of verbal commands, directed by a (god)father-like speaker to
an acolyte–poet or ‘oyente’, in this case we overhear ‘voices’ which inhabit the
speaker’s bones at night, like a haunting; we see ‘visions of written words’
(emphasis in original). Rather than being under the poet–speaker’s command
(which in Pizarnik is typically represented by static imagery), the words seem
almost to pre-exist her (‘hay’). They proliferate, at first violent and out of control
(‘se mueven, combaten, danzan, manan sangre’), then they become wounded,
abject (‘con muletas, en harapos’). It is as if the speaker were a mute witness to
these ‘palabras escritas’, which she watches, transfixed in apprehension before
this ‘alfabeto de crueldades’, and with a curious tenderness toward the ‘alfabeto
de miserias’.20 The subtlety of this speaker’s position – a feminized passivity and
powerlessness which yet vacillates between awe and empathy toward the words
– is completely lacking in Paz’s more straightforward, masculinist voice. Finally,
Pizarnik represents herself in this poem with one of her well-known, third-per-
son aphoristic epithets, ‘La que debió cantar’, which underscores both the poet’s
natural task (cantar) as well as her inability to perform it. The abject, impotent
self-characterization concludes: rather than singing, the speaker ‘retches’ with
silence. Unable to produce and control words, the speaker’s body is invaded,
possessed by sounds (whispers in her fingers, murmurs in the heart, ceaseless
laments on her skin).21

19Octavio Paz, La centena (Poemas: 1935–1968) (Barcelona: Barral, 1969), p. 11.

20Thanks to Pierre T. Rainville for pointing out the sense of the speaker as fearful and then
tender witness to the words.
21 For a discussion of Pizarnik’s images of muteness, related to feelings of choking and
asphyxia, see Fiona Mackintosh’s chapter in this volume. The sense of being taken over,
‘inhabited’, either by a menacing silence or by out of control voices/sounds, is well known to
readers of Pizarnik’s poetry. Often silence as rupture is represented, precisely, as a proliferation
of voices not created/controlled by the speaker. What I am especially interested is pointing out
here, though, is the inability to articulate – the muteness – related to feelings of choking,
asfixia, most likely directly connected to Pizarnik’s asthma. See, for example, the following:
‘Si llego a distender mi garganta . . . cambiará mi relación – ahora tan complicada – con el
lenguaje . . . la misma sensación de que una mano de hierro me oprime por esa zona’ (Diarios,
p. 346; 1 December 1963).
 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND SILENCE(S) 23

In the third poem of Árbol de Diana, Pizarnik comes close to inaugurating

this decisive collection – at the very centre of her published poetry – by defining
her self as silence: ‘sólo la sed/ el silencio/ ningún encuentro’ (Poesía, p. 105).22
These lapidary lines, the archetypal femininity of lack and muteness, particu-
larly inscribed in the self-characterizing epithets in lines 5 and 6 – ‘la silenciosa
en el desierto’ and ‘la viajera con el vaso vacío’ – have become overdetermined
as Pizarnik’s ‘true’ voice. This ‘personaje alejandrino’, strategically fashioned
and manipulated by the poet herself, completely overshadowed (in her published
poetry) during her lifetime the minotaur/humorous voice, which predominated
toward the end of her life but which was also present – if relegated – especially
in unpublished and private writings from early on.23
‘Formas’, from Los trabajos y las noches, provides a sort of transitional or
pivotal text:

no sé si pájaro o jaula
mano asesina
o joven muerta entre cirios
o amazona jadeando en la gran garganta oscura
o silenciosa
pero tal vez oral como una fuente
tal vez juglar
o princesa en la torre más alta (Poesía, p. 199)

The poem contains a curiously bisemic image of silence; it also presents an

emblematic set of images located at the positive and negative poles of the spec-
trum of gender and sexuality. The title itself is significant. The idea of ‘forms’
gestures toward identitarian provisionality and disguise or inauthenticity; these
ideas are culturally gendered as feminine and are abundantly represented in
Pizarnik’s writing.
Indecision, the inability (or refusal) to choose (often signified, as it is here,
by the conjunction ‘o’), is a Pizarnikian commonplace. Here, she destabilizes
the poem’s ostensibly self-defining intention by opening with ‘no sé si’. The
first-person singular of ‘saber’ is the only marker of an ‘I’. However, the sense
of a lyrical autobiography, or self-portrait, is unmistakable, particularly if we
read this poem intratextually (virtually every image present here is repeated

22 Pizarnik published three books of poetry before Árbol de Diana (although she repudiated
La tierra más ajena, the volume she self-published at age 19) and three after. Many critics
consider Árbol de Diana to be her finest work. According to César Aira, for example, by 1965,
the year after Pizarnik had returned from her four years in Paris, ‘Se vio transformada más o
menos en lo que es hoy, una figura casi legendaria, un centro, un modelo. Había publicado sus
dos mejores libros, Árbol de Diana y Los trabajos y las noches’. César Aira, ‘Las metamorfosis
de Alejandra Pizarnik’, ABC Cultural, 6 January 2001, pp. 7–8.
23 In Pizarnik’s final letter to Ivonne Bordelois, dated 5 July 1972, she says she is going to
send her some recent (unpublished) poems, ‘cuyo emblema es la negación de los rasgos
alejandrinos. En ellos, toda yo soy otra’ (Correspondencia, p. 306). See also my earlier
footnote 5.
24 SUSANA CHÁVEZ SILVERMAN

throughout Pizarnik’s poetry and private writing). The poem sets up two dis-
tinct (and opposing) semantic and structural fields, which mainly function hori-
zontally; the meanings alternate between positive and negative poles, each one
discretely contained in a single line. This pattern is only broken in the poem’s
first line, which constitutes a kind of double transgression of the text’s gram-
mar: first, in the inclusion of the first-person verb, and second, because this line
contains two images, which figure both the negative and positive poles.
Additionally, ‘pájaro’ and ‘jaula’ are more problematic than the images in the
rest of the poem; by this I mean their polysemy, taking Pizarnik’s oeuvre as a
whole, makes it somewhat difficult to determine at which end of the spectrum
they fall. (Significantly, my own indecision about this first line is reflected in
the speaker’s ‘no sé si’.) Birds, although they traditionally connote freedom, the
soul, generally symbolize the abject self for Pizarnik. The cage’s traditional
symbolic link with containment, on the other hand, is often qualified (or directly
inverted).24
There are four images at the positive end of the spectrum (leaving out bird
and cage): ‘mano asesina’, ‘amazona’, ‘oral’, and ‘juglar’, and three at the neg-
ative pole: ‘joven muerta’, ‘silenciosa’, and ‘princesa’. These gendered images
also overlap with the spectrum of silence: directly at the centre of the text (lines
4 and 5) are two images related to voice and muteness. ‘Silenciosa’ is somewhat
ambiguous, but can be read as signifying silence as rupture (as does the dead
girl among funereal tapers), since the image is juxtaposed with and contained
by affirming images of orality. Indeed, the dead girl, the princess and the silent
one belong to the group of hyperfeminine, self-representational epithets Pizarnik
fetishized in her authorized writing. On the other hand, the images I call posi-
tive by no means unequivocally connote a confident, or life-affirming subjectiv-
ity, although poignantly, three of the images seem to gesture toward this
possibility.
The murderous hand metonymizes the monstrous, excessive, violent self (the
minotaur voice) that mainly ‘emerges’ in unauthorized poems and prose, posthu-
mously published, or in La condesa sangrienta. However, an attentive reading
can find many glimpses of this voice, even in the published lyric poetry. The
Amazon is a positive image, life-affirming here in its insistence on her primal
orality, even as the line is surrounded, encapsulated by death on one side and
silence on the other. The classical Amazon’s link with female same-sex culture
and her ‘panting’, here, in an overdeterminedly feminine (indeed, vaginal, amni-
otic) ‘throat’, should, perhaps, not go unremarked. The last three lines reference
the medieval oral tradition in poetry (especially Spanish) with which Pizarnik
was intimately familiar. The orality of a fountain is positive (in a life-giving
sense), as is the image of the minstrel or troubadour (the only unambiguously
masculine image in the poem). Finally I cannot help but be reminded, by the
princess image in the last line, of Countess Báthory, immured in her tower at

24 For example, in the poem ‘El despertar’ (dedicated to her first psychiatrist, León Ostrov),
Pizarnik writes: ‘La jaula se ha vuelto pájaro/ y se ha volado’ (Poesía, p. 92).
 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND SILENCE(S) 25

Csejthe. However, whereas Erzsébet Báthory is perhaps the most familiar

embodiment, to Pizarnik’s readers, of monstrous (sexual) excess at the positive
end of her gendered and sexualized spectrum, I read the princess image, rather,
as unequivocally negative: hyperfeminized, enclosed in her fairytale lack of
agency as she is here, ‘en la torre más alta’.
I will now look at some of the signs, both abstract and concrete, that inhabit
the negative realm of the gender/sexuality spectrum. All the gendered and sexu-
alized signs I examine support – or indeed create – the notion of radical alterity
for Pizarnik’s textual self. As one might expect, the author herself was supremely
aware both of this feeling of alterity itself and of its constructed (textual) nature,
as we can see in this early entry from her diaries, dated 28 July 1955:

No hay qué decir, salvo que adelanté en mi diagnóstico. Ya aprendí cabalmente

que soy distinta de la mayoría de la gente . . . me pregunto si a todos los
neuróticos les ocurre lo mismo. De pronto me admiro de todo lo que hice. De
mis papeles. Algún día van a estar en el museo (de algún Instituto Psiquiátrico).
A su lado habrá un cartel: Poemas de una enferma de diecinueve años. (Diarios,
pp. 42–3)

This disarming combination of difference/pathos, self-aggrandizement and self-

deprecating humour will remain characteristic of Pizarnik’s voice, particularly in
her private writing, throughout her life.
In the diaries we receive, mainly, a more abstract sense of the negative alterity
which is mapped out in the poetry by the more widely studied concrete images.
It seems to me that Pizarnik’s contest – poetry versus prose – can be read with an
eye to gender, particularly in the light of Naomi Schor’s argument about the
overdetermined femininity (and negativity) of the detail.25 A subtle rhetorics of
gender and genre can be observed as early as 1959, in this diary entry of 28
December:

El peligro de mi poesía es una tendencia a la disecación de las palabras: las fijo

en el poema como con tornillos . . . y ello se debe, en parte, a mi temor de caer
en un llanto trágico . . . además, mi desconfianza en mi capacidad de levantar una
arquitectura poética. De allí la brevedad de mis poemas. (Diarios, p. 159)

There is no direct reference to prose yet. However, Pizarnik’s seemingly pre-

scient ability to ‘head off at the pass’ later detractors, who would disparage the
fixity and limited repertoire of her imagery, is truly remarkable. She acknowl-
edges this frozen (‘dehydrated’) quality in her poems, linking it to her already-
established spatial method of composition. She explains that this style serves, on
the one hand, to check a ‘fall’ into an excess of sentiment(ality) and on the other,
paradoxically, constitutes a compensatory response to a perceived lack: her

25 Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York and London:
Methuen, 1987).
26 SUSANA CHÁVEZ SILVERMAN

insecurity about being able to undertake the grand(iose) aesthetic gesture. The
binary gender dynamic, wherein the small and modest (feminine) mode is culti-
vated against the large and confident (masculine) mode is clearly visible here, as
is, however, her ambivalence about conforming neatly to gender stereotypes
about literary production.
Several other diary entries consistently and obsessively juxtapose prose and
poetry in hierarchical terms which are gendered and hauntingly poignant. On 28
September 1962, in Paris, Pizarnik writes: ‘Escribir un solo libro en prosa en vez
de poemas o fragmentos. Un libro o una morada en donde guarecerme’ (Diarios,
p. 275 original italics). Here, she clearly prioritizes – as both aesthetic and onto-
logical project – the singular, phallic object as against the small, dispersed poems
she was producing. Because she establishes the impossible text (a work of prose)
as a home or dwelling, within which she could take shelter, it follows logically
that she feels homeless, exiled in her own genre, poetry.
On 1 May 1966, while working on an essay about Octavio Paz’s Cuadrivio,
Pizarnik contemplates prose, poetry, and her place in the canon:

Deseo hondo, inenarrable (!) de escribir en prosa un pequeño libro. Hablo de

una prosa sumamente bella, de un libro muy bien escrito . . . es extraño: en
español no existe nadie que me pueda servir de modelo. El mismo Octavio es
demasiado inflexible, demasiado acerado, o, simplemente, demasiado viril . . .
yo no deseo escribir un libro argentino sino un pequeño librito parecido a
Aurélia, de Nerval. (Diarios, p. 412)

In this complicated rhetorical stratagem, Pizarnik again privileges the impossible

(‘deseo’; ‘inenarrable’) prose work. She qualifies it, in the second sentence, in a
naïve, almost schoolgirlish tone, only to reverse herself and for all practical pur-
poses declare herself beyond models, at least in Spanish. At the same time as she
explains why several canonical Latin American male Modernist and Boom authors
are unsuitable models (her dismissal of Paz – with a gendered critique of his
‘virility’ – is followed by an admiring yet ultimately dismissive consideration of
Cortázar, Borges and Rulfo), she insinuates herself into precisely this canon. And
yet, ostensibly in order not to appear presumptuous, perhaps, with a cunning,
double-edged topos modestiae she pledges her (non-Argentine) allegiance to
Nerval, in her desire to write (but) a small, ‘simple’ prose book, like his Aurélia.
In addition to the abstractly negative configuration of alterity which predomi-
nates, the diaries include instances of concrete images which signify in this neg-
ative realm. For example, on 15 December 1960, in Paris, Pizarnik describes a
rather Breton-like (though same-sex) crush on a woman identified only as M.
The ‘azar objetivo’ is not on her side, unfortunately, and she begins to speculate
paranoiacally: ‘tal vez ella sí me vio y qué creerá ahora de este pequeño mon-
struo que la persigue; creerá que soy una lesbiana infecta’. This thought leads
her to ‘Odio. Odio. Yo odio y quisiera que todos muriesen, salvo la vieja repug-
nante mendiga de ayer que dormía en el metro abrazada a una gran muñeca. (Así
voy a terminar yo pero será la muñeca la que dormirá conmigo en sus brazos)’
 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND SILENCE(S) 27

(Diarios, p. 176). Her ‘hatred’ and desire for everyone to ‘die’ except for the old
beggarwoman can be understood in terms of her abject identification with the
mendiga – subconsciously attenuating, perhaps, her anxiety about being per-
ceived as a lesbian – immediately after the (imagined) romantic rejection or
impossibility with M.26 Pizarnik’s parenthetical projection into the infantilized
same-sex dyad – her self embraced by the lifesized doll – (another textual strat-
egy with which to negotiate her fear of/attraction toward lesbianism) overlaps
intratextually with a number of poems, and leads us directly into the consider-
ation of other concrete examples of negative gendered or sexualized alterity in
the poetry.
Approximately three years after the diary entry cited above, in an unpublished
prose text written in Spain and titled ‘El Escorial’ (which editor Ana Becciú
dates in 1963), the same binary image (‘mendiga–muñeca’) appears. Despite
feeling herself (uncharacteristically) attractive to the heterosexual male gaze –
‘adorada por cuanto ojo macho ha dado Hispania fecunda’ – Pizarnik writes: ‘No
obstante debajo o detrás o del otro lado se es mendiga, se duerme debajo de un
puente totalmente ebria y abrazada a una muñeca’ (Prosa, p. 18). Pizarnik’s text
overlaps, in a fairly precise intertextual coincidence, with Cortázar’s story
‘Lejana’, from Bestiario (1951). In this story, protagonist Alina Reyes, a bored,
young bourgeoise fiancée in Buenos Aires, begins to dream and is eventually
taken over by an abused beggarwoman in Budapest. The story narrates a radical
sense of estrangement, evident even in the title itself. When Alina Reyes first
begins to feel herself overlapping from within with the ‘lejana,’ she repeats the
word ‘hate,’ linking it first with the image of the distant beggarwoman, and later,
with a bridge in Budapest upon which she will fuse and then transmigrate per-
manently into the mendiga.27 It is possible Pizarnik picked up on the radical
alienation figured in ‘Lejana’; in any case, she used the image of the ‘mendiga’
(or the dyad, ‘mendiga–muñeca’) repeatedly, to represent her own alterity, par-
ticularly – though not exclusively – in moments of being drawn to and then dis-
avowing the mirror-like doubling implicit in a lesbian attraction. Let us keep in
mind her linking the idea of ‘odio’ to the image of the ‘mendiga’ in the diaries,
cited above (Diarios, p. 176), as well as the ‘mendiga’–‘puente’ connection in
‘El Escorial’ (Prosa, p. 18).28
Besides the ‘mendiga’ and the ‘muñeca’, other concrete, gendered images of
negative alterity appear throughout Pizarnik’s poetry. In the earlier works these
signs are often hyperfeminized or miniaturized, whereas a more complex, trans-
formative ars combinatoria begins to take place in the later poetry (in the last

26 This anxious disavowal of lesbianism appears repeatedly throughout the diaries. See,
for example, Diarios, pp. 154, 425, 494.
27 Julio Cortázar, La autopista del sur y otros cuentos (New York: Penguin Books, 1996),
pp. 8, 14–15.
28 I cannot be sure if Pizarnik had read ‘Lejana’ by the time of the diary entry I am dealing
with (1960), or even by the time she wrote ‘El Escorial’ (1963). But given her friendship with
Cortázar, and her reviews of his work, it is highly likely that she had.
28 SUSANA CHÁVEZ SILVERMAN

two books, Extracción de la piedra de locura and El infierno musical), where the
negative signs are put into play with signs from the positive end of the spectrum.
In poem 17 from Árbol de Diana (Poesía, p. 119), the speaker identifies herself
with two of the epithets most familiar to Pizarnik’s readers. She describes herself
first with the adjective ‘sonámbula’, and then with the third-person phrase ‘la
hermosa autómata’. The images are hyperfeminine and the poem itself is
emblematically brief (a fragmentation that, as we have seen in the diaries,
Pizarnik associates with an inferior, implicitly feminized form of writing). Yet
there is an intriguing tension between a sense of stasis (in the feminine images
themselves) and movement (in the poem’s form and in the actions performed by
the personae). Although still short, the poem is in fact one of the longest in Árbol
de Diana; like poems 29 and 31, it is closer to prose than to the more lapidary,
lyric texts that characterize the rest of the volume. If there is some sense, as I
mentioned, of movement and agency in the poem, particularly in the actions of
the ‘autómata’ (‘se canta, se encanta, se cuenta casos y cosas’), this possibility is
immediately put into check by the ‘nido de hilos rígidos’ that hamper the speaker
in her first-person incarnation.
In ‘Reloj’, also from Los trabajos y las noches (Poesía, p. 183), two more
feminine epithets appear: ‘dama pequeñísima’ and ‘moradora en el corazón de un
pájaro’. As we shall see later, the ‘dama’ appears at the positive end of the spec-
trum as well; here, however, she is actualized in miniature form, both in terms of
her qualification by the superlative degree of the adjective and because she
‘dwells’ – note the archaic, fairytale quality of the verb – within the heart of a
bird (a symbol which, as we have seen, frequently serves as a negativized stand-in
for the abject self). It is interesting that the final, monosyllabic line of this tiny
poem is ‘NO’ (Poesía, p. 183). This might give the impression of movement or
agency. However, that this would be a misconception is suggested in the diaries.
We read about the allure and the sense of self-defeating agony implicit, for
Pizarnik, in refusal, in ‘saying no’. In the entry for 11 August 1962, she writes:
‘20 h. Le dije a P. que no. Separada . . . Te separas del amor por ganas del no
amor . . . Soñaste siempre con prescindir del amor, con separarte, no brutalmente
sino diciendo “no, gracias”. Ya lo dijiste. ¿Estás contenta?’ (Diarios, p. 260).
Moving now into gendered/sexualized images of alterity at the positive end
of the spectrum, toward the end of a lengthy diary entry from 12 March 1965,
Pizarnik describes her attraction to the figure of the medieval Hungarian
Countess Erzsébet Báthory, about whom she was working, at the time, on the
‘essay’ La condesa sangrienta, which would be published later that year in
Mexico:

Ensayo sobre la condesa Báthory. Diferencias entre las orgías de CB y el placer

. . . el primero. Ante todo: su infinita, inenarrable tristeza (voir melancolía) . . .
La soledad./ La pura bestialidad. Se puede ser una bella condesa y a la vez una
loba insaciable . . . En lo que respecta a mi imaginación, su única característica
. . . es su desenfreno . . . Todo esto se reduce al problema de la sole-
dad. (Diarios, p. 397)
 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND SILENCE(S) 29

What is striking in this passage is Pizarnik’s intensely empathetic reading of the

Bloody Countess. This empathy shows up most clearly in La condesa sangri-
enta’s vignette entitled ‘El espejo de la melancolía’. In this diary entry (as in ‘El
espejo de la melancolía’), the structure of Pizarnik’s identification is dualistic:
first, with the Countess’s purported melancholy – and above all solitude – and
second, with her ‘pure bestiality’. The positive charge of the identification is
centred on the notion of bestial and excessive hunger, attributed both to the
countess – who is described with one of Pizarnik’s favorite epithets at this end
of the spectrum, ‘loba’ (this time qualified as insatiable) – and to the author’s
imagination, whose wildness/wantonness is described as ‘its only
characteristic’.29
Although I am not dealing with the prose minotaur texts, which are, along
with La condesa sangrienta, the most emblematic of the positive charge, I want
to point out Pizarnik’s awareness of the absolute alterity, the definitive fracture,
wrought within her self, and between her and the outside world, by these texts.
On 24 May 1966 she writes: ‘Mis contenidos imaginarios son tan fragmentarios,
tan divorciados de lo real, que temo, en suma, dar a luz nada más que monstruos.
Yo “civilizo” mis poemas al detenerlos y congelarlos’ (Diarios, p. 416). Here,
approximately a year after she published La condesa sangrienta, the image of
motherhood gone wrong – of giving birth to monsters – projects Pizarnik for-
ward (not without anxiety: ‘temo’) toward the kind of writing – the minotaur
texts – she will be fatally drawn to at the end of her life. She relates the possibil-
ity of these monster offspring to the ‘divorce’ between her imagination and ‘lo
real’; the palliative, compensatory action is to keep writing and publishing the
controlled, short, ‘frozen’ lyric poems, redolent of the negative charge, in order
to soothe (‘civilize’) the savage beast.
On 2 June 1970 Pizarnik writes:

Advertí que el texto de humor me hace mal, me descentra, me dispersa, me

arrebata fuera de mí – a diferencia, par ex., de los instantes frente al pizarrón
[where she composed many of her poems], en que me reúno (o al menos me
parece).
Sin embargo, ninguno de los poemas por rescribir me enfervoriza. El texto
de humor, por el contrario, es la tentación perpetua. (Diarios, p. 495)

Here, already deeply involved in writing the texts which would comprise La
bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la polígrafa, Pizarnik acknowledges the dam-
age this writing does to her. It is interesting that the damage comes from outside;
it is being done to her. The injury is described in terms of the humorous text tak-
ing the subject outside of herself (‘me arrebata fuera de mí’) – a state which, in

29 Pizarnik’s letter to Juan Liscano, dated 7 September 1965, suggests that her identification
with the Bloody Countess was aesthetic, romantic, rather than due to any shared affinities for
literal evil (Correspondencia, p. 173). I think Báthory’s homoerotic transgressiveness was
also irresistible to Pizarnik.
30 SUSANA CHÁVEZ SILVERMAN

the non-literal sense, Pizarnik prized – as had the Surrealists before her. In con-
trast to this state of alterity are the moments before the chalkboard, where she
feels wholeness (self-gathering). However, although she recognizes the self-af-
firming potential of these moments, they are not compelling to her. It is, more
and more insistently, the (self-)destructive minotaur texts that beckon.
The poem ‘Violario’ (Prosa, p. 33) dates from 1965, but was published just over
a year before Pizarnik’s death, in Revista de Occidente, in Madrid. In this prose
poem, the ‘I’ actively solicits the reader’s complicitous, homophobic gaze (upon
an aging, predatory lesbian) through a series of disavowing moves, using the
devices of humour and terror. The speaker is probably a young adult, but describes
herself as having ‘[una] estampa adolescente’ (which is the way Pizarnik preferred
to see/present herself). The poem, which has the narrative qualities of a vignette,
combines death, sex and aestheticism, as did La condesa sangrienta (published the
same year ‘Violario’ was written). It uses, however, a wicked humour, both to
undermine the seriousness of death and to make fun of lesbianism. It opens in
medias res, with the speaker speculating that her ‘parecido mental’ with Little Red
Riding Hood is what attracts predatory, aging lesbian she-wolves (‘de cara de
lobo’) to her. She singles out one in particular, who she remembers tried to ‘rape’
her at a wake. The rest of the poem consists in the speaker’s cruel mockery of the
‘vetusta femme de lettres’, exploiting the disjunction between what appears to be
an innocent, shared embrace between two mourners and the truth of the situation,
which is never realistically described. The reader must instead surmise what is
going on by correctly interpreting the speaker’s disavowing reactions, which
become more unambiguously homophobic as the text proceeds.
First, we see her disconcerted reaction to the older woman’s embrace, ‘[yo]
temblaba de risa y de terror’; next the laughter disappears and the speaker’s fear
remains, as they both tremble in the prolonged embrace ‘por distintos estremec-
imientos’ (again, the representation of the woman’s lesbian desire is suppressed;
we must infer it by contrast to the speaker’s growing horror). The inappropriate-
ness of the woman’s advances – of her desire – is highlighted as we see that she
attempts to secure the speaker’s cooperation: ‘seguí mirando las flores, seguí
mirando las flores’ [original emphasis] the woman orders the speaker, who reacts
in precisely the opposite manner to what the woman had hoped. The penultimate
paragraph is an outburst of over-the-top, anti-lesbian outrage. Rather than hold-
ing still, gazing at the flowers (providing a funeral-appropriate cover for the
woman’s amorous advances) and allowing the woman to constitute her as object
of desire, the speaker declares herself ‘scandalized’ by the woman’s ‘ardor a lo
Renée Vivien, con ese brío a lo Nathalie Clifford Barney, con esa sáfica unción al
decir flores’ (Prosa, p. 33). The specific cause of the speaker’s scandalized reac-
tion – the woman’s lesbian desire – withheld or coded earlier in the poem, is
clearly revealed toward the end. It is worth underscoring the disavowal of lesbian
sexuality enacted in two important ‘lesbian’ texts published during Pizarnik’s
lifetime, ‘Violario’ and La condesa sangrienta. The mechanisms of the disavowal
are very different: La condesa sangrienta makes visible the perverse countess’s
sadistic excesses, whereas ‘Violario’ reduces lesbian desire to a pathetic joke.
 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND SILENCE(S) 31

Both these texts, however – which script the lesbian as monster – are markedly
different from the poem dedicated to Silvina Ocampo, for example, which –
importantly – was not published while Pizarnik was alive.30
Two more texts, one early and one late, confirm Pizarnik’s use of concrete
signs of gendered alterity at the positive end of the spectrum. ‘La única herida’
from Las aventuras perdidas (1958) opens with a question: ‘¿Qué bestia caída
de pasmo/ se arrastra por mi sangre . . .?’ (Poesía, p. 78). The image of the wound
recurs throughout Pizarnik’s writing, published and private; it is perhaps the
emblematic image. Its link with a sense of alterity (madness, victimhood/vulner-
ability, ‘extranjería’, Jewishness, exile, and so on) is well known. Here the wound
is associated with the presence of a vampiric ‘beast’ inside her bloodstream: hav-
ing this beast inside her is the cause of her extreme, narcissistic alterity, which
makes it ‘difficult’ for her to live in daily reality: ‘He aquí lo difícil:/ caminar por
las calles/ y señalar el cielo o la tierra.’
I have always read the beast as masculine in Pizarnik, unless she explicitly
genders it as feminine (such as ‘loba’, ‘dama de rojo’). I also connect it to the
minotaur, an important variation of the monstrous in Pizarnik, as in ‘El espejo de
la melancolía’ from La condesa sangrienta. That Pizarnik identified with the
minotaur–monster (overdeterminedly gendered male), as an emblem of her
extreme alterity, is made apparent in this entry from her diary, on 5 July 1955:
‘me siento un producto de la cruza entre el Minotauro y una Amargada Marciana’
(Diarios, p. 31). It is interesting that both these ‘parents’ are inhuman. It is worth
noting, as well, that they are appropriately, heteronormatively gendered.
‘Extracción de la piedra de locura’, written in 1964 and published in the epon-
ymous volume, in 1968, is an important prose poem. I wish to highlight certain
fragments of it for the uncompromising ars combinatoria she effects between and
among signs at both ends of the spectrum of gendered and sexualized alterity. The
speaker introduces herself as a voice. First, she appears ‘undead’, speaking from
the tomb; then, another voice ‘speaks’ her. This voice is related to the ‘bestia’ we
just saw, from the early poem ‘La única herida’, and to the multiple iterations of
alterity-by-desdoblamiento throughout her work: ‘Hablo como en mí se habla.
No mi voz obstinada en parecer una voz humana sino la otra que atestigua que no
he cesado de morar en el bosque’ (Poesía, p. 247). The tone is rational, dispas-
sionate, but the content belies this appearance: it reveals the simulative quality of
her human voice as against the genuineness or discursive ‘truth’ of this (other)
voice, which testifies that the speaker is still a forest-dwelling, wild creature.

30 Linda Williams’ formulation about the monster in classic horror (although she is
discussing film rather than literature) may be apropos here. According to Williams, ‘When the
monster is constructed as feminine, the horror film thus expresses female desire only to show
how monstrous it is’. Cited in Carol J. Clover, ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher
Film’, in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1996), pp. 66–113, p. 92, my emphasis. Taking this a step further:
I would ask what happens to the degree of ‘monstrosity’ made visible when the textual monster
is not only female but a lesbian, created by an author who is also a woman and a (conflicted)
bisexual?
32 SUSANA CHÁVEZ SILVERMAN

Continuing with the inside–outside duality which Pizarnik used extensively,

throughout her work, she declares herself ‘possessed’ by a fatal premonition of
a black, asphyxiating wind. In this silencing space, the speaker searches for a
way out, first in her memories. When they fail to provide her with an ‘escudo, o
. . . arma de defensa, o aun de ataque’, she acknowledges her abjection, her
victimhood – ‘¿A qué hora empezó la desgracia?’ (Poesía, p. 248) – and then in
what seems, at first, a paradoxical move, asks for silence. However, whereas the
first silence, metaphorically represented in the ‘viento negro que impide respi-
rar’, corresponds to silence as rupture, the second is located at the positive
valency (Valesio’s silence as plenitude); it is equated with ‘la pequeña choza
que encuentran en el bosque los niños perdidos’ (Poesía, p. 248). Here, we
observe how the positive and negative signs begin to work together. The cot-
tage, forest and children reference the miniaturizing, infantilizing fairytale
quality we have seen at the negative end of the spectrum. The image of the cot-
tage, in particular, also serves as a visual and metaphoric space of (comforting)
containment for a speaking subject who represents herself, increasingly, as frac-
tured. Directly after the sentence cited above, we read: ‘Y qué sé yo qué ha de
ser de mí si nada rima con nada’ (Poesía, p. 248). This poignant, colloquially-
inflected phrase – nothing more quintessentially Argentine than the expression
‘qué sé yo’, in spite of herself – links the desired silence/cottage to the neces-
sary (and impossible) bond between the self and the text, even as it inscribes the
text’s unravelling. It is clear that she is referring, nostalgically, to her (lyric)
poetry, about which she stated many times that it was what held her together,
‘contained’ her.
The next section comprises a luxuriantly aestheticized, eroticized contempla-
tion of a framed scene of beauty and pleasure; it appears to be a painting depict-
ing a cherubic, Florentine youth, who ‘invites’ the speaker into the picture. In
distress, she declares herself ‘fuera del marco pero el modo de ofrendarse es el
mismo’ (Poesía, p. 249). ‘Outside the frame’, she is scattered, fragmented, and
as abject and self-abnegating as a religious offering (an image which occurs
repeatedly in Pizarnik’s work). This section is followed by an enumeration of
scattered images which possess and inhabit the self, but they infantilize and ter-
rify, rather than containing or articulating her: ‘capitanes y ataúdes de colores
deliciosos y ahora tengo miedo a causa de todas las cosas que guardo . . . cuantas
cosas en movimiento, cuantas pequeñas figuras azules y doradas gesticulan y
danzan (pero decir no dicen)’ (Poesía, p. 250). Immediately after this list, which
has begun the work of referencing the compendium of ‘typical’ Pizarnikian
images at the negative end of the spectrum (childhood colours and storybook
imagery, which uncannily produce apprehension rather than delight), comes one
of the most eerie and beautiful fragments in Pizarnik’s work:

Sonríe y yo soy una minúscula marioneta rosa con un paraguas celeste yo entro
por su sonrisa yo hago mi casita en su lengua yo habito en la palma de su mano
cierra sus dedos un polvo dorado un poco de sangre adiós oh adiós. (Poesía,
p. 250)
 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND SILENCE(S) 33

The rhythm of this prose fragment is vastly different from that of earlier texts in
which some of these discrete images (or similar ones) appeared, signifying the
hyperfeminization, powerlessness, and infantilization of the speaker. Here, these
meanings are available, but they are mediated by the sensual, almost libidinal,
punctuationless flow of the words, markedly different from the lapidary forms
and the feeling of fixity common to the earlier poetry in which they appear. And
yet, the imagery does overdetermine a childish and feminized lack of agency as
the miniaturized speaker (a tiny pink puppet with a sky-blue parasol) seems to
float, or flow (much like the shrunken Alice in Wonderland) into the very body
of the Florentine ephebe (from the paragraphs just above this one), through his
mouth, trying to found her ‘morada’ first on his tongue – tantalizing site of the
signifying language which eludes her – and then in the palm of his hand, where
giant-like, he crushes her as if she were but a beautiful golden butterfly.
In the rest of the poem (another three pages of dense, rhythmic prose), con-
crete images of miniaturization, infantilization and abjection (‘princesita ciega’,
‘joven muerta’, ‘dibujo borrado’, ‘pequeña mendiga’) alternate with images of
wildness (‘mujer-loba’, ‘guarida’) framed by a discourse whose structure and
abstract imagery undermine the fixity of the negative images by embodying and
enacting the positive charge, by resembling almost a subconscious flow, a move-
ment beyond the binary and toward the edge of jouissance: ‘¿qué quieres?’
(Poesía, p. 251) the speaker asks herself. And the very language itself incarnates
the response, ‘Un transcurrir de fiesta delirante, un lenguaje sin límites, un nau-
fragio en tus propias aguas, oh avara,’ even as, one sentence later, she denies it:
‘Figuras de cera los otros y sobre todo yo’ (Poesía, p. 251).
Toward the end of the poem, Pizarnik’s language approaches the unbridled,
more directly sexual discourse of the diaries and the minotaur texts: ‘El sexo a
flor de corazón, la vía del éxtasis entre las piernas’ (Poesía, p. 253). But I say
‘approaches’ deliberately, because in ‘Extracción de la piedra de locura’ this
sexual, embodied language is not unmoored, let loose upon itself as it is in the
minotaur texts, but rather brought back around, held in check by negative imag-
ery (of closure, containment, refusal) which frames it. Directly before the quote
above, she writes: ‘el haberme acallado en honor de los demás’. And directly
after: ‘Puertas del corazón, perro apaleado, veo un templo, tiemblo, ¿qué pasa?
No pasa.’ This is what she envisioned in her writing: ‘Yo presentía una escritura
total. El animal palpitaba en mis brazos con rumores de órganos vivos, calor,
corazón, respiración, todo musical y silencioso al mismo tiempo.’ This, instead,
is what constantly eroded that vision, that writing: ‘¿Qué significa traducirse en
palabras?’ (Poesía, p. 253).
The diary entry for 5 January 1964 captures precisely the two poles I have
been addressing throughout this essay, and lays bare the stakes of this vital
(fatal?) ‘contienda’ between the authorized voice and the ‘textos de sombra’:

Esteticismo que finalizará en el silencio. Salvo que acepte los poemas veloces,
internos, venidos de lejos sin tratar de detenerlos, sin matarlos, sin cosificarlos
. . . No tener para quien escribir desemboca en dos formas poéticas: la del
34 SUSANA CHÁVEZ SILVERMAN

exorcismo, inteligible o no, y la detenida, asfixiante, esteticista que consiste en

un pequeño poema mil veces corregido . . . Mi forma auténtica es el automa-
tismo afectivo. Sólo me podrá ayudar lo que escriba rápidamente puesto que
mi conflicto es la inmovilidad, el muro. Y no se abate un muro construyendo
a su lado otro muro. Quiero abrirme. (Diarios, p. 355)

Writing the struggle between containment (the lyric poetry, the authorized voice)
and dispersal (the private, unpublished writing, the minotaur voice) constitutes,
for this reader, Pizarnik’s greatest ‘angustia’ and her greatest ‘apertura’.

Bibliography
Aira, César, ‘Las metamorfosis de Alejandra Pizarnik’, ABC Cultural, 6 January
2001, pp. 7–8
Allatson, Paul, ‘ “My Bones Shine in the Dark”: AIDS and the De-scription of
Chicano Queer in the Work of Gil Cuadros’, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies,
32: 1 (2007), 23–52
Chávez Silverman, Susana, ‘The Autobiographical as Horror in the Poetry of
Alejandra Pizarnik’, in Critical Studies on the Feminist Subject, ed. Giovanna
Covi (Italy: Università di Trento, 1997), pp. 265–77
——, ‘The Look that Kills: The “Unacceptable Beauty” of Alejandra Pizarnik’s La
condesa sangrienta’, in ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, ed.
Emilie Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith (Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 1995), pp. 281–305
——, ‘The Poetry of Octavio Paz and Alejandra Pizarnik: A Dialogue with Silence’,
in Jewish Culture and the Hispanic World: Essays in Memory of Joseph H.
Silverman, ed. Samuel G. Armistead and Mishael M Caspi (Newark, DE: Juan de
la Cuesta, 2001), pp. 129–44
——, ‘Signos de lo femenino en la poesía de Alejandra Pizarnik’, in El puente de las
palabras: homenaje a David Lagmanovich, ed. Inés Azar (Washington, DC:
Organization of American States, 1994), pp. 155–72
Clover, Carol J., ‘Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film’, in The Dread of
Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1996), pp. 66–113
Cortázar, Julio, La autopista del sur y otros cuentos (New York: Penguin Books,
1996)
Jagose, Annamarie, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual
Sequence (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2002)
Johnson, Barbara, The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and
Gender (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)
Molloy, Sylvia, ‘Disappearing Acts: Reading Lesbian in Teresa de la Parra’, in
¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, ed. Emilie L. Bergmann and
Paul Julian Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 230–56
Montefiore, Jan, Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s
Writing (London and New York: Pandora, 1987)
Negroni, Maria, El testigo lúcido: la obra de sombra de Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario:
Beatriz Viterbo, 2003)
 GENDER, SEXUALITY AND SILENCE(S) 35

Ostriker, Alicia, Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in

America (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986)
Paz, Octavio, La centena (Poemas: 1935–1968) (Barcelona: Barral, 1969)
Rohy, Valerie, Impossible Women: Lesbian Figures and American Literature (Ithaca,
NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2000)
Schor, Naomi, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York and
London: Methuen, 1987)
Valesio, Paolo, ‘A Remark on Silence and Listening’, Rivista di Estetica, 19–20
(1985), 17–44
 Different Aspects of Humour and Wordplay in the
Work of Alejandra Pizarnik

Evelyn Fishburn

Dark, sombre, black; angry, aggressive, corrosive; transgressive, iconoclastic;

puerile, experimental, incomprehensible; surrealist, absurd; and above all, joyless.
These are some of the words that come to mind most immediately when thinking
about the difficult and painful topic of humour and Alejandra Pizarnik. There is
not much, if any, in her poetry, which has meant that until recently humour was a
neglected aspect of her writings, but the publication of her prose work, including
her correspondence and diaries, has brought to our attention the significant role
that humour played in her life and work. Pizarnik’s most important writings on
humour can be found in much of her correspondence as well as in Prosa completa
(2002), where there is a whole section gathered under the rubric ‘Humor’ fol-
lowed by the complete version of her only play, Los perturbados entre lilas.
The late texts, published posthumously, were often ignored or all but dis-
missed as embarrassing by readers who considered them either puerile, private
jokes or lashings of despair by a mind on the border of derangement. However,
recent criticism has begun to consider them, emphasizing the seriousness of the
dark humour that pervades them. In the words of Cristina Piña: ‘Sólo que no es
el lenguaje de la locura sino el de un arte que ha llegado hasta el fondo de su
impulso transgresor, imitando peligrosísimamente el habla descarrilada del
delirio.’1 Significantly, Sylvia Molloy – a close friend of Pizarnik – spoke in a
recent interview against a ‘purified’ hagiographic version of Pizarnik that elimi-
nates ‘la parte cómica, soez, pornográfica, como si eso fuera inferior’.2 My con-
tention is that these are important writings whose cruel anger and obscenity
complements the tormented wonderment of her poetry.
In this chapter I offer an introductory discussion of the place of humour in
Pizarnik’s non-fictional writings before proceeding to examine its explosive
presence in her tortuous and splintered late prose works, which is where most of
the humour is found. In the second part of the chapter I examine Pizarnik’s rela-

1 Cristina Piña, Alejandra Pizarnik: una biografía (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991; 2nd edn,
Corregidor, 1999), p. 192.
2 ‘Memoria de una juventud en Olivos’, in Suplemento Clarín, 26 July 2003. Accessed at
http://www.clarin.com/suplementos/cultura/2003/07/26/index.html
 DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF HUMOUR AND WORDPLAY 37

tionship to Jewishness and look at the presence (or absence) of a Jewish dimen-
sion to Pizarnik’s humour.3

Essays, Diaries, Correspondence

Pizarnik is generally remembered as the poet of hauntingly beautiful verse who
committed suicide at the age of thirty-six, and although there may be a question
mark over the taking of the fatal overdose, there is no debate about the death
wish which beset her throughout her life. It is in the light, or shadow, of such a
longing that her humour should be approached, as an insidiously corrosive and
(self-)destructive element as well as an avenue of escape from the reality from
which she felt alienated. Her humour, as already mentioned, is not joyous: echo-
ing Vallejo, she wrote: ‘todo está alegre menos mi alegría’ (Correspondencia,
p. 166). It seldom produces laughter, and when it does it is a cold, uncomfortable
laughter, often an embarrassed frisson. It is purposely difficult, its impenetrabil-
ity being not only part of its own aggression but arguably the cause of aggressive
feelings in the reader, who feels partly implicated in what is being attacked, and
partly mocked, and therefore angered by the impossibility of finding a convinc-
ing or coherent sense in what is being said. The text’s resistance to any interpre-
tation as to its meaning is part of its ‘convulsiveness’ (to invoke Breton’s
formula),4 and it may be thought foolish, not to say ridiculous, to adopt an ana-
lytical approach to writings that implicitly and explicitly flaunt their rebellion
against order and comprehension: ‘Por tanto les digo, lectores hinchas, que si me
siguen leyendo tan atentamente dejo de escribir’ (Prosa, p. 133).
But Pizarnik herself read ‘attentively’, as is only too evident from her excel-
lent critical essays (see chapters by Wilson and Goldberg in this volume). Her
discussions on humour in others (Cortázar, ‘Bustos Domecq’ [Borges and Bioy
Casares], Silvina Ocampo, Michaux) focus on aspects of her writings that run
parallel with her own search for an alternative way of perceiving reality. They
are illuminating as regards both their work and hers, providing an important
insight into the conceptual background that informs her own usage. For instance,
in an article on Cortázar she writes dismissively of Freud’s joke-work, whose
psychoanalytical thrust she considers irrelevant to the metaphysical humour of
her own time (Prosa, p. 197). She argues that the avant garde vision of the world
as absurd is mimetically realist and shows her admiration for the separation of
cause and effect in Cortázar’s stories (Prosa, pp. 198–9). Particularly pertinent to
her own prose fiction, is the link that she perceives between the subversiveness
of humour and of poetry, noting that both have the ability to look beneath the
surface of reality and reveal the other side. In all her critical readings of humour,
Pizarnik hears a tragic echo which in turn will resonate in her own humorous

3 I should like to express my appreciation to the Leverhulme Foundation for their generous
support of my research visit to Buenos Aires in connection with this essay.
4 As Breton puts it on the final page of Nadja, ‘la beauté sera CONVULSIVE ou ne sera
pas’, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
38 EVELYN FISHBURN

writings, where, as she says of Ocampo’s short stories, ‘el eterno doble fondo de
la risa’ is always ‘lo trágico’ (Prosa, p. 281). Like that of the surrealists, with
whom she had close affinities, Pizarnik’s humour is asocial and anarchic, a vital
strategy of resistance against all conventionality, and a response to the horror of
existence.
Humour was an important element in Pizarnik’s self-figuration. It is interest-
ing to observe the difference in the way she projects herself to herself in her
diaries and to her friends in the correspondence. There is little humour to be
found in the diary entries but there are many important references to it, often as
a separate or additional part of her fragmented self: ‘No sé qué es pero el humor
desapareció, el deseo de salir, trascenderme. Nada sino yo, este yo que muerde’
(Diarios, p. 104). Without her ‘humor’ she is left only with herself, a ‘yo’ she
fears. In the diaries she cannot laugh at herself. On the contrary, thinking about
herself kills any joyousness: ‘Cada vez que pienso en mí dejo de reír, de cantar,
de contar. Como si hubiera pasado un cortejo fúnebre’ (Diarios, p. 223).
Noticeably, most references to humour are accompanied by some dark, negative
thought. However, for Pizarnik humour is also ‘el gran encubridor’, on the one
hand, a means to hide her inability to communicate with the world, and on the
other, a way to approach proscribed topics. For instance, she writes, revealingly,
that by treating her sexuality humorously she is able to hide her celibacy and
assume an orgy-loving, aggressively heterosexual sexual persona to cover up
what she calls her ‘forzosa or forzada castidad, o lo que fuere’ (Diarios, p. 154).
She notes, in this same entry of 1959, a tendency that will come to dominate her
later prose, namely, to talk about obscene topics with humour.
The contrast between the serious, tormented style of the diaries and the playful,
jocular and suggestive style of her letters is startling. The latter are full of puns,
throwaway witticisms, code-switchings between both registers and languages,
delighting freely in private jokes, mostly of a sexual or scatological nature. Some
are accompanied by childlike illustrations, all part of the puerile persona Pizarnik
fondly adopted.5 The humour at first is largely uncomplicated, interesting mainly
because it projects a persona that is at odds with that of the diaries and the poetry,
but a change of mood can be detected in the later correspondence, when it becomes
more insistently aggressive, with a marked increase in obscene punning. Her lan-
guage is full of sexual and lavatorial innuendo, such as in the neologism ‘articul-
oncio’, the absurdly phrased ‘le clavé muy hondo mi culo azul’, the onomatopoeic
wordplay ‘¿titíla, tía Atila?’, and hundreds more examples. Her punning pyrotech-
nics are a strategy to deterritorialize language and free it from clichéd use; as with
‘Atila’, Pizarnik exploits proper names for their sonic as much as their semantic
properties, indulging freely in the fun of making new connections. Thus, conflat-
ing the names of Onassis and Onan, followed by their two rhyming attributes, she
creates the following bon mot: ‘Onaniss que es armero, pajero’ (Correspondencia,
p. 157). The interplay between Onassis, ship-building, and Onanism in this phrase

5 This topic is covered by Fiona Mackintosh in Childhood in the Works of Silvina Ocampo
and Alejandra Pizarnik (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2003).
 DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF HUMOUR AND WORDPLAY 39

is an excellent example of the way Pizarnik exploits the sound of words in order to
decentre language and concepts by moving from one frame of reference to another
through linguistic slippage and equivocation. Osías Stutman, to whom several of
these late letters are addressed, aptly defined the puns as ‘guirnaldas de sonoros
calembours con capacidad de maravillar’ (Correspondencia, p. 155).6
In the correspondence, humour is an obvious distancing device that allows her
to communicate her anguished state of mind to her friends in a veiled manner,
masking emotion with the ingenuity of her dazzling linguistic inventiveness. For
example, in a letter to Arias López she coins the neologism UMOR-H, which,
combining ‘humo’ (smoke) and ‘humor’, is suggestive of the role of humour as a
smokescreen. ‘Umor’ may also be a wink to Pirandello’s dicussion of this topic
in his 1908 essay L’Umorismo.7 With throwaway wit, Pizarnik refers to the dif-
ficulties of expressing humour ‘que es velocísimo (y yo tan lenta)’
(Correspondencia, p. 113). This is typical of the playful, light-hearted vein in the
letters; the following extract, from an early letter to Ana María Barrenechea,
illustrates the rich gamut of humour devices used by Pizarnik:

Hermosa amiguita Ana, quiero decir, distinguida amiga: ¡sonno iiiio! la tua
Alejandra! En cuanto hollé delicadamente el suelo de la mother patria mi
madre en particular dictaminó excesivas delgadeces lindantes con inminentes
anemias. A causa de ello me llevaron a perder mi hermosa silueta a Miramar.
Quiero decir: estuve en Bs. As. sólo un día: del 10 al 11 de febrero. Anteayer
regresé por fin y me apresuro a darte señales del sentimiento tráxico de mi
exigencia. Antes de partir te envié —allá por las gélidas navidades parisinas—
un sobre grande, grande, con el mismo articuloncio que remito ahora. Supe por
otras amargas experiencias que los carteros, ebrios de fois gras y de largos
besos, anonadaron y desaparecieron buena parte de la correspondencia mun-
dial. Y —agregó la fina poeta— como tengo muy mucho interés en que leas
este —digamos— reportaje que le hice a nuestro queridísimo Julio, te lo envío
tout de suite. (Correspondencia, p. 98, continued on p. 100)

Though the humour is fairly obvious, I shall indulge momentarily in listing the
various devices employed to underline its richness and versatility. These range
from multilingual, mixed registers, self-mocking references to her weight prob-
lem, or to herself as ‘la fina poeta’, and the inevitable wordplay on ‘culo’. The
explanation of the lost letters uses two important humour devices, incongruity
and exaggeration, to make its ludicrous point, while the oblique reference to
Unamuno’s work on existential angst is flippantly distorted both in ‘tráxico’ and
in the double slippage from ‘vida’ to ‘existencia’ and to ‘exigencia’. These dis-
tortions act as an important self-distancing device for her own emotions, or, to
quote her coinage, UMOR-H. A salient example of this can be found in another
letter, to Stutman, dated October 1970:

6 For a discussion of the ambiguous position of such letters in delimiting Pizarnik’s oeuvre,
see Cristina Piña’s chapter in this volume.
7 Luigi Pirandello, L’umorismo: Saggio (Lanciano: Carabba, 1908).
40 EVELYN FISHBURN

Ich been [sic] die heilige [sic] Lola vengo de descubrirlo; y ello, gracias a unas
medias 3/4 bordadas por el padre Coloma bajo els batuto del bioquímico
Toscanelli, maestro menor de las ubres completz de Mallarmaé en 20 tomos,
un dado, 1 península. (Correspondencia, p. 166)

The multilingual feast mixing Spanish, German, English (bin/been) and Catalan,
with Italian and French allusions, is immediately apparent, and illustrates the ease
with which Pizarnik moved in these different cultures. But a slower reading enriches
the initial effect. For instance, the saintliness of ‘die heilige Lola’ is funnier when
read against Marlene Dietrich’s well-known song ‘Ich bin die fesche (smart, chic)
Lola’, and it may also be understood as a mark of homage to the German singer. El
padre Coloma was a minor nineteenth-century writer, a critic of the Madrid aristoc-
racy of the times, whose association with embroidery is obscure; not so the link
between Mallarmaé [sic] and the famed dice of ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le
hasard’. However, the humour in the fusion of (Mallar)mé and maé with ubres and
obras is more oblique, and at the risk of rationalizing the absurd, responds to an
inner logic that mocks poetic creativity. (This letter is unique for the number of
overt Jewish allusions, which I shall discuss in the second part of this chapter.)

Theatre: Los perturbados entre lilas

Pizarnik wrote one play, an absurd farce entitled Los perturbados entre lilas (hence-
forth Perturbados).8 She later extracted some of the lyrical passages and published
them separately in El infierno musical as ‘Los poseídos entre lilas’, in the form of a
prose poem (Poesía, pp. 169–171). This ‘purified’ version, though considered by
some as her finest poetic achievement, misses the core and original motivation of
the play, namely, to express fragmentation through the interplay between two moods.
Perturbados is crucially important as the foremost place where the ‘two voices of
Alejandra’ meet, the lyrical voice of the highly sensitive poet, and the strident, mock-
ing voice of the subversive writer revelling in bawdiness and vulgarity. Perturbados
represents a duality that remains unresolved, without synthesis or catharsis. There is
no discernible plot, and if there is a message, it needs to be read through the frag-
mented structure of the piece. Perturbados was written during July–August 1969, a
few years after Pizarnik’s return from Paris, where she had forged close links with
many surrealists. Though she did not consider herself a surrealist, close affinities
can be found between Perturbados and the subversive practices of the surrealists.9
According to Ana María Moix, the work is ‘digna de figurar entre lo mejor de Alfred
Jarry, Ionesco y Beckett’.10 It includes extensive stage instructions, which are not

8 The play is more frequently referred to as Los poseídos entre lilas, but I shall use the
title as it figures in Prosa Completa (pp. 165–94), to avoid confusion with the shorter prose
poem version (Poesía, pp. 291–6).
9 For a discussion of surrealism and Pizarnik, see César Aira, Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario:
Beatriz Viterbo, 1998), p. 11.
10 In ‘Prosa de una belleza mágica’, Babelia, 6 April 2002, p. 10.
 DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF HUMOUR AND WORDPLAY 41

always linked to the baffling dialogues of the main body of the play, thereby under-
lining and enacting the theme of fragmentation and lack of communication. No sta-
ble interpretation is possible, or even desirable. The play’s rebellion against realist
aesthetics or anything approximating the logic of causality lashes out with a relent-
lessly aggressive dark humour. All social conventions, but particularly those linked
to childhood innocence and sexual mores, are the object of virulent derision.
According to her diaries she was reading Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double
(1958) at the time of writing Perturbados, and many of his ideas on the theatre are
discernible in this work. Among these, the separation between stage instructions and
dialogue, the renunciation of psychological and social man in favour of a meta-
physical theatre, the use of violent physical images to crush and hypnotize the sensi-
bility of the spectator, and a desire ‘to extend the frontiers of what is called reality,
by putting the reality of the imagination on an equal footing with life’.11 But most
particularly, and following Breton and Artaud, Pizarnik uses convulsiveness in her
endeavour to express a new and more authentic concept of life. Her particular
weapon is the use of humour in all its transgressive manifestations.
Apart from a debt to the European Theatre of the Absurd, another more local
lineage can be traced for Perturbados in a contemporary experimental move-
ment that emerged in Argentina in the middle of the century and which itself
harks back to the popular and highly influential ‘grotesco criollo’. This was a
body of theatre which flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, written largely by
immigrants about immigrants, and was predominantly concerned with feelings
of social alienation, exposing the mismatch between official rhetoric of the lib-
eral project and the reality. Perturbados can also be seen as a precursor of ‘el
neogrotesco’, in which national myths and values are grotesquely parodied and
aggression has become ritualized.12 Though Pizarnik’s play is more abstract in
the sense of dislocation it conveys, there are some points of contact with this
theatrical axis. These can be summarized as the experience of meaninglessness,
the interplay of illusion and disillusion, and violence suggested through the use
of hyperbole and exaggeration. The use of criollo popular speech reinforces
these links, which, however, should not be overemphasized, given the predomi-
nantly metaphysical dimension of Pizarnik’s farce.13

11 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York:
Grove Press, 1958), see pp. 123 and 82–3.
12 For further information see Eva Claudia Kaiser-Lenoir, ‘La particularidad de lo cómico
en el Grotesco Criollo, Latin American Theatre Review, 12:1 (1978), 21–32, and Osvaldo
Pellettieri, Una historia interrumpida: teatro argentino moderno (1949–1976) (Buenos Aires:
Galerna, 1997). For further discussion of Pizarnik as a precursor of a movement known as
‘teatro neobarroso y under’, see María Alejandra Minelli, ‘Políticas de género en el neobarroco:
Alejandra Pizarnik y Marosa di Giorgio’, in Proceedings of the 2. Congresso Brasileiro de
Hispanistas, 2002, São Paulo (SP) [online]. 2002 [accessed 15 November 2006]. Available at:
http://www.proceedings.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=msc0000000012002000
300038&lng=en&nrm=iso
13 Pizarnik’s name does not appear in any general discussion of Argentine theatre. Her
play was not considered for the stage until a few fringe performances in recent years, for
example in the Salón Pueyrredón, Buenos Aires, April 1998.
42 EVELYN FISHBURN

Perturbados is set in the closed space of a ‘contaminated’ nursery, and consists

of a series of disconnected scenes played between four farcical characters who
arguably represent a divided self, acting as splintered representations of the author’s
different personae. Piña sees this one-act piece as ‘una auténtica “teatralización del
inconsciente” ’ (Piña, Alejandra Pizarnik, p. 181). The characters’ clearly ludic
names invite speculation. For example, ‘Segismunda’ wittily combines and con-
flates (Sigmund) Freud, the great interpreter of dreams, with Calderón’s most
famous character Segismundo (from La vida es sueño [1636]), the dreamer and
questioner of the boundaries between dream and reality. But there are further lay-
ers of association: Freud’s seminal discussion of childhood sexuality is also indi-
rectly invoked and caricatured in the near homonym ‘seguís inmunda’. Using the
Latin prefix ‘in’ as negation to refer jocularly to the character/author’s anguished
sense of dislocation from the world gives ‘Seguís no de este mundo’ as another
possible layer of meaning. Segismunda is made to wear a bizarre outfit of exacting
stipulation, every item extravagantly colourful and classified as ‘modelo’ Keats,
Shelley, Rimbaud, and so on. It is tempting to see in this a parodic reference to
fashion’s fetishization of cult figures, yet such facile didacticism seems misplaced:
Pizarnik was not particularly interested in normative humour and I prefer to see in
these specifications an attempt to desacralize high culture by invoking literary fig-
ures not for their poetic oeuvre but for their effect on the world of couture.
My point, in this analysis, is to reveal an underpinning of order and inner logic
in what appears to be random. Other playful associations may be detected. Carol,
two consonants short of (Lewis) Carroll and his world of nonsensical humour,
represents an androgynous male character who acts as a sort of alter ego to the
dominant/dominatrix Segismunda. His female appellation pokes fun at social gen-
der division. The play’s concentration on childhood eroticism is again emphasized
in the explicitly sexual names of the lollipop-sucking character Macho and of
Futerina, his female, uterine counterpart. Both are ridiculous, limbless creatures,
whose grotesqueness dehumanizes them and makes them objects of revulsion
rather than pity. Perturbados has many farcical stage instructions that combine
very detailed visual and sound specifications with abstract stipulations of mood.
Similarly, a jarred contiguity produces the comic effect of the dialogue, which
moves constantly between moods and registers and between high and low culture.
The usual pattern is that Segismunda voices her existential anguish and Carol inter-
rupts by bursting into song, usually a plaintive tango. So, in reply to Segismunda’s
world weary ‘No estás cansado de este afán’, Carol enacts this weariness, singing

Mi noche, tu noche,
mi llanto, tu llanto,
mi infierno, tu infierno. (Prosa, p. 167)

Segismunda’s metaphysical question ‘¿Y quién te garantiza que vos no sos la sombra
de alguno de mis yo?’ is answered tunefully with ‘El mismo amor, la misma lluvia’
(Prosa, p. 192). Pathos is turned into bathos: the invented tangos repeat the despair,
but in an incongruously different key. This kind of interplay, or ‘estranio contrapunto’
 DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF HUMOUR AND WORDPLAY 43

(Correspondencia, p. 289), as Pizarnik called her play, is a perfect illustration of

what the humour theorist Koestler has termed a ‘bisociative shock’, meaning ‘a col-
lision between two different codes or systems’.14 This collision, he argues, is artisti-
cally creative, as well as being an important trigger for humour. Freud’s relief theory,
that laughter is produced by the energy released when pathos is short-circuited, is
equally relevant to the relief effected by Carol’s bathetic interruptions.15
An insistent preoccupation with obscenity, aggravated, no doubt, by the nurs-
ery setting, lies at the heart of Perturbados’s constant flouting of conventional
morality. Items that are completely appropriate for a nursery, such as tricycles,
dolls, chamber pots or a whistle, are disturbingly rendered inappropiate by being
eroticized. Thus, there is an insistence on penetrative erotic tricycles – ‘todos
envidian mi triciclo mecanoerótico’ (Prosa, p. 166), ‘todas las hembras a medio
hacer se mueren por los triciclos’ (Prosa, p. 181) – though the erotic tricyles are
themselves parodied: ‘necesito un triciclo más confortable, algo con biblioteca,
frigidaire y ducha’ (Prosa, p. 175). Moreover, there is a fetishized doll, ‘la
muñeca no está terminada pero . . . empieza a despuntarle un sexo que ni la Bella
Otero’ (Prosa, p. 181); there are sepulchral and lavatorial cupboards described as
‘féretros inodoros’ (Prosa, p. 166); a golden phallus is used as a whistle and
there is generally much wilfully provocative sexual and scatological repartee.
Much of it is grotesque, as in the following interchange between Macho and
Futerina: – ‘Besame, tocame. Tocame un nocturno. – No podemos con los trici-
clos en las entrepiernas. – No te hagas la monja portuguesa, vení, acercate’
(Prosa, p. 172). These scenes are able to appear funny in spite of their utter taste-
lessness because, following the tradition of the Theatre of the Absurd, they are so
very evidently purely verbal constructs, and no empathy is aroused.
Perturbados stands in parodic dialogue with a number of other works, from
the tango to the Bible. Most are here re-written with a strong emphasis on
obscenity. For instance, the poetic eroticism of the Song of Songs is mimicked,
but with pornographic innuendo: ‘Mi amante es más alta que un reloj de pén-
dulo’; ‘Mi amante es obscena porque se toca la hora’ (Prosa, p. 178). Cortázar’s
invented erotic language, using a high linguistic register and perfect syntax in a
parodic manner, is also bawdily imitated, the reference to a copulating doll add-
ing an element of perversion: ‘Lo de que fifa es, por ahora, una hipótesis de tra-
bajo. Pero en el caso de ser cierta, ¿con quién fifaría mi muñeca? – Con un
matrimonio’ (Prosa, p. 190). Pizarnik’s lifelong fascination with, and her debt
to, Lewis Carroll’s Alice books has received excellent critical attention and not
much needs to be added here, but the difference between the whimsical non-
sense humour of these works and the morbid, corrosive laughter in Perturbados
will have become apparent from what has been said so far.16

14 Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Dell, 1967), pp. 35–40.
15 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Freud Library, 1991), VI, pp. 425–34.
16 See Fiona Mackintosh, ‘ “La pequeña Alice”: Alejandra Pizarnik and Alice in
Wonderland’, Fragmentos, 16 (1999), 41–55.
44 EVELYN FISHBURN

There are other examples of humorous cultural subversion. Pizarnik joins a

well-established twentiethcentury practice of attacking traditional aesthetics by
defacing and defaming the Mona Lisa; where Duchamp added a moustache and
beard in his 1919 work L.H.O.O.Q. (which was then reproduced by Picabia),
Pizarnik’s cultural iconoclasm works not by disfiguring the icon but by debasing
it by means of a gossipy explanation.17 The Mona Lisa’s legendary smile is
explained as ‘(una) cara de resfriada y sonriendo demasiado de modo que se
descubre que tiene un solo diente’ (Prosa, p. 165). This is followed by a refer-
ence to what is presumably a drawing by Goya, whose ‘cinturón para castidad
para labios’ cleverly links sexual with verbal (political?) repression in a descrip-
tion that fits with the painter’s own views and mordant wit (Prosa, p. 166).18
There are other allusions to art; for example, later in the play, Segismunda indi-
rectly describes her own (or Pizarnik’s) fragmented self as a caricaturized cubist
painting: ‘Tiene tatuados dos ojos, una nariz y, naturalmente, una boquita de
corazón. Hasta un sombrero tiene. En fin, una típica belleza de los años veinte en
pleno traste’ (Prosa, p. 189). And to finish the visual description, a different dis-
ruption, that of a non-sequitur: ‘Además de tener tatuajes, tiene siempre razón’
(Prosa, p. 189). Aside from these allusions to art, there are many more veiled
references to dadaism, surrealism, and the theatre of cruelty, among others.
María Negroni was the first to note the close structural and thematic parallels
between Perturbados and Endgame, the work that most clearly inspired it, but,
as she points out: ‘La opacidad de Beckett se ha esfumado.’19 In both plays griev-
ing is associated with laughter, and ridicule and slapstick are used to give some
sort of comic detachment from metaphysical anguish, but in Perturbados this
anguish is itself parodied through hyperbole and aberration. Pizarnik re-writes
from a female position: Beckett’s stark room is a prettified nursery, the main
voice is female, as are her transgressive sexual urges. Segismunda’s foil, Carol,
is a transcoded example of gender clashes: male with a girl’s name, he is a virgin
frightened of sex. He is in a clearly subservient position, though at the end, like
Clov, his Beckettian counterpart, he leaves in search of order. While the gender
dimension does not circumscribe the humour, it adds a layer to its transgressive-
ness. (This is an issue which merits a separate, more detailed study.)
A more recondite allusion in Perturbados is to a scene in Molière’s last play
Le Malade imaginaire (1673) in which a gullible patient is implicitly mocked
and a (pretend) doctor ridiculed and exposed as a charlatan.20 The same incident
occurs in Pizarnik’s play but here it moves on to reach a level of transgressivenes

17 Compare Martín F. Yriart’s essay ‘César Aira o la estética anarquista de la literatura’,

which reads the ideology of anarchism as that of: ‘demoler lo institucionalizado, el sentido
común, la vulgaridad burguesa que con su mirada convierte a la Gioconda en una marca de
dulce de membrillo’, http://www.lainsignia.org/2005/octubre/cul_044.htm
18 See Nigel Glendinning, Goya: la década de ‘Los caprichos’. Retratos 1792–1804
(Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Francisco, 1992).
19 María Negroni, El testigo lúcido: la obra de sombra de Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario:
Beatriz Viterbo, 2003), p. 81.
20 I quote from the 1933 Larousse edition.
 DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF HUMOUR AND WORDPLAY 45

of groundbreaking proportion. Given the sustained verbatim repetition of the

dialogue, the unexpectedness of the connection, and the fact that this reference
has remained unnoticed hitherto, I quote the passage at length.21 My point, in
doing so, is to underline the similarities, and to highlight, with the comparison,
the obscene and venomous bravado that follows in Pizarnik’s re-enactment of
the scene.

Le Malade imaginaire, Act III, sc. x Perturbados

Je suis médecin passager, qui vais de ville Yo voy de ciudad en ciudad y de provin-
en ville, de province en province, de roy- cia en provincia para encontrar enfermos
aume en royaume, pour chercher d’illustres dignos de ocuparme.
matières à ma capacité, pour trouver des
malades dignes de m’occuper, capables
d’exercer les grands et beaux secrets que
j’ai trouvés dans la médicine. Je dédaigne Desdeño entretenerme con enfermedades
de m’amuser à ce menu fatras de maladies ordinarias, tales como reumatismo, pru-
ordinaires, à ces bagatelles de rhuma- rito anal, dolores de cabeza y estre-
tismes et de fluxions, à ces fièvrottes, à ces ñimiento.
vapeurs, et à ces migraines . . .
Je veux de maladies d’importance, de Lo que yo quiero son enfermedades de
bonnes fièvres pouprées, de bonnes pes- importancia, buenas calenturas con
tes, des bonnes hydropisies formées, de delirio, satiriosis, fulgor ulterino,
bonnes pleurisies, avec des inflamma- hidropesía, priapismo, cabecitas de
tions de poitrine pouprées: alfiler, talidomídicos, centauros, talon de
Aquiles, Monte de Venus, Chacra de
c’est là que je me plaie, c’est là que je júpiter, Estancia de Atenea; en fin, en eso
triomphe; et je voudrais, monsieur, . . . es donde yo gozo, en eso es donde yo
que vous fussiez abandoné de tous les triunfo. Desearía, señora, que estuviese
médecins, désespéré, à l’agonie, pour Vd. abandonada de todos los médicos,
vous montrer l’excellence de mes desahuciada, en la agonía, para mostrar
remèdes . . . a Vd. la excelencia de mis remedios.

Je vous suis obligé, monsieur, des bontés Le agradezco, caballero, las bondades
que vous avez pour moi. que tiene para mí.

Donnez-moi votre pouls. Allons donc, Déme el pulso. Vamos, lo hallo natural.
. . . Qui est votre médecin? Eso no es natural. ¿Quién es su
médico?

Monsieur Purgon El Dr Limbo del Hano

21 Ana María Rodríguez Francia notes ‘la subyacencia del teatro molieriano’ in Los
perturbados, but draws a different parallel: ‘la relación hipotextual respecto de El médico a
palos de Molière’. See La disolución en la obra de Alejandra Pizarnik: ensombrecimiento de
la existencia y ocultamiento del ser (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2003), p. 117, and pp. 124–5.
46 EVELYN FISHBURN

(The variation in the names of the doctors epitomizes the difference in tone
between the two texts: Pizarnik often added an intrusive ‘h’.22) Molière’s text is
a bitter attack on the medical profession and Pizarnik would not have been
insensitive to the tragic irony of Molière, genuinely ill, using hypochondria for
the subject of his play, or to the fact that the actor/playwright had a fatal attack
while performing the part of the man who is not ill but imagines it. If in the
seventeenth-century play the scene is part of a plot to prevent an unhappy mar-
riage, in Perturbados it stands alone, out of context, a game serving mainly as a
vehicle to extend the frontiers of where comic satire can venture. In both plays
there is a carnivalesque inversion of accepted roles, a doctor wishing a patient
the worst of health and real agony so as to be able to demonstrate his excellent
medical expertise, and the patient being duly grateful. But the rather mundane
common illnesses listed in Le Malade imaginaire progress in Perturbados to
specifically sexual complaints and irregularities. Delighting at first merely in
bawdy innuendo, the doctor follows it with a ludic enumeration of real and
made-up sexual illnesses which he says he enjoys treating (the sexual innuendo
in the Spanish ‘gozar’ is stronger than ‘se plaire’), moving in an ordered cre-
scendo of prurience from the slightly ambivalent ‘calenturas con delirio’,
‘satiriosis’ (satyriasis is an uncontrollable or excessive sexual desire in man),
‘fulgor uterino, priapismo’, to ‘cabecitas de alfiler’ (a sort of genital inflamma-
tion in women), and changing tack again, almost imperceptibly slips in the sick-
est of jokes by adding ‘talidomídicos’, and with the most perverse metonymic
association, ‘centauros’, to the offensive catalogue (Prosa, p. 176). It must be
remembered that the thalidomide crisis occurred in the 1960s, a few years
before Perturbados was written. The skit has turned obscene and bitter and is
perhaps the most extreme attempt in the play to be ‘convulsive’ through the
darkest use of sick, grotesque, humour. It is followed, as ever, by a complete
change of mood, expressing metaphysical anguish and longing. Once again,
what appears to be simply gratuitous indulgence in salaciousness and profanity
has, as Cristina Piña and other critics have observed, a sombre underside, in
which eros is linked to thanatos through orgasmic annihilation (‘la petite
mort’).23 This argument is supported by Segismunda’s gnomic statement, ‘la
obscenidad no existe. Existe la herida.’ But once again Carol interrupts, croon-
ing ‘la vida es una herida antigua’ (Prosa, p. 168).

22 This may gesture towards Julio Cortázar’s self-mocking character Horacio Oliveira, the
central protagonist of Rayuela (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1962), which Cortázar asked
Pizarnik to type up. Horacio adds silent ‘h’s as if to humorously deflate his own rhetoric:
‘Usaba las haches como otros la penicilina. . . . “Lo himportante es no hinflarse”, se decía
Holiveira’ (p. 581).
23 Cristina Piña, ‘La palabra obscena’, in Poesía y experiencia del límite: leer a Alejandra
Pizarnik (Buenos Aires: Botella al mar, 1999), pp. 20–30 (p. 30). For a discussion of the link
between sexual and ritual laceration and ‘la petite mort’ see Georges Bataille, Visions of
Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and
Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 250–3 (p. 251).
 DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF HUMOUR AND WORDPLAY 47

The Late Prose Work: La bucanera de Pernambuco o

Hilda la polígrafa
If in Perturbados humour plays a bathetic, oppositional role to pathos, in La
bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la polígrafa (henceforth La bucanera) it occu-
pies centre stage, with intensified, uncontrolled stridency. Pizarnik’s neologism
‘el volcánvelorio de la lengua’ (Prosa, p. 109), a fusion of volcanic eruption and
wake, hints at that ever-present link of humour with death.24 In ‘La bucanera’,
the story which takes its title from – or lends it to – the collection as a whole,
Pizarnik emphasizes the curse of writing: ‘eso que escribo para la mierda’, ‘¡Qué
damnación este oficio de escribir!’, and ‘Una se abandona . . . Nada’ (Prosa,
pp. 154–5). But the fragility of meaning is perhaps most subtly hinted at in allu-
sive and alliterative ways: ‘¿coge Adela un ramo de asfódelos o es un ramo de
asfódelos lo que coge a Adela?’ (Prosa, p. 156). The palindromic structure of the
question actually enacts the absurdum of reality which can be understood in one
way, or its opposite.
As suggested in the title’s bizarre juxtaposition of piracy and cryptography,
cultural plunder and remote intertextuality are the core of these unclassifiable
texts, in which aggression against accepted moral codes is accompanied by
extreme cultural iconoclasm. There is an impressive array of references to writ-
ers of erotica, and to many others whose names are exploited for the playful
sexual potential of their sound. Heraclitus becomes ‘heraclítoris’, in ‘En ala-
bama de heraclítoris’; Origen, becomes ‘Orgasmo’ and Erasmus, ‘Orgasmo
Derroterdamcul’, which is followed by ‘¡Mein Goethe! Soy Bertoldo Bertoldino
y Cacaseno. Soigneur dés, un coup de dieux n’abolira pof la lézarde’ (Prosa,
pp. 120–1, 156, 106). Learning, too, is linked to sexuality: ‘textículo’, ‘pajericul-
tos lectores’, ‘in culo volens loquendi chorlitus’ (Prosa, p. 100), and, like almost
anything else, serves for subversive wordplay. The piece ‘La pájara en el ojo
ajeno’ is saturated with inventive interchanges between ‘paja’ and the associative
‘pajarito’. Its mock-innocent Moraleja is ‘El niño azul gusta de la paja roja pero
la niña roja gusta de la paja azul’ (Prosa, p. 100–4). In the following nonsense
sentence Pavlov’s salivating dogs are ingeniously encoded by metonymic asso-
ciation: ‘la dorada [for la adorada] Pavlova que gracias a Pavlov pudo darse una
ducha en Cucha-Cucha’ (Prosa, p. 134). The same humorous sideways leap
occurs in ‘Juana Manuela Gorriti’, tan útil para la lluvia’ (Prosa, p. 90). Gorriti
was a nineteenth-century Argentine writer and feminist avant la lettre, which
makes the trivialization of her name doubly daring. In ‘Helioglobo – 32’ the
made-up title conflates a reference to Artaud’s life of Heliogabulus, Héliogabale
ou l’artiste couronné (1934), and Count Zeppelin’s air balloon (‘helios’ and
‘globo’). The number 32 is a learned, esoteric reference to the 32 ‘distinctive
signs’ of the Buddha, which is taken up through colloquial banter in the text:
‘Recordará el lector que, no bien nació Buda, la gente vio a Asita [Asita is a
monk who has attained enlightenment], el ermitaño n.º 122, bajar del Himalaya

24 See María Negroni’s discussion of this phrase in El testigo lúcido, p. 92.

48 EVELYN FISHBURN

pegando saltitos con un solo pie puesto que tenía un solo pie. Asita entró chez
Buda y leyó en el cuerpo del pibe los “32”.’ The holy figure, 32, is then trans-
posed to the unholy 69, ‘los “32” signos del Buda son 69’, its sexual innuendo
underlined by a reference to the erotic world of Histoire d’O (Prosa, pp. 96–9).
‘Una musiquita cacoquímica’, as the title indicates (in the prefix ‘caco’ with its
lavatorial nuances coexisting with the Greek root ‘kakos’, bad) and as the piece
illustrates, is a celebration of cacophonic wordplay, aptly dedicated to ‘el abate
Calemberg’, the comic charater from old German folk tales credited with the
invention of punning (calembours).
References to Bernard Shaw and his name are numerous, and wittily inven-
tive. For instance, his play Pygmalion (1913) is lavatorially and sonically dis-
torted to ‘Pigmeón y Gatafea’, in the title of a non-existent piece which is
dedicated to a ‘doctor Bernard School’ (Prosa, p. 92). I read this as a mocking
wink to Professor Higgins’s insufferable didacticism, but surely also to that of
the playwright himself. Elsewhere, Shaw appears as a pedicure and the designer
of slippers, ‘pantuflas ad patitam exclusivamente diseñadas para nosotros por
Bernard Showl’ (Prosa, pp. 158 and 101). There is an inner logic to this non-
sense: we recall that Pygmalion’s rebellion at the end of the play revolved
around the fetching of slippers, and ad patitam leads to Dr Scholl of pedicure
fame (Scholl is pronounced ‘Sholl’ in German). The point is that though these
countercultural references are an undoubted celebration of chaos, they are not
as haphazard as they appear to be at first; instead, they conform to some sort of
momentary inner logic. This is perhaps not simply an empty display of
Pizarnik’s vast cultural knowledge so much as an inventive and deliberate
application of this knowledge to bring down the barriers between high and low
culture.
Humour, like metaphor, draws together two dissimilar concepts, but its effect
is more transient. I am aware that nothing kills humour as much as its explana-
tion and the rationalization of absurdity, yet there needs to be a shared frame of
reference for an intended joke to be grasped, so that when the association is
particularly oblique some reflection may enrich the first spontaneous reading.
For instance, the link between the name Concha Espina (much quoted in the
diaries and letters as well as often in La bucanera) and the Freudian notion of
the ‘vagina dentata’ is not difficult to detect, but the ridicule is enhanced through
knowledge that the Spanish writer of that name was a devout Catholic and prop-
agator of traditionalist Falangist ideology. (Her full name was María de la
Concepción Jesús Basilisa Concha Espina.) Still on this topic, a mixed-register
clash that Pizarnik did not invent, but which she certainly exploited ferociously,
is the dual meaning of the word ‘Introitus’, used for the opening act of worship
in the Mass, and, in medical parlance, for the passage leading from the vulva to
the cervix. Pizarnik’s reference to ‘el introito a la vagina de Dios’ brings down
time-honoured barriers between the sacred and the profane. In Bakhtinian terms
of the carnivalesque, the accepted world is turned upside down by feminizing
the Deity in an extravagantly blasphemous image which exploits in mock eru-
dite language the two very different usages of this ‘technical’ term: ‘Estas
 DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF HUMOUR AND WORDPLAY 49

razones, que obran a modo de palabras liminares o de introito a la vagina de

Dios, tienen por finalidad abrir una brecha en mi fúlgido ceremonial’ (Prosa,
p. 154). One of the subversive characteristics of humour, amply demonstrated
in the foregoing example, is that it allows us to breach taboos, say the unsay-
able, and take pleasure in it. Freud offers an explanation for this: he argues that
indecent and unrestrained jokes allow us to outwit the ‘censor’ within us and
take pleasure in overcoming our inhibitions, whether sexual or malicious (Freud,
p. 185).
It would be too reductive to discuss Pizarnik’s humour in gendered terms, but
gender is one of the important categories constantly transgressed. A male, Chú
or ‘lector’, can be ‘encinto’ though mainly to rhyme playfully with ‘recinto’
whilst adding to the overall absurdity of the sentence. Other examples are more
pointed gender transgressions, starting with the buccaneer of the work’s title:
women were not traditionally pirates, and cannibals are not usually depicted as
very old females, but here two ‘ancianas antropófogas de 122 años’ seem hap-
pily to have barbecued some missing ‘persopejes’ (Prosa, p. 155). Later on in the
story, if it can be called this, the traditional feudal male prerogative, the droit de
seigneur, is feminized in a mock sexual context, where a woman is urged to exert
this right: ‘¡Usá el derecho de pernada, tarada!’ (Prosa, p. 155).
These examples suffice to provide the reader with a cross-section of humour
in Pizarnik’s work. This humour is fundamentally countercultural, and the clear-
est explanation of its effect can perhaps be reached by comparison with Borges
(a writer whose style Pizarnik often imitated with tongue in cheek, and most
evidently in the Postdata and Postdatita of ‘La bucanera’ [Prosa, 156–7]). I have
argued elsewhere that allusion in Borges is always apposite, however perverse or
counterculturally it is used.25 It inflects the meaning of the text, and sometimes,
when a reference is read against its original context, a new meaning emerges in
the space created between the two uses. This is not the case or the purpose of
Pizarnik’s citations, which, like her wordplay, rely on sonic and thematic asso-
ciation in texts that are themselves absurd, and simply do not bear such weight.
Both writers are concerned with entropic humour, as a means of responding to
the absurdity of the world,26 but while Borges replaces the rejected order with a
parodic fictional order, Pizarnik celebrates disorder by simply offering chaos. I
suggested earlier that an inner logic informs many of her intertextual jokes, but
their effect is, as true humour should be, immediate, spontaneous and ephemeral.
The overall result, however, is more lasting: it is a true cultural revolution, an
irreversible defiance of accepted reality, with its false boundaries and
hierarchies.

25 Evelyn Fishburn, ‘Hidden Pleasure in Borges’s Allusions’, in Borges and Europe

Revisited, ed. Evelyn Fishburn (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of
London, 1998), pp. 49–59.
26 See Patrick O’Neill, The Comedy of Entropy: Humour, Narrative, Reading (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 50.
50 EVELYN FISHBURN

Pizarnik and Jewishness

I will now focus specifically on the Jewish dimension of Pizarnik’s humour, and
to this end, a certain amount of basic biographical contextualization is required.
Pizarnik was born and died a Jew. Fleeing anti-Semitism, her parents emigrated
to Argentina from the Ukraine two years before her birth in 1936; she was
brought up in a Yiddish-speaking household and went to a Jewish school. Though
she rejected early on both the Jewish way of life and a conventional middle-class
existence, Pizarnik returned to her Jewish roots towards the end of her life. She
was buried according to Jewish rites at La Tablada cemetery, the ‘cementerio
extraño y judío’ where her father’s body also lay (Prosa, p. 44). Pizarnik’s atti-
tude to her Jewish heritage was markedly conflictive. On the one hand she
resented and rejected what she perceived as its cultural and emotional constraints,
‘mi angustia no permite lamentos intrusos’ she wrote after an aunt’s visit. In this
diary entry dated 31 August 1955 Pizarnik resents her aunt’s constant talking
about Hitler and anti-Semitism, seeing it as ‘masochistic’ (Diarios, p. 63). On
the other hand, she bemoaned her lack of roots: ‘la tremenda soledad que implica
no tener raíces en ningún lado’ (Diarios, p. 373). A current theme in post-Holo-
caust literature concerns the loss of shared family memories, a regret that Pizarnik
voices with pretend childlike innocence: ‘Mamá nos hablaba de un blanco
bosque de Rusia . . .Yo la miraba con desconfianza . . . ¿qué significa un bis-
abuelo? (Prosa, p. 30).
The double pull of her Judaic allegiance is also reflected in the changes to her
name, and to the way in which she referred to herself. At home and at school she
was ‘Blime’, Yiddish for flower, and its variations ‘Blímele’ and ‘Buma’; else-
where she was known by its Spanish version Flora, with which she signed her
first writings. Eventually, in seeking a new persona, she adopted her second
name Alejandra. This was not merely the signature of the poetic persona, but a
name so wholeheartedly embraced that in her famous outcry, it stands for both
surface and inner self:

alejandra, alejandra,
debajo estoy yo,
alejandra (Poesía, p. 65)

In a later poem she laments

. . . he perdido mi nombre
el nombre que me era dulce sustancia
en épocas remotas, cuando yo no era yo
sino una niña engañada por su sangre . . . (Poesía, p. 95)

Yet the name that was ‘dulce sustancia’ had not been entirely wiped out: in a let-
ter to her mother written as late as 1969 she still signs ‘Bumita’.
Pizarnik often expressed feelings of ‘extranjería’, which not unreasonably
have been linked to her personal Jewish history. Nevertheless, in the context of
 DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF HUMOUR AND WORDPLAY 51

the extraordinarily high proportion of second generation immigrants living in

Buenos Aires at the time, of which the Jewish community formed a significant
part, Pizarnik’s adolescent experience as a daughter of immigrants would not
have been that uncommon.27 Whilst it was undoubtedly a contributory factor,
and a conditioned way of thinking about herself, her sense of exclusion probably
owes less to any ethnic considerations than to personal feelings of existential
alienation. Although she writes, longingly, ‘Yo quería entrar en el teclado para
entrar adentro de la música para tener una patria’ (Poesía, p. 265), her isolation
is felt beyond the communal as the following quotation makes clear: ‘descono-
cida que soy, mi emigrante de sí’ (Poesía, p. 267). The same argument can be put
forward regarding her avowed ‘errancia’: Pizarnik felt herself to be a ‘wanderer’,
and it may well be appropriate to link this with the topos of the ‘Wandering Jew’,
but the Jewish reference can be read beyond its cultural specificity, as a meta-
phor for a spiritual and emotional sense of homelessness: ‘para mí, que soy
errante, que amo y muero’ (Poesía, p. 264). ‘Errante’ here must be understood in
its double sense of ‘wandering’ or ‘straying’ both physically and morally.
Leonardo Senkman finds in Pizarnik’s ontological and verbal sense of exile ‘una
inconfundible voz judía’, and while this statement cannot be disputed it is impor-
tant to weigh Pizarnik’s lamentations of ‘not belonging’ against her strong attrac-
tion to, and identification with, the outcast’s condition typical of the ‘poète
maudit’.28
Pizarnik’s strange way of speaking Spanish is sometimes linked to her bilin-
gual upbringing, but the examples given by Bajarlía and Bordelois do not point
to a Jewish intonation, or the use of Yiddishisms, so much as to an idiosyncratic
way of speaking Spanish, running separate words into one another and stressing
the ‘wrong’ syllables.29 Pizarnik was, after all, ‘porteña’, born in Avellaneda,
and her odd way of speaking was part of her intense awareness of the difficulties
of language, expressing her wish to distance herself from a language that for her
was too conclusive, too confident in its ability to express what to her were doubt-
ful ‘certainties’. Hence, she felt the need to create a purer, more authentic expres-
sion, and used a basic strategy to defamiliarize conventional speech by simply
altering its rhythm. This was fundamentally important to her; in her words, ‘[a]
cento y palabra justa en mí están escindidos. Si aspiro a la justeza de un texto

27 As an indication of the size of the immigrant community in Buenos Aires, in 1914,

49.4% of the population were born outside Argentina. James R. Scobie, Buenos Aires: Plaza
to Suburb, 1870–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 263. In 1939, there were
300,000 Jews living in Argentina. The numbers would have swelled immediately before the
Second World War. See Boleslao Lewin, Como fue la inmigración judía a la Argentina
(Buenos Aires: Editorial Plus Ultra, 1971), p. 156.
28 See Leonardo Senkman, ‘Alejandra Pizarnik: de la morada de las palabras a la intemperie
de la muerte’, in La identidad judía en la literatura argentina (Buenos Aires: Pardes, 1983),
pp. 337–40, and Florinda Goldberg, Alejandra Pizarnik: ‘este espacio que somos’
(Gaithersburg, MA: Hispamérica, 1994).
29 Juan Jacobo Bajarlía, Alejandra Pizarnik: anatomía de un recuerdo (Buenos Aires:
Almagesto, 1998); Ivonne Bordelois in Correspondencia, p. 16.
52 EVELYN FISHBURN

debo matar su acento’ (17 August 1968; Diarios, pp. 455–6. See also 7 September
1962; p. 268).
In her chapter ‘Judaísmo y extranjería’, Piña observes that there are only three
poems in which there are any Jewish allusions, and that all three were published
posthumously (Alejandra Pizarnik, pp. 79–85). The first, ‘Los muertos y la llu-
via’, alludes obliquely to the chanting at a Jewish burial, and ends with a quota-
tion from the Talmud: ‘Dios tiene tres llaves: la de la lluvia, la del nacimiento, la
de la resurrección de los muertos’ (Poesía, pp. 43–4).30 The second appears in a
poem entitled ‘El ojo de la alegría (un cuadro de Chagall y Schubert)’, where
Jewish music is again invoked as well as the Chagallian image of a young girl
holding a seven-branched candelabrum, one of the most important symbols of
Judaism (Poesía, p. 423). The third is a very short untitled text comparing her
vanishing childhood to a Golem (Poesía, p. 436). To these examples can be
added ‘Poema para el padre’, a loving tribute to her dead father, where the Jewish
background remains unspecified but is the underlying issue (Poesía, p. 370).
The relatively recent publication of the extended Diarios, the inclusion of
hitherto unpublished texts in the Prosa Completa, and access to the Pizarnik
archives held at Princeton University have given us a wider perspective on the
topic of Pizarnik and Judaism, which may colour our perception of this issue.
Jewish elements are usually, but not always, placed in an exalted context; how-
ever, in a piece not included in the 1982 edition of her posthumous work, written
while Pizarnik was interned in the clinic ‘El Pirovano’, there is a scabrous Jewish
reference, comparing female pubic hair to unkempt rabbinical beards. ‘Yo he
lamido conchas en varios países’ she writes boastfully, calling herself ‘la Reik
del abrirse camino entre pelos como de rabinos desaseados – ¡oh el goce de la
roña! (Poesía, p. 412). As I shall argue below, it is highly significant that this is
about the only obscene Jewish reference amidst the plethora of obscenities that
permeate the late prose work. Towards the end of the long ‘poem’ Pizarnik
returns to the theme of ‘extranjería’ as spiritual alienation, identifying herself in
this last respect with one of the writers with whom she felt the greatest affinity,
Kafka, a fellow Jew: ‘Y sobre todo Kafka/ a quien le pasó lo que a mí, si bien él
era púdico y casto’. The poem continues:

Se alejó – me alejé –
No por desprecio (claro que nuestro orgullo es infernal)
Sino porque una es extranjera
Una es de otra parte. (Poesía, p. 416)

In speaking inclusively of ‘nuestro orgullo’, a reference to the Jews as a ‘stiff-

necked people’, she seals the shared bond between herself, Kafka and the Jewish

30 The correct quotation from the Talmud reads as follows: ‘Three keys are in the hands of
the Holy One, blessed be He, which are not entrusted to any messenger, and they are: The key
of rain, the key for a woman lying-in, and the key for the resurrection of the dead’ (Tract
Taanith, Fasting). http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/t04/taa06.htm
 DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF HUMOUR AND WORDPLAY 53

people.31 Yet it is not a straightforward relationship on the part of either writer,

as expressed in the famous quotation from Kafka which Pizarnik’s orphaned
voice so clearly echoes: ‘What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly
anything in common with myself.’32
Pizarnik’s admiration for and sense of affinity with Kafka is well documented:
she read a paragraph from his work every day ‘a fin de darme fuerzas’ (Diarios,
p. 444) and ‘como quien lee la Biblia’ (Diarios, p. 447). Less known is the fact
that in her private notebooks, where she copied passages from works that were
important to her, there are a great number of quotations from Kafka’s writings,
many underlined and even annotated by Pizarnik. ‘Terminé los diarios de Kafka
y ahora me siento más sola que nunca’ (10 June 1969; Diarios, p. 473).33
Pizarnik’s relationship to Kafka has been examined in great depth by Anastasia
Telaak in a key work on Jewish writing in Argentine literature, where she dis-
cusses the many points of contact between them, and makes important observa-
tions regarding their difference.34 Chief among these is the fact that Judaism
plays a consistent and explicit role in Kafka’s work, particularly in his diaries,
some entries being devoted almost exclusively to the situation of the Jews. This
stands in stark contrast to Pizarnik’s diaries, where her increased interest in ‘mi
cuestión judía, tan nueva’ is considered mainly, though not exclusively, in a few
entries from 1967 to 1970 (see particularly, Diarios, pp. 430–4). Her interest is
personal, focused on how Judaism affects her. For instance, the longest entry
dwells on what being Jewish means to her, and she discusses this with reference
to Kafka: ‘si hay algo que me disgusta es el tipo de muchachito judío muerto de
hambre de amor, y que lo pide [the reference is to Jesus], un pequeño judío
enamorado de ciertas ideas (amor, caridad, compasión). . . . Pero a los judíos
como K. los amo y son ellos, en suma, mi raza y mi casa. Pero ser judío significa
. . . ser poseedor de un secreto’ (Diarios, p. 432). Perhaps this shared secret is a
perception, seen through the lens of Judaism, of the world as an unfathomable,
senseless place, both menacing and disorientating. Alicia Borinsky has put this
most insightfully: ‘el mismo juego que parece buscar una autodefinición a ratos
en la hibridez y otros en la universalidad del abismo del sentido, la inscribe en un
judaísmo contemporáneo, desfamiliarizado y escindido de la tranquilidad de las

31 ‘and the Lord said to Moses . . . I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked
people’ (Exodus, 32: 9–10, King James Bible). For a reading of Pizarnik and Kafka see Karl
Posso’s chapter in this volume.
32 ‘Was habe ich mit Juden gemeinsam? Ich habe kaum etwas mit mir gemeinsam . . . (und
sollte mich ganz still, zufrieden damit daß ich atmen kann in einen Winkel stellen)’, 1 January
1914.
33 I would like to thank Fiona Mackintosh for references to material from the Princeton
Archives. The copied passages are principally from Kafka’s diaries, but also from the story
‘The Great Wall of China’ and from Blanchot’s Kafka et la littérature. Surprisingly, the diary
quotation mentioned immediately above is not included in the notebooks.
34 Anastasia Telaak, Körper, Sprache, Tradition: jüdische Topographien im Werk
zeitgenössischer Autorinnen und Autoren aus Argentinien (Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag,
2003), pp. 291–398.
54 EVELYN FISHBURN

figuras de definición colectiva’.35 Pizarnik was very interested in Kafka as a

humorist, and at one time had planned to write a short essay on the topic of
Kafka and humour, taking the Jewish element to be crucial. She writes that she
would have to read Kafka ‘cien veces’, and ‘ensayos sobre el humor . . . en gen-
eral y sobre hum. Juif. Luego sobre K. . . . Luego sobre judaísmo’ (Diarios,
p. 442). But the article appears not to have been written and neither Kafka in
particular, nor Jewish humour generally, figure among her learned and penetrat-
ing essays on humour in Cortázar, Borges and Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo
and Michaux. While Kafka figures a few times in La bucanera, most promi-
nently in the form of an epigraph taken from his diaries (Prosa, p. 91), this is not
particularly connected to humour.
Indeed, there is a notable absence of what is conventionally understood as
Jewish humour from Pizarnik’s work, especially as regards the late prose, where
humour is paramount. (Tellingly, in Telaak’s detailed study there is no mention
of humour with reference to Pizarnik.) Even Jewish culture in general is largely
missing from these late writings and its absence among the welter of multicul-
tural and multilingual references which permeate La bucanera seems particu-
larly striking. In addition to Kafka, a few Jews are named (Heine, Proust) but
their Jewishness is all but ignored, in contradistinction to their treatment by
Borges, who – when referring to Heine – insistently underlines his Jewishness.
Absent too are the great Jewish humorists: there is no mention of Scholem
Aleichem, no Isaac Bashevis Singer, no Saul Bellow or Philip Roth, whose por-
nographic novel Portnoy’s Complaint achieved instant success upon publication
in 1969, just before Pizarnik wrote La bucanera.
The one important Jewish presence in La bucanera is so fleeting, so cryptic,
that, to my knowledge, it has escaped all critical attention. It occurs at the begin-
ning, in a mock-index which lists the titles of some pseudo ‘prosas’, each accom-
panied by a dedicatee. The last of these reads as follows: ‘A idishe Mame o la
autora de Igitujés’, and I shall analyse it in terms of what Piña recalls as talmudic
devices, ‘esos tirabuzones conceptuales con los que Alejandra jugaba’ and ‘ese
darles vueltas (cabalístico) a las palabras buscándoles otro significado yo otro, o
otro más’ (Alejandra Pizarnik, pp. 105–6). ‘A idishe Mame’ is an obvious allu-
sion to the proverbial Jewish mother, so often stereotyped as overprotective and
oppressive, and most probably evoked ironically in her ‘shmalzy’ portrayal in the
Yiddish song of that title, popularized, among others, by Sophie Tucker and Al
Jolson. ‘Igitujés’ is a more ingenious scatological example of ‘Hilda’s’ cryptic
writing, in that it joins the beginning of the usual Sabbath greeting ‘A git Shabbes’
onto ‘Tuches’, the Yiddish for ‘arse’ (with all the kissing or licking that accom-
panies the term also in English). The ‘idishe Mame’ is a not improbable refer-
ence to Pizarnik’s mother, and to their conflictive relationship.36 In this case, the

35 ‘Memoria del vacío: una nota personal en torno a la escritura y las raíces judías’, in
Revista Iberoamericana, 66:191 (2000), 409–12 (p. 411).
36 Pizarnik’s problematic relationship with her mother is frequently mentioned in the
correspondence and particularly in Juan Jacobo Bajarlía, where she refers to her as ‘la vieja
 DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF HUMOUR AND WORDPLAY 55

mother would be her ‘author’, or creator, and Pizarnik would be referring to her-
self self-deprecatingly in the insulting terms that the Yiddish neologism implies.
And since ‘idishe Mame’ is dedicated to Amélie de Freud, the Hispanicized form
of address for Freud’s mother, the phrase could refer, in an oblique way, to the
Virgin Mary, of whom Pizarnik once wrote ‘madre judía típica, tan típica como
la madre de Freud’ (Diarios, p. 433). Causality is never straightforward in
Pizarnik, and ‘La autora de Igitujés’ may well be understood as a reference to
Freud’s renowned discussion of anality, or equally to his theory of the Oedipus
complex, to which there is a well-known Jewish dismissive response: ‘Oedipus,
Schmiedipus, as long as he loves his mother’. But there may be another layer
linking Pizarnik and Freud in the Oedipal joke: Freud had a traumatic experience
in early childhood when he saw his mother naked, and could only bring himself
to refer to this incident in Latin; Pizarnik’s rare foray into Yiddish to allude to her
own mother can perhaps be seen as an inverted parallel, moving into a more
familiar and domestic language rather than into arcane formality.37
The extremely veiled nature of this super-condensed, overdetermined joke in
La bucanera is obviously intended for a small, dedicated and perhaps slightly
obsessive Jewish readership. In marked contrast to this stands the explicitness
and expansiveness of the Jewish element in the one other place Jewish humour
appears, namely, in the private body of letters written to Osías Stutman, an
Argentine poet and immunologist, at the time that Pizarnik was writing La
bucanera. I referred in the first part of this chapter to Pizarnik’s play (in these
letters) on the sonic qualities of words, in order to decentre language and con-
cepts while making new, absurd associations; uniquely, in this correspondence
with presumably a fellow Jew, there is a marked Jewish presence, with Jewish
humour playing a sustained role. For instance, in the following passage, Jewish
references appear among a multiplicity of criollo and other allusions, but the
‘bite’ lies in the Jewish element:

yo tejeré un étui penniene (con lentejoilas!) como los que vende mi tío Lévy-
Strauss en el Rest. Goldenberg (Ile Saint Louis) con campanitas para que
respiren y tintineen y todo Mineapolish sienta que disfrutás de la vida y tireas
la cácjara en el Zoilo para que la pise Azucena Maizani o Troilo o Edmuñe
Riperro y canten ese tang de la dinastía ming ‘desúbito coxal, me la agarré’!
fine estoy contenta porque mandé a la merduzia a un shlieper que casi me deja
enfinca de un Rodríguez no sé cuanto. ¡Yo, quedar Rodriz! (25 August 1970;
Correspondencia, p. 158)

The passage stands alone; it makes no coherent sense, but conjures a Jewish
atmosphere which shows Pizarnik at ease with her Jewishness, and, in the best

rezongona’ (Bajarlía, p. 18 onwards). Telaak discusses the mother–daughter relationship from

an Oedipal perspective, and examines what she terms ‘Mutterhasse’, aggressivity towards the
mother, in the context of the role of the mother in traditional orthodox Jewish culture; see
Telaak, pp. 331–42, particularly page 337.
37 Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Time (London: Dent, 1988), p. 11.
56 EVELYN FISHBURN

tradition of Jewish humour, laughing at the stereotype. For example, by mocking

the way Jewish immigrants speak Spanish in Argentina, Pizarnik is, wittingly or
otherwise, displaying her own superiority in having overcome that stage but at
the same time signalling a conspiratorial sense of identification with ‘her’ peo-
ple, emphasizing their exclusion from the accepted language of culture. The
Yiddish preferred substitution of the ‘oy’ sound for the Spanish diphthong ‘ue’ is
mimicked in ‘Zoilo’ for ‘suelo’ and ‘lentejoilas’, for ‘lentejuelas’. This mispro-
nunciation is often used in anti-Semitic caricature, or, as here, in that staple of
Jewish humour, self-mockery. The clash between the two codes – the yiddish
‘shlepper’ (‘shlieper’), and the aristocratic would-be hyphenated Hispanic
‘Rodríguez no sé cuanto’ – produces a textbook example of what humour theory
calls a cultural frisson.38 This might lie behind Pizarnik’s mock outrage at the
thought of becoming pregnant by a ‘goi’, however socially illustrious. Similarly,
the ‘Rest. Goldenberg’ is a renowned Jewish restaurant in Paris in the rue des
Rosiers, which is in the Jewish quarter, the Marais, and to (mis)place it in the
exclusive Ile de St Louis points to another joke based on a suggestion of clashing
cultures. Pizarnik did not have an uncle called Lévy-Strauss, and ‘mi tío Levy-
Strauss’ is more likely to be a way of referring to Jews as a people, or – thinking
of the key work on kinship by the famous (Jewish) anthropologist of that name
– an extended family. From ‘tío’ to ‘tía’, this last idea is repeated in the letter in
a saying by Kafka, ‘Todos los judíos tenemos una tía llamada Klara’, which
Pizarnik quotes to show Jewish solidarity, also claiming to have an Aunt Klara.
But this aunt differs from the image conjured by a stiff-necked people (‘nuestro
orgullo’); she is trivialized as someone handing out a homely Jewish delicacy
‘pepinillos en un viejo frasco de nescafe’ and playing basketball for a Jewish
athletic team, Maccabi, with someone now called Levin (Correspondencia,
p. 160). Death is never far from Pizarnik’s humour, and the Jewish ritual custom
of washing the dead ‘cuando en el cementerio juif lavan al muerto con Lux’
(Correspondencia, p. 166) is recalled with false hilarity in another letter, in a
passage that seeks to convey a feeling of joylessness amidst general joy.
The profusion of Yiddishisms or Spanish words with a Jewish inflection in
these letters serves to highlight acutely their absence in the rest of Pizarnik’s
profusely multilingual writing. For example, ‘¡Ay veiz mir!’ is a frequently heard
lament; ‘Woe is me’ is a literal rendering whose elevated register misses the inti-
macy and sense of victimization of diasporic history. ‘Minneapolish’ hints at the
city’s large Jewish population; ‘chistejes’ (for ‘chistes’) mimics the hard ‘ch’
sounds of Semitic languages; and some words are made to end with Russian-
sounding suffixes, such as Acablotski and (calle) Floridaskaia, or to start with Sh
or Sch, as in ‘Schuck’, ‘schmack’. The Argentinian author Frida Shultz de
Mantovani serves at least twice for Yiddish punning, first as Fryda Schmutz (dirt,
or rather, smut) de Manco-Capac and then as Fr. Schulltz de Schmalz (Schmaltz,
known mainly as an oversweet literary style, in fact refers to the opulence of

38 See my earlier comment on Koestler’s bisociative shock.

 DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF HUMOUR AND WORDPLAY 57

rendered fat, preferably goose fat, a ghetto luxury). In the light of the constant
wordplay in the correspondence, it would be reasonable to read these alliterative
jibes as not much more than a wish to play with language, and particularly with
names, for their sonic associations, without any specific intention beyond the
overall iconoclasm of the prose. But, significantly, in this case the punning is
based on Jewish/Yiddish sounds and word formations, showing Pizarnik’s sensi-
tivity to Jewish culture, whilst also showing a jocular sense of being at home
with it.
My purpose in exploring the Jewish references in Pizarnik’s only fairly
recently accessible diaries, poetry, correspondence, prose and notebooks was to
examine more closely the presence and significance of Judaism in her writing.
So far, Pizarnik’s Jewishness has been evaluated mainly on the basis of her poetry
as in the case of Goldberg, Senkman and Telaak. In discussing Pizarnik’s
‘carácter de “judía” ’ Piña concentrates mainly on the poetry, although she also
includes in her assessment friends’ testimonials as well as the darker texts, the
destructive, obscene humorous prose. She interprets the Jewish element in these
as an ontological mark of difference, together with other more concrete markers
of difference, namely, her being female and bisexual (Poesía y experiencia del
límite, pp. 83–4). My own focus on instances of explicit Jewish references has
not altered the previously observed fact that these are, numerically, very few, but
it has added a new perception to their nature and scope. The detailed analysis of
the Jewish element in the letters to Stutman not only gives a unique picture of
Pizarnik being entirely at home in ‘Jewspeak’, whether in the form of Yiddish
expressions and associations or in the mixing of Yiddish sounds with Spanish,
but also serves to highlight the void that its absence leaves in the humorous
prose. Pizarnik obviously had the knowledge, the inner-awareness and the Jewish
wit to have included Jewish humour more openly in her work, but did not do so.
Many reasons come to mind for this, but it would be foolish to suggest a rational
explanation for a mind as complex and unpredictable as Pizarnik’s. Better to
rejoice in the rich and inventive area of humour revealed, and to add this contro-
versial aspect of Pizarnik’s sense of Jewishness to the overall picture.

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lainsignia.org/2005/octubre/cul_044.htm
 The Tormenting Beauty of Ideals:
A Deleuzian Interpretation of Alejandra Pizarnik’s
La condesa sangrienta and Franz Kafka’s
‘In the Penal Colony’

Karl Posso

Desire for a deeper sleep that dissolves more.

The metaphysical urge is only the urge toward death.
Franz Kafka1
The excess of reason engenders the unjustifiable.
The excess of transparency engenders terror.
Jean Baudrillard2

Alejandra Pizarnik is notorious for a short prose work entitled La condesa san-
grienta, which, contrary to what is stated in the recently published Prosa com-
pleta, first appeared in 1965 under the title ‘La libertad absoluta y el horror’.3
The story was then republished several times in various journals and eventually
came out as a book in 1971, the year before Pizarnik committed suicide.
Surprisingly, this piece, which Pizarnik claimed to be her best prose, started life
as a humble book review (Diarios, pp. 464–5). A book review, however, which
soon enough elides completely the ostensible object of its scrutiny, Valentine
Penrose’s La comtesse sanglante (1962), in order to distil and transform the his-
tory therein narrated. What we have here is effectively the second most cele-
brated and oddly absolved case of plagiarism in Argentinian literature after the
works of Borges’s Pierre Menard. But it is perhaps this unconventional gesta-
tion, combining critical intent with dexterous piracy, which makes the piece so
different from the rest of Pizarnik’s work. The story is that of Erzsébet Báthory,
a sixteenth-century Hungarian countess famed for the alleged torture and murder
of some six hundred girls, who is said to have bathed in their blood in order to

1 Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1913, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1948), p. 259 (8 April 1912).
2 Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner
(Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), p. 193.
3 Alejandra Pizarnik, ‘La libertad absoluta y el horror’, Diálogos, 1:5 (1965), 46–51. In
Prosa completa Ana Becciú claims the essay first appeared in Testigo, 1:1 (1966).
 THE TORMENTING BEAUTY OF IDEALS 61

preserve her youth. Báthory has gone on to become, alongside Vlad the Impaler,
one of the main historical sources for the myth of Transylvanian vampirism –
both feature in Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould’s seminal anthology The Book of Were-
Wolves (1865).4 In the twentieth century, Báthory inspired the likes of Georges
Bataille, who claims in The Tears of Eros that ‘if Sade had known of [her] exis-
tence, there is not the slightest doubt that he would have felt the fiercest exalta-
tion; [she] would have made him howl like a wild beast’;5 and Angela Carter,
whose puckish account of the Carpathian countess as photosensitive lamia in
‘The Lady of the House of Love’ is contrasted with Pizarnik’s terser, more sinis-
ter sketch in The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales.6 These rather distinct writers all
exalt Báthory as the force of devastating sensuality which interrupts the received
order of things.
Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta, however, is merely an abridged version of
Penrose’s account – which Cortázar also plundered, albeit in a more restrained
fashion, when writing 62 Modelo para armar (1968).7 Pizarnik seizes upon
details in Penrose’s text which she considers interesting or important, but erases
the overtly fanciful dialogue between the characters and sterilizes the French
poet’s nauseating purple prose exemplified by the histrionics with which she
goes about setting the scene: ‘A time when children and virgins disappeared
without anyone being too much concerned: much better not to get mixed up in

4 Andrei Codrescu, The Blood Countess (London: Quartet Books, 1996); Sabine Baring-
Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of Terrible Superstition (London: Smith,
Elder & Co., 1865), pp. 139–41; Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London and New York:
Routledge, 1994), pp. 24–5; Clive Leatherdale, The Origins of Dracula: The Background to
Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece (Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex: Desert Island Books, 1998), pp.
141–51; Maurice Périsset, La Comtesse de sang (Paris: Éditions Pygmalion/Gérard Watelet,
1975), pp. 15–17; Gabriel Ronay, The Truth About Dracula (New York: Stein and Day, 1970);
Tony Thorne, Countess Dracula: The Life and Times of the Blood Countess, Elisabeth Báthory
(London: Bloomsbury, 1997), pp. 5–12; James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the
Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981), pp. 17–18.
5 Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros (1961), trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco, CA: City
Lights Books, 1989), pp. 138–41 (p. 139).
6 Angela Carter, ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ (1979), in The Bloody Chamber
(London: Vintage, 1995), pp. 93–108; Chris Baldick, ed., The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 466–97. See also M. A. Seabra Ferreira,
‘Alejandra Pizarnik’s “Acerca de la condesa sangrienta” and Angela Carter’s “The Lady of the
House of Love”: Transgression and the Politics of Victimization’, New Comparison, 22
(1996), 27–57; Gina Wisker, ‘Revenge of the Living Doll: Angela Carter’s Horror Writing’, in
The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism, ed. Joseph Bristow and
Trev Lynn Broughton (London and New York: Longman, 1997), pp. 116–31.
7 Ana María Hernández, ‘Vampires and Vampiresses: A Reading of 62’, in The Final
Island: The Fiction of Julio Cortázar, ed. Jaime Alazraki and Ivar Ivask (Norman, OK:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), pp. 109–14; Ángeles Mateo del Pino, ‘El territorio de la
memoria: mujeres malditas, La condesa sangrienta de Alejandra Pizarnik’, Rassegna
Iberistica, 71 (2001), 15–31; Silvia Scarafia and Elisa Molina, ‘Escritura y perversión en La
condesa sangrienta de Alejandra Pizarnik y 62 Modelo para armar de Julio Cortázar’, in Un
tal Julio, ed. María Elena Legaz (Córdoba: Alción Editora, 1998), pp. 89–114.
62 KARL POSSO

this sort of thing. But their hearts, their blood, what happened to those?’8 Pizarnik
limits herself to reporting selected details about Báthory in the present tense, and
uses simple, crisp language; in marked contrast to Penrose, the narrative is intro-
duced thus: ‘Sentada en su trono, la condesa mira torturar y oye gritar’ (Prosa,
pp. 282–3). Penrose dramatizes: ‘Erzsébet lowered her eyes . . . above the brace-
lets, on the spot where the blood had lain for several moments, she noticed that
her flesh had the translucent glow of a candle illuminated by the light of another
one’ (Penrose, p. 70); whereas Pizarnik states: ‘la condesa, para preservar su
lozanía, tomaba baños de sangre humana’ (Prosa, p. 292). On the whole the text
advances through a series of unadorned declarations and examples; attempts on
the author’s part to probe her protagonist’s inner being are limited; every detail is
meant to form part of a strictly rational exposition. It seems paradoxical that in
the act of condensing rather than writing ‘ex nihilo’ Pizarnik achieves a forceful
directness when it comes to themes such as the anguish of being, violence and
death: themes which in the laboured succinctness of her poetry often emerge as
somewhat hackneyed considerations, or alternatively which atrophy within the
solipsistic miasma of her journals. The curt reportage of La condesa sangrienta
plays a fundamental role in compelling the reader to persevere with the horror:
by dispensing with the dramatic embroidery of fairy tale, the text acquires an air
of rational acuity regarding the uncanny fantasy of free will and destruction; so
the lure of the rational – of elucidation – makes sure the reader reads on.9
A more significant paradox therefore is the disjunction between the narra-
tive’s sustained awe for the ‘belleza convulsiva’ (Prosa, p. 282) of the epony-
mous ‘condesa sangrienta’s’ ‘libertad absoluta’, and the concluding disavowal of
said absolute freedom by the narrator, who has willingly subjected herself and
her readership to the ordeal of the narrative. My aim here is to analyse this dis-
junction in the light of Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‘Coldness and Cruelty’ (1967), in
which he sets out to dissociate the symptoms of so-called sadomasochism into
two distinct ‘perversions’. For Deleuze, masochism relates to the ego’s destruc-
tion of the superego, and sadism to the expulsion of the ego in the production of
an ideal of authority. But perhaps the incompatibility of sadism and masochism
is best illustrated by the following old joke: ‘A sadist marries a masochist and,
when they arrive at their honeymoon suite, the masochist describes in detail all
the things the sadist should do, at which point the sadist replies, “You’d like that,
wouldn’t you?” ’10 A genuine sadist, in other words, could never tolerate a mas-
ochistic victim. In any case, Deleuze claims that the writings of the Marquis de

8 Valentine Penrose, The Bloody Countess, trans. Alexander Trocchi (London: Calder and
Boyars, 1970), p. 11. It may come as little surprise then that the trite Hammer horror, Countess
Dracula – Dir. Peter Sasdy, Rank Organization, 1971 – is based on an adaptation of Penrose’s
text.
9 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in Art and Literature: Jensen’s Gradiva,
Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, ed. Albert Dickson, trans. James Strachey, The Penguin
Freud Library (London: Penguin Books, 1973– ), XIV (1990), pp. 335–76 (p. 372).
10 Nancy J. Holland, ‘What Deleuze Has to Say to Battered Women’, Philosophy and
Literature, 17:1 (1993), 16–25 (p. 25).
 THE TORMENTING BEAUTY OF IDEALS 63

Sade (1740–1814) and those of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1835–1895) serve

a clinical function by defining two distinct links between psychic life, pain and
sexual pleasure.11 Deleuze argues that the worlds of sadism and masochism sim-
ply do not communicate: they repel each other both structurally and philosophi-
cally. His intricate cleaving of the sadomasochistic composite offers a useful
analytical scalpel with which to dissect Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangri-
enta. Deleuze’s essay will also serve to flay the callused body of criticism which
over the past four decades has recklessly applied the term ‘Sadean’ to the piece
simply because it deals with torture, without paying due attention to the stylistic
and philosophical implications of such a label or to the text’s problematic affili-
ation to the art of Masoch by presenting itself as a contract with the reader – a
contract which it then goes on to breach rather dramatically.
On first reading, there are certainly sufficient points of contiguity between La
condesa sangrienta and Sade’s The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom:
both texts consist of enumerations of violent descriptions – ‘les aplicaban los
atizadores enrojecidos al fuego; les cortaban los dedos con tijeras o cizallas; les
punzaban las llagas, les practicaban incisiones con navajas’ (Prosa, p. 285) –
within self-contained vignettes of homicidal debauchery.12 In Pizarnik each of
the eleven vignettes following the introductory section carries its own title: ‘La
virgen de hierro’, in which an anthropomorphic torture device skewers its vic-
tims in a seductive embrace; ‘Muerte por agua’, in which cold water is poured
over a naked girl in the snow until she becomes a perfectly preserved ice statue;
and so on through a list of ‘baños de sangre’ and assorted ‘torturas clásicas’ all of
which are recorded with sangfroid, scientific precision. As in Sade, it soon
becomes obvious to the reader that this gruesome inventory remains subsidiary
to the demonstration of an idealized or pure reason: Countess Báthory’s ideal of
a world of pure negation. Bathing in the blood of virgins may be meant to negate
the body’s passage through time, but unlike the version of events offered by
Penrose, in which intense vanity determines the unfolding atrocities, for
Pizarnik’s Countess negation goes far beyond the cosmetic (Penrose, pp. 70–2).
The Countess negates aging and therefore life, but she does so absolutely, to the
point of identifying with death itself as the ultimate and therefore perfect nega-
tion: ‘nunca nadie no quiso de tal modo envejecer, esto es: morir. Por eso, tal vez
[la condesa] representaba y encarnaba a la Muerte. Porque, ¿cómo ha de morir la
Muerte?’ (Prosa, p. 287). Pizarnik’s Báthory inherits this absolute negation
through ultimate reasoning from the libertine. As Pierre Klossowski argues in
the essay ‘Nature as Destructive Principle’, for the libertine there are two modes
of nature or being: a secondary nature which is the continuum of creation and
destruction, and a primary nature of pure negation which remains an ideal – pure

11 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York:
Zone, 1999), pp. 15–138.
12 María Victoria García-Serrano, ‘Perversión y lesbianismo en “Acerca de la condesa
sangrienta” de Alejandra Pizarnik’, Torre de Papel, 2 (1994), 5–17 (p. 7).
64 KARL POSSO

negation as the ideal of reason itself.13 The rage or despair of the libertine and of
Pizarnik’s Countess Báthory is born of the realization of the triviality of their
(personal) destructive actions in relation to the (impersonal) ideal which they can
only reach through reasoning. Actual death and destruction belong to secondary
nature: they are merely the reverse of creation and change; they are derivative
and so do not belong to the primary nature of impersonal or immanent negation,
that which is symbolized for Báthory through the paradox of accessing eternal
life by negating it and identifying with death itself – ‘Porque, ¿cómo ha de morir
la Muerte?’
In a bid to access the impersonal, Báthory is compelled to negate secondary
nature and this includes her own ego. Furthermore, in order to prove the idea of
absolute negation, something which cannot be given in actual experience, she is
confined to endless demonstration, hence the unrelenting repetitiveness of
Pizarnik’s Sadean text. Báthory, like Sade, strives to make the ideal a reality: she
demonstrates her reason and instructs her victims with no consideration for the
victim’s approval or conviction. Furthermore, for the libertine Countess the
number of victims and violent acts is of capital importance because quantity
depreciates the value of individual objects – and the aim here is to refute the
personal, that is, secondary nature; by depreciating the value of objects, both
one’s reality and that of the other is diminished (which is also why the victims’
suffering is dramatized in Penrose’s text but not referred to in Pizarnik’s). This
explains the well-known apathy of the libertine and the continual return of
Pizarnik’s narrative to the impassive gaze of the silent Countess, whose active
participation in torture can only be described as infrequent: the text is punctu-
ated by references such as ‘sola espectadora silenciosa’ (Prosa, p. 283); ‘la
sonámbula vestida de blanco – lenta y silenciosa’ (p. 284); ‘el negro silencio de
la condesa’ (p. 292); ‘su terrible erotismo de piedra’ (p. 294). Critics have gener-
ally accounted for the Countess’s silence by concurring with Cristina Piña’s
assertion that her reluctance or inability to speak is a result of narcissistic impo-
tence, that is, of Lacanian specularity;14 others, in the context of the text’s seem-
ing non sequitur: ‘Y a propósito de espejos: nunca pudieron aclararse los rumores
acerca de la homosexualidad de la condesa’ (Prosa, p. 290), have gone on to
develop more fully a reading of silence as coded or closeted lesbian eroticism.15

13 Pierre Klossowski, ‘Nature as Destructive Principle’, in Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days
of Sodom and Other Writings, ed. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (London: Arrow,
1989), pp. 65–86.
14 Cristina Piña, ‘La palabra obscena’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 5 (1990), 17–38
(p. 30); Cristina Piña, Poesía y experiencia del límite: leer a Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos
Aires: Botella al Mar, 1999), pp. 46–7.
15 Sylvia Molloy, ‘From Sappho to Bappho: Diverting the Sexual in Alejandra Pizarnik’,
in Sex and Sexuality in Latin America, ed. Daniel Balderston and Donna J. Guy (New York:
New York University Press, 1997), pp. 250–8; Suzanne Chávez Silverman, ‘The Look that
Kills: The “Unacceptable Beauty” of Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta’, in
¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, ed. Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian
Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 281–305.
 THE TORMENTING BEAUTY OF IDEALS 65

All of these readings, however, confine the text to the preoccupations or passions
of secondary nature. Silence or apathy in Pizarnik’s text is intended to go far
beyond this. Apathy, which for Sade distinguishes the libertine from the tawdry
‘enthusiastic’ pornographer, crucially renders the individual capable of doing in
cold blood acts which would have brought remorse when done in a moment of
frenzy. So, if the sadist carries the exaltation of the ego to its height, at the height
of exaltation comes apathy where the ego abolishes itself simultaneously with
the other, or as Pizarnik puts it: ‘[como si] Teseo además de ser él mismo, hub-
iese sido, también, el Minotauro; matarlo, entonces, habría exigido matarse’
(Prosa, p. 290). The pleasure of apathy, in which the ego and the other are simul-
taneously abolished, is a pleasure which breaks away from the act of destruction
itself; as Klossowski states, in this dissociation ‘the Sadean conscience repro-
duces in its own operations the perpetual motion of nature which creates but
which, in creating, sets up obstacles for herself. The only way she [Nature]
recovers her liberty, even momentarily, is by destroying her own works.’16 By
negating nature within the ego and outside the ego, as we find with Báthory,
apathetic pleasure becomes the pleasure of demonstrative reason through repeti-
tive description, which is precisely what we find in La condesa sangrienta’s
drive toward absolute negation.
Everything in Pizarnik’s narrative is subordinated to the imperative of repeti-
tive description of torture, violence and eroticism – to the extent that the tale–es-
say contains passages such as this, less than half-way through: ‘Resumo: el
castillo medieval; la sala de torturas; las tiernas muchachas; las viejas y horren-
das sirvientas; la hermosa alucinada . . .’ (Prosa, p. 286). As a result, Penrose’s
somewhat imaginatively embellished account of the Countess’s historical context
and her trial (she includes extracts from the court proceedings in an appendix) are
given short shrift by Pizarnik. The complexities of the Báthory dynasty are
reduced to a cursory genealogy of feral prurience; and the details of the Countess’s
legendary trial are abridged thus by Pizarnik: the proliferation of rumours regard-
ing the Countess’s activities obliged the Hungarian palatine, Thurzó, to investi-
gate; he found her guilty, and sentenced her to be immured perpetually within her
castle (rather like Sade imprisoned in the Bastille). But at this point Pizarnik’s
focus returns, once again, to the Countess’s monstrous apathy: a woman on trial
who cannot be bothered to defend herself or to complain, but who calmly states
‘que todo aquello era su derecho de mujer noble y de alto rango’ (Prosa, p. 295)
and then returns to a state of imperturbable quiescence. Regarding this ‘derecho
de mujer noble’, one should add that, with the exception of the trial, because of
the extended absences of her warrior husband and the remote patronage of the
Habsburgs (who brought about her downfall but ultimately prevented her execu-
tion), the historical Countess Báthory (1560–1614) independently ruled many

16 Klossowski, ‘Nature as Destructive Principle’, p. 86. See also Leo Bersani, A Future for
Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (London: Marion Boyars, 1978), pp. 160–85
(p. 160): ‘If pleasure results from the reduction of tension due to stimuli, the ultimate pleasure
is the elimination of all stimuli, and the wish to die is a fantasy of ecstatic inertia.’
66 KARL POSSO

castles and estates along a vast swathe of feudal Hungary during most of her
adult life; in practice then, she had enjoyed absolute authority.17 And for Pizarnik,
inasmuch as Báthory adopted the legislative and prohibitive function of a
Hungarian patriarch within the exclusively female realm of her fortress, the
Countess is rendered all the more sexually ambiguous. However, within the nar-
rative’s scheme of sadistic apathy, in which Pizarnik largely divests her character
of political context, qualities and emotions, all things of a secondary nature are
attenuated and remain ambiguous so that Báthory becomes a somewhat rarefied
expression of ‘the law’. The irony here is that, as in Sade, Báthory’s embodiment
of the law undermines the law by instituting an overarching principle of absolute
evil which in effect becomes an anarchic ultra-law.
The issue of Báthory as law is significant in terms of the ideal of absolute
negation which the text appears to promote, and so is worth reflecting on. If we
take the law to be a secondary power derived from the supreme Platonic princi-
ple, ‘the Good’, then lawful behaviour is ‘the best’ in that it brings us into clos-
est proximity of ‘the Good’.18 As Deleuze argues, there is a great deal of irony
in the operation that seeks to trace the law back to an absolute, unreachable
‘Good’, and humour in ‘the attempt to sanction the law by recourse to an infi-
nitely more righteous Best’ (Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, p. 82). In the
Critique of Practical Reason, Kant reversed classical order and made ‘the Good’
contingent upon the law, thus making the law entirely and explicitly self-
grounded; in other words, absolute. In so doing, Kant makes the object of the
law – including moral law – clearly unknowable: the law defines a realm of
transgression where one is already guilty, and where one oversteps the bounds
without knowing what they are; punishment does not reveal the nature of the
law, it just leaves it in an indeterminate state which equates it to the specificity
of the punishment itself. Kant, in other words, delineates the law narrated by

17 Since 1526 Hungary had served the Habsburgs as a buffer against Ottoman invasion;
this meant that the Habsburg overlords often pandered to Hungarian nobles in order to keep
them from siding with the Turks. During most of Erzsébet Báthory’s lifetime, therefore, power
in and around the Carpathian region was much more diffuse – feudal – than a late sixteenth-
century map of Habsburg territory might suggest. It was only when Holy Roman Emperor
Rudolf II reneged on the Peace of Vienna shortly after signing it in 1606 that the suppression
of all Báthories became a pressing Habsburg concern. The situation was exacerbated after
1608 when his successor to the Hungarian throne, the future Emperor Matthias, sought to oust
Erzsébet’s pro-Turkish, Protestant nephew, Gábor Báthory, from the principality of
Transylvania. Regarding the Countess’s trial: the public decapitation of a Habsburg-related
noble could not, however, be countenanced by the Viennese court, hence her immurement.
C. A. Macartney, Hungary: A Short History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1962),
pp. 73–4, 79–80; Karin J. MacHardy, ‘The Rise of Absolutism and Noble Rebellion in Early
Modern Habsburg Austria, 1570–1620’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34:3
(1992), 407–38 (p. 430); Denis Sinor, History of Hungary (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1959), pp. 188–91; Thorne, Countess Dracula, pp. 21–33, 126–31, 191–7.
18 Iris Murdoch, ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’, in Virtue Ethics, ed.
Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 99–117 (pp. 110–
11).
 THE TORMENTING BEAUTY OF IDEALS 67

Kafka in The Trial and more specifically perhaps in ‘In the Penal Colony’ (1914;
published 1919), a story I would like to turn to briefly because of its relevance
to the ideas broached by Pizarnik in La condesa sangrienta.
Kafka’s story of a foreign explorer in a penal colony on a tropical island,
centres on the event of a public execution which is about to be carried out by an
officer using a punitive writing machine created by the former commandant of
the colony. A criminal is to be executed for failing to salute the closed door
behind which his superior is asleep and for then losing his temper when whipped
for being neglectful. The officer explains the functioning of the machine to the
explorer with an atomistic sense of detail: a prisoner is stripped bare and shack-
led to the machine’s quivering bed; a ‘scriber’ governing the movements of a
glass ‘harrow’ embedded with needles then engraves the prisoner’s sentence
upon his body over a twelve-hour period, at which point he dies. The harrow is
made of glass so that spectators may read the writing upon the victim’s body,
but the machine’s script is utterly illegible. More alarming though is the fact
that the prisoner is never tried because, as is often the case in Kafka, ‘guilt is
never to be doubted’.19 A prisoner is never told his sentence, instead he experi-
ences it on his body, and the truth of the law is then revealed to onlookers
through the expression of enlightenment that is said to radiate from his eyes
during the sixth hour of torture (Kafka, pp. 154–9). As Foucault would have it
in Discipline and Punish (1975), punishment in public operates as the lustful
actualization of the law that justifies the existence of the atavistic (penal) com-
munity – it is the excessive manifestation or spectacle of punishment which
produces the transcendence of the law.20 However, in this case, when the for-
eign explorer refuses to voice his support for this form of punishment to the
new commandant of the colony (who finds the machine archaic and distasteful),
the officer – an avid disciple of the old commandant, the machine’s creator –
decides to throw himself, rather than the prisoner, on to the machine. The dilap-
idated apparatus then malfunctions, so instead of achieving death through
corporeal enlightenment, the officer suffers the indignity of a summary cruci-
fixion and impalement. Following this event, the explorer is led to the grave of
the former commandant – the gravestone, concealed by a table in a tea house,
proclaims that one day the commandant will return to the colony. The traveller
then flees the island, fending off the former prisoner and his guard who attempt
to escape with him.
In ‘In the Penal Colony’ the law is the undecipherable scripture of the old com-
mandant, a figure who has receded godlike from the work he has created. The

19 Franz Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’, in Franz Kafka, Stories 1904–1924, trans. J. A.
Underwood (London: Abacus, 1995), pp. 147–78 (p. 155). (Henceforth Kafka, with page
references given after quotations in the text.)
20 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 3–69. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Genealogy
of Morals’, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in What is Justice?, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Mark C.
Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 262.
68 KARL POSSO

story has been read as an allegory of post-colonialism;21 as a reflection of the col-

lapse of the Habsburg empire and the disintegration of Europe during World War
I, and as a prophecy of the Third Reich.22 In the same way, Pizarnik’s La condesa
sangrienta was subsequently appropriated – or even read anachronistically – as an
allegory of the various military dictatorships that prevailed in Argentina from
1966 onwards.23 In other words, Kafka’s story has been read repeatedly as a con-
demnation of absolute power; but the point to be made here is that the explorer
does not represent a triumph of liberalism over absolutism, given what follows the
collapse of the machine: the explorer’s orders are ignored by the reprieved pris-
oner, that is, the subject of the law (Kafka, p. 176), and in the end the explorer has
to skulk off the island leaving behind him chaos and the prospect of the old order’s
messianic return. All legal structures in the story are thus negated: what we have
here is the ironic erasure of the ideal of the law’s transcendence via the arch-law
of absolute negation. The result of this is that the law emerges as a volatile product
of desire; the law is relational rather than transcendent in that it pervades the indi-
viduals and components of the social/judicial machine. Kafka’s immanent law
remains unspecified, it only makes itself known in the characters’ desire for (tran-
scendent) order and the actualization of sentences. The same is true of Báthory as
law: the Countess desires the ideal of pure negation, but she is also desired by the
people as an organizing force (her transcendence emerges as a relational product
of immanent desire). Ironically, she does not issue edicts, only punishments, so
her wards and servants live in terror of their unknown transgressions, which they
only become aware of through the manifestation of their mistress’s wrath. In other
words, Báthory becomes an absolute law of unjustified cruelty.
‘Obedience’ to the law, as Kafka and Pizarnik show, is therefore not governed
by the desire to approximate to ‘the Good’, but by a sense of guilt which is
grounded in the primal repression of social subjectivity – Báthory’s maids are
always already guilty because they are the products of household law (symbolic
order). However, Pizarnik, like Sade, responds to the idea of the law through
irony, an anti-law of pure negation. Báthory as law submits to an idealized super-
ego which annihilates the ego itself: by apathetically destroying her objects, her
victims, the sadistic ego annihilates herself; on the few occasions she is an active
participant in torture she either soaks in the blood of her victims or bites them,
thus abasing herself by blurring the subject/object relationship; more significantly

21 Elizabeth Boa, Kafka: Gender, Class, Race in the Letters and Fictions (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 134–9; David Pan, ‘Kafka as Populist: Re-reading ‘In the Penal
Colony’, Telos, 101 (1994), 3–40; Karen Piper, ‘The Language of the Machine: A Post-
Colonial Reading of Kafka’, Journal of the Kafka Society of America, 20:1–2 (1996), 42–54.
22 Gary Adelman, ‘Fearful Symmetry: Beckett’s The Lost Ones’, Journal of Modern
Literature, 26:2 (2002–3), 165–70 (p. 168).
23 David William Foster, ‘Of Power and Virgins: Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa
sangrienta’, in Structures of Power: Essays on Twentieth-Century Spanish-American Fiction,
ed. Terry J. Peavler and Peter Standish (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996),
pp. 145–58. Foster’s argument implies that the text was written either during or after the
Onganiato. He gives an incorrect date of first publication – 1976.
 THE TORMENTING BEAUTY OF IDEALS 69

though, Báthory is already silent and listless when the law – the absolutist
Habsburg superego – decrees her immurement at the end of the tale (despotic law
merely negates itself momentarily here in order to preserve its transcendence).
Why are the ruminations on the law in both La condesa sangrienta and ‘In the
Penal Colony’ eroticized? Freud shows how the formation of the narcissistic ego
and the superego involves a process of desexualization of Eros (libido): within
psychic life the desexualization of libido through idealization leads to the power
of the imagination in the ego, and through the process of identification it consti-
tutes the power of thought in the superego. Freud maintains that the desexualiza-
tion of libido can have two possible effects on the pleasure principle – either
sublimation or neurosis. With neurosis, ‘perverted’ resexualized libido then takes
either the ego or the superego as its object. Thought is a form of sublimation
which proceeds from the formation of the superego, but in sadism, owing to the
ego’s overinvestment in the superego, the desexualization involved in the cre-
ation of an idealized superego is accompanied by the sexualization of thought
itself. Thus in Kafka the old commandant’s complete dedication to the thought
of order and justice – to the point where the product of his thoughts affords the
erasure of his presence/ego – means that his law machine turns out to be nefari-
ously erotic: a machine which stiffens and protractedly penetrates the criminal’s
body in an ‘unmistakable travesty of copulation’ in order to offer orgasmic illu-
mination.24 Similarly, Báthory is reduced by Pizarnik to a superego who exer-
cises cruelty to the fullest extent, and instantaneously recovers her full sexuality
as soon as she diverts her power outwards: ‘si el acto sexual implica una suerte
de muerte, Erzébet Báthory necesitaba de la muerte visible, elemental, grosera,
para poder, a su vez, morir de esa muerte figurada que viene a ser el orgasmo’
(Prosa, p. 287). The fact that she appears to have no ego other than that of her
victims, just as the Penal Colony’s law only manifests itself in the bodies of its
criminals, explains the apparent paradox of sadism, its pseudo-masochism
(Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, p. 124). Báthory enjoys suffering the pain she
inflicts upon others; when her destructive madness is deflected outwards it is
accompanied by an identification with the external victim. The irony of sadism
lies in the two-fold operation whereby Báthory necessarily projects her dissolved
ego outward and as a result experiences what is outside her as her only ego –
devastating melancholia: ‘su interior es un espacio de color de luto; nada pasa
allí, nadie pasa. Es una escena sin decorados donde el yo inerte es asisitido por el
yo que sufre por esa inercia’ (Prosa, p. 290); only torture livens things up
temporarily:

por un breve tiempo pueden borrar la silenciosa galería de ecos y de espejos

que es el alma melancólica . . . hasta pueden iluminar ese recinto enlutado y
transformarlo en una suerte de cajita de música con figuras de vivos y alegres

24 Clayton Koelb, ‘The Margin in the Middle: Kafka’s Other Reading of Reading’, in
Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance: Centenary Readings, ed. Alan Udoff
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 76–86 (p. 77).
70 KARL POSSO

colores que danzan y cantan deliciosamente. Luego, cuando se acabe la cuerda,

habrá que retornar a la inmovilidad y al silencio (Prosa, p. 290)

There is no real unity with masochism here, or any common cause, but a process
which according to Deleuze is quite specific to sadism – a pseudo-masochism
which is entirely and exclusively sadistic and which is only crudely similar to
masochism. Irony is the operation of the overbearing superego, the art of expel-
ling or negating the ego, with all its sadistic consequences. The imperative of
repetition and demonstration that governs both the Countess’s actions and the
sovereignty of the penal writing machine aims to neutralize the dimension of
eroticism and pain through excess in order to reinstate the purity of thought; as
mentioned earlier, there is a progression in sadism from the negative to negation;
that is, from the negative as a partial process of destruction endlessly reiterated,
to negation as an absolute idea of reason.
It will come as no surprise that at the time of writing La condesa sangrienta,
and in fact throughout the last decade of her life, Pizarnik became increasingly
obsessed with Kafka; references to him, his diaries and narratives become pro-
gressively more frequent in her journals with the passing of each year. It is in
relation to Kafka and Jesus, in a diary entry dated 25 September 1967, that
Pizarnik elaborates her own Kantian dismissal of the law grounded in the sover-
eignty of ‘the Good’ and replaces it with a law of inverted Platonism: a law iden-
tified with the (impersonal) primary nature of absolute negation, which is in
every way opposed to the (personal/egotistical) demands and the rules of sec-
ondary nature:

La Presencia máxima es, paradójicamente, esta ausencia sin mezcla. . . . Jesús

es un pequeño judío enamorado de ciertas ideas (amor, caridad, compasión), y
las ama porque nunca las vio en la dite réalité. . . . Jesús amaba esas tres ideas
pero en tanto ideas. Digo que imagino a Jesús mandando a la mierda a los
apóstoles, golpeando a su madre pero llorando a solas mientras elucubra sus
ideas de bondad luminosa. . . . Su antípoda es Kafka. Pero comparar a Kafka
con Jesús es risible. Jesús sería el lacayo indigno de Kafka. Jesús, aquí está tu
civilización judeo-cristiana con sus hospicios y sus cámaras de tortura. No la
respeto. Me resulta roñosa y tortuosa. Pero a los judíos como Kafka los amo
. . . Pero ser judío significa ser poseedor de un secreto. Me acerco a ese secreto.
Lo veo pero no lo leo. Pero esto sí: soy judía y no dejo de estar contenta –
contenta a muerte y con muerte. (Diarios, pp. 432–3)

From the assertion of a primary nature (‘presencia máxima’) of ‘ausencia sin

mezcla’, Pizarnik goes on to dismiss Jesus Christ as the embodiment of the iron-
ically tortuous false laws or ideals of secondary nature – love, charity, compas-
sion – in short, the unknowable Platonic ‘Good’. In Kafka, the melancholy man
who ordered that all his work be destroyed, she finds the apotheosis of negation;
as the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, she finds in her fellow Jew – per-
haps in the wake of the Holocaust – a heightened affinity to fatality. The secret
she tentatively identifies as death in the above journal entry – death or something
 THE TORMENTING BEAUTY OF IDEALS 71

akin to it, something sensed but unknown – reads as an intimation of the Freudian
death instinct, Thanatos, which can never be given as such in experience, and
can therefore only be spoken about in speculative terms. Critics have identified
such speculation as the crux of Pizarnik’s poetry and as the strident overture to
her suicide; 25 but it is in La condesa sagrienta that this speculation is at its most
refined given the previously mentioned formulation of the Countess’s morbid
desire to become death, because death alone is that which cannot die. Beyond
death’s concrete relation to the body as its limit, which is what we find in ‘In the
Penal Colony’ – actual, personal deaths – death in La condesa sangrienta is cel-
ebrated as the impersonal absolute – death as an infinitive – whereby ‘death
turns against death; where dying is the negation of death, and the impersonality
of dying no longer indicates only the moment when I disappear outside myself,
but rather the moment when death loses itself in itself’.26 (In relation to the
poetry, Frank Graziano highlights the fundamental paradox of Pizarnik’s com-
mitment to the failure of writing: she attempts with increasing feverishness to
recover or sustain ‘immediate life’ through the very medium which abstracts and
preserves it as ‘non-existence’; this paradox replicates the Sadean logic of want-
ing to become death because death alone cannot die.27)
Unlike the Platonic ‘Good’, which is a transcendent ideal, Thanatos although
absolute is immanent to being. And the reason for this distinction is offered by
Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). There Freud explains that the
repeated binding of Eros – the energetic links of excitations and the biological
bonds between cells – produces in us time as a cumulative, psychological unfold-
ing in which every living present contains both the past and the present to come.28
(This delineation of the immanence of Thanatos with respect to psychological
time – or Bergsonian ‘duration’ – is adumbrated by Pizarnik in the contempla-
tion of the lugubrious present as a concentrated point of an infinite and virtual
open whole of time in Extracción de la piedra de locura [1968].29) At the start of
life Eros includes the preceding moment of inanimate matter, Thanatos, and sim-
ilarly, it brings with it the moment after life, or the return to Thanatos. ‘Neither

25 Carolina Depetris, Aporética de la muerte: estudio crítico sobre Alejandra Pizarnik

(Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2004), pp. 164–78; Alexandra Fitts, ‘Alejandra
Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta and the Lure of the Absolute’, Letras Femeninas, XXIV, 1:2
(1998), 23–35; Susana H. Haydu, Alejandra Pizarnik: evolución de un lenguaje poético
(Washington: Interamer, 1996), pp. 86–102; María Negroni, El testigo lúcido: la obra de
sombra de Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2003); Marta Sierra, ‘De caníbales,
bucaneros y polígrafas: escritura, obscenidad y mutilación en Alejandra Pizarnik’, Latin
American Literary Review, 33:66 (2005), 77–94 (p. 81).
26 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (London:
Athlone, 1990), p. 153.
27 Frank Graziano, Alejandra Pizarnik: A Profile (Durango, CO: Logbridge-Rhodes,
1987), pp. 10–12.
28 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in On Metapsychology: The
Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. Angela Richards, trans. James Strachey, The Penguin Freud
Library (London: Penguin Books, 1973– ), II (1991), pp. 269–338 (pp. 336–8).
29 Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracción de la piedra de locura (1968), in Poesía, pp. 213–58.
72 KARL POSSO

Eros nor Thanatos can be given in experience; all that is given are combinations
of both – the role of Eros being to bind the energy of Thanatos and to subject
these combinations to the pleasure principle in the Id’ (Deleuze, ‘Coldness and
Cruelty’, pp. 115–16).30 Eros is the ever-repeating synthesis which constitutes
the present, but Eros only emerges from the larger field of the pure form of time,
the groundless dimension of Thanatos, a dimension convulsed by an incessant
repetition of a simultaneous past, present and future – in other words, the maca-
bre eternity rhapsodized by Bataille and aspired to by Pizarnik’s Countess.31
Thanatos is an absolute (primary nature), but this absolute negative does not
exist in the unconscious because destruction is always presented as the other side
of a construction, as an instinctual drive which is necessarily combined with
Eros (secondary nature). So beyond the repetition that links life comes the repe-
tition that erases and destroys, that emulated by the repetition of the sadistic
superego’s demonstration which tries to access the inanimate realm of Thanatos,
from which all life emerges and returns. Thanatos as an ideal represents, not a
separate world beyond the sensible world, but a contestatory force of violent
disequilibrium within the sensible world.
And it is with the most perverse disequilibrium that La condesa sangrienta
concludes; it ends, as mentioned at the outset, with a crushing narratorial dis-
avowal of the preceding celebration of the Countess’s cold and unremitting dem-
onstration of absolute negation in freedom. It does this with a surprising line of
apparent ethical re-alignment: ‘Como Sade en sus escritos . . . la condesa Báthory
alcanzó, más allá de todo límite, el último fondo del desenfreno. Ella es una
prueba más de que la libertad absoluta de la criatura humana es horrible’ (Prosa,
p. 296). But the irony of this statement is guaranteed because it comes at the end
of a text which has completely undermined judgement – and the law which pro-
nounces such judgements. La condesa sangrienta initially presents itself as a
book review; it engages its readers through the abnegatory display of masochistic
subservience to the book (superego) it is about to praise, only to proceed by tear-
ing up this contract. After the first few lines, direct references to Penrose as source
are barred from the text; Pizarnik’s piece disavows its own lack of originality – its
plagiarism – in order to speak about Báthory with intimacy, and so, ironically,
making manifest the notion that all experience in writing is inauthentic (lifeless).
This is reminiscent of Kafka’s law-writing machine: a machine meant to vindi-
cate by producing on the victim’s body an inscription faithful to his experience,
but which, through the officer, makes patently clear that ‘the belief that writing
redeems insofar as it produces moral illuminations of experience is a belief to be

30 In this context the Id is simply taken to mean the unconscious system in Freud’s first
model of the psyche.
31 Georges Bataille, The History of Eroticism, in The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Urzone Books, 1988), II and III, pp. 84–6, 109–10; Georges Bataille, Inner
Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988),
pp. 71–2. See also Melanie Nicholson, Evil, Madness, and the Occult in Argentine Poetry
(Florida: University Press of Florida, 2002), pp. 86–9.
 THE TORMENTING BEAUTY OF IDEALS 73

resisted’.32 Pizarnik does not judge (review) Penrose’s book; she gainfully and
sadistically preys on and repeats it in an act of Menardian vampirism in order to
cancel it out – but in so doing she is also cancelling out the legitimacy of her own
writing and its claims to moral illumination. The final judgement in La condesa
sangrienta returns the reader to a notion of moral law in order to underscore the
transgressive nature of the acts described, and so it intensifies the horror and
pleasure of the text; but this judgement is delivered by an authorial voice which,
through the breach of contract with the reader who expected a review, has already
established itself as being thoroughly ‘unlawful’; hence the overwhelming irony.
By the end of La condesa sangrienta the validity of all judgement – moral or
otherwise – has already been undermined and dismissed as a consideration of the
secondary order; a consideration which vanishes in the context of the ideal sover-
eignty of absolute negation.

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 Alejandra Pizarnik, Surrealism and Reading

Jason Wilson

This essay will explore Alejandra Pizarnik’s years in Paris (1960–64) as a reader
of surrealism at its source, and the effects this intense reading had on her work,
specifically on the title piece from her Extracción de la piedra de locura (1968,
but written in 1964). The inter-textual density of her work obviously implies
careful reading on her part, and yet, paradoxically, her work appears to discard
allusion and bookish matters to deal directly with her inner world and its fraught
relationship with language, what Bernardo Ezequiel Koremblit called her ‘dela-
tora transparencia’.1 It could be that so much study, so much jettisoned literary
work was a cause of her sense of impotence, of not being able to find the authen-
tic language of being she sought inside herself, even contributing to the now
mythical sense of being haunted by a future suicide. That is, so much library
work contributed to her mutism, to her inability to hear the music.
Cristina Piña, her first biographer, quoted a critic and friend, Ivonne Bordelois,
as noting that her poetry did not read like conventional surrealism: ‘el parentesco
vital de Alejandra con el surrealismo es obvio, su escritura está lejos del
surrealismo’.2 César Aira, another friend, developed this crucial insight by situ-
ating Alejandra Pizarnik in the ‘estela’ of surrealism. Surrealism for him was
primarily ‘un sistema de lecturas, el más rico y productivo de los tiempos mod-
ernos’, where he would also situate his own stream of bizarre short novels.3
Rather than stimulating a mimetic urge to become a surrealist by practising auto-
matic writing and the myth of the authenticity of the first draft, Pizarnik’s
engagement with surrealism led to her developing a strong critical sense of not
imitating blindly what she read. Edgardo Dobry noted that Pizarnik ‘seemed’ to
be conscious ‘del agotamiento de los métodos del surrealismo’.4 But there is no
need for that ‘seemed’. That is, Alejandra Pizarnik expressed a critical posture
towards surrealism in her texts, as well as in her essays.5 There are several

1 Bernardo Ezequiel Koremblit, Todas las que ella era: ensayo sobre Alejandra Pizarnik
(Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1991), p. 93.
2 Cristina Piña, Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991; 2nd edn, Corregidor,
1999), p. 100.
3 César Aira, Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1998), pp. 11–15.
4 Edgardo Dobry, ‘La poesía de Alejandra Pizarnik: una lectura de Extracción de la piedra
de locura’, in Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 644 (2004), 33–43 (p. 36).
5 This posture is also observed by Carolina Depetris, who refers to Pizarnik’s ‘referencia
78 JASON WILSON

explanations for this. The most important explanation emerges from Aira’s
notion of ‘estela’. Alejandra Pizarnik arrived in Paris well after surrealism’s hey-
day, its heroic period in the 1920s and its break-up over revolutionary politics in
the 1930s. André Breton was still alive, still edited surrealist magazines like La
Brèche (eight numbers between October 1961 and November 1965), but other-
wise the late 1950s and 1960s belonged to Sartre and his committed brand of
existentialism and the radical nouveau roman. However, Alejandra Pizarnik did
latch on to an exciting tail end by befriending Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar and
fringe surrealists like André Pieyre de Mandiargues (who wrote the back flap to
the first edition of Extracción de la piedra de locura and to whom a poem is
dedicated) and, most importantly, the Belgian poet and painter Henri Michaux,
who was then living in Paris.
The biographical anecdotes around these figures in Paris and this period are
sufficient to suggest that there was a group of late, dissident surrealists, led by
Octavio Paz’s close friendship with the ageing Breton and his own reinterpreta-
tion of surrealism as ethical, appealing to a triad of love, poetry and freedom and
elaborated in his book on poetics, El arco y la lira (1956), particularly its second
edition of 1967.6 Cristina Piña even claimed that the first chapter of Julio
Cortázar’s 1963 novel Rayuela was the best description of Pizarnik’s Paris (Piña,
p. 92). Pizarnik certainly identified with La Maga, as she told me herself over a
long evening in Buenos Aires in 1970. Cortázar included an Octavio Paz poem
from Salamandra (1962) in his text (chapter 149). Indeed, if you listed Cortázar’s
cited debts in the novel, you would come up with a reading list similar to
Pizarnik’s own. In the novel, there is a quasi-surrealist group called El Club de la
Serpiente, with its anarchic thinkers listening to the latest jazz. In chapter 60,
Morelli’s list of debts in term of writers included Borges and Michaux, with
Rimbaud crossed out as too obvious.
Octavio Paz has evoked these Paris years in a prologue of 1959 to a book of
poems by Blanca Varela.7 He insists that all of them in that Paris looked ‘hacia
adentro’. According to him, they listened to jazz in the Hôtel des Etats-Unis,
drank white wine and rum, danced and heard ‘El Alquimista’ read poems by
Artaud and Michaux, and they walked the streets, as flâneurs. Paz then lists four-
teen first names of this quasi-surrealist group, which include Breton himself, his
Chilean wife Elisa, Paz’s first wife Elena Garro, and Jean Clarence Lambert, a
French poet and translator of Paz into French (the rest remain anonymous to
me). What united them in the depression of the Cold War years was seeing art as
‘exorcismos’. Poetry was ‘defenderse, defender a la vida’. He then moves on to

continua, al surrealismo, y también a su superación’ and to Pizarnik’s involvement with the

‘entorno’ of surrealism, through which she discovered the Romantics, mystics and poètes
maudits. Carolina Depetris, Aporética de la muerte: estudio crítico sobre Alejandra Pizarnik
(Madrid: Universidad Autónoma, 2004), pp. 91–2. Depetris also explores Pizarnik’s
relationship to Argentine manifestations of surrealism in the 1950s; see pages 92–6.
6 See Jean-Louis Bédouin, Vingt ans de surréalisme, 1939–1959 (Paris: Denoël, 1961).
7 Octavio Paz, ‘Destiempos, de Blanca Varela’, in Obra Completa, III (Mexico: Fondo de
Cultura Económica, 1999), pp. 349–53.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, SURREALISM AND READING 79

Blanca Varela – no friend of Pizarnik as she excluded her from the anthology Las
ínsulas extrañas: Antología de poesía en lengua española (1950–2000), which
she co-edited with Eduardo Millán, José Angel Valente and Andrés Sánchez
Robayna. The choice caused a stir, particularly the exclusion of Pizarnik from
this canon. Nevertheless, the crucial term was ‘exorcise’, a religious practice
related to the devil inside and echoing the Bosch painting of Pizarnik’s title. This
term also underlines the massive influence of Henri Michaux. His collections
Exorcismes had appeared in 1943, and his key anthology L’espace du dedans in
1944. Lysandro Galtier published his influential translations in Buenos Aires in
1959 and Paz began writing essays on Michaux in the 1960s.8 Pizarnik was in
the vanguard of his cult admirers. Since the late 1960s I have discerned a Michaux
air in many Latin American writers.9
Alejandra Pizarnik was no timid disciple, and explored her own version of
surrealism by reading and absorbing Georges Bataille: ‘Mi lectura de fondo
sigue siendo Georges Bataille’, she wrote in a lettter to Ivonne Bordelois
(Correspondencia, p. 242). Both Paz and Cortázar had also engaged with Bataille
in their work; his thinking in essays seemed at the time a natural continuation of
surrealist erotics, with his notions of transgression and literary extremism. She
also studied Antonin Artaud, who had died in 1948; he was the most surrealist of
them all, but had been excluded from the group for many years by Breton.
Pizarnik’s biographical meanderings between these various eminent figures are
complex. Paz wrote a prologue to her Árbol de Diana (1962), almost an anthol-
ogy of her work up to then. As a kind of ‘padrino’, Paz opened up the world of
literary magazines to her, so her work appeared in Mexican magazines like
Ramón Xirau’s Diálogos or Sergio Mondragón’s El corno emplumado; she pub-
lished in Mito in Bogotá and in Venezuela through another of Paz’s friends, Juan
Liscano. She wrote for Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s Paris-based Mundo Nuevo,
for Sur and the Revista de Occidente; I have found poems by her in César Aira’s
little magazine El cielo, and there is more of her work scattered among many
others, for example Cordillera and Sísifo (La Paz), Vector (Paris), Cuadernos del
viento (Mexico), Cormorán y Delfín and Pianola (Buenos Aires), Meridiana
(Córdoba), Comunidad (Asunción), Jeunesse internationale (Frankfurt),
Humboldt (Switzerland), and Le Thyrse (Brussels). Pizarnik was keen to get
published in literary magazines and to be read around the Spanish-reading world
and beyond, as we can see through her careful documentation of these various
publications (Princeton, box 4, folder 2). According to these records, in addition
to what has subsequently been republished in the Prosa completa, Pizarnik also
published the following critical articles: ‘Antonio Porchia’ in El Hogar (Buenos
Aires, 1956); ‘Leopold Sedar Senghor o la lucidez y el delirio’, in Cuadernos,
70 (March 1963, Paris); ‘Salamandra de Octavio Paz’, in Cuadernos, 72 (May
1963, Paris); ‘Obra selecta de Carlos Castro Saavedra’, in Cuadernos, 91

8 Henri Michaux, Antología poética, trans. Lysandro Galtier (Buenos Aires: Fabril, 1959);
Paz collected his essays on Michaux in Corriente alterna (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1967).
9 Jason Wilson, ‘Después de la poesía surrealista’, in Ínsula, 512–13 (1989), 47–9.
80 JASON WILSON

(December 1964, Paris); ‘Olga Orozco o la poesía como juego peligroso’, in

Zona Franca, yr 1, num. 7/8 (Caracas, December 1964); ‘Notas sobre Bruno
Schulz’, La República (Caracas, 3 May 1964); ‘Sobre T. S. Eliot’, in El corno
emplumado, 14 (1965, Mexico); and ‘La libertad absoluta y el horror’, Diálogos,
vol. 1, num. 5 (July–August 1965, Mexico).10 Through Paz, Pizarnik met and
studied Henri Michaux, already being seen as the most original surrealist because
he refused to join Breton’s group in the 1920s. Pizarnik was asked by Cortázar to
type out his novel Rayuela, and nearly lost the typescript; later she would iden-
tify with its main female character La Maga, as already noted. But most crucial
was Breton’s own fascination with the occult, with dissident thinkers like Fourier
or the alchemists. So in a general sense, Pizarnik absorbed what ‘surrealism’ had
become in Paris in the decade leading to Breton’s death in 1966, and wrote criti-
cal essays about many of her ‘friends’ there (including Cortázar, Paz, and
Michaux).11
Pizarnik’s letters are testimony to these Paris years, where she learnt French
and could at last live the literary life (supported by her family in Buenos Aires).
She was acutely conscious of her dependence, of ‘la culpa de ser poeta, de haber
dejado sola a mi madre, de hacerme mantener por ella y demás’ (Diarios, p. 442).
As early as 1954 she had moaned about ‘viles imitaciones francesas’ in Buenos
Aires (she was 18 years old) and longed to travel abroad to live her dream of
becoming a poet: ‘¡Oh, cómo deseo vivir solamente para escribir!’ (Diarios,
pp. 27 and 64). She voiced that traditional Argentinian ‘viaje a París’ bedazzle-
ment: ‘Estoy enamorada de esta ciudad’ (Correspondencia, p. 68); she was aware
that ‘lo que me calma de aquí es mi vivir sola, sin familia, viendo a la gente sólo
cuando lo deseo’ (Correspondencia, p. 130). She later summarized these years
of freedom from her family and from ‘porteño’ gossip: ‘el único período de mi
vida en que conocí la dicha y la plenitud fue en esos cuatro años de París’
(Correspondencia, p. 288). Part of the reason for this ‘dicha’ was being able to
read surrealist books on the spot, rather than from the one or two bookshops like
the Galatea in Buenos Aires that sold the latest French texts. Her reading became
the place Pizarnik wanted to be, in the sense of finding a homeland; she noted
that ‘los poemas favoritos son como una patria’ (Correspondencia, p. 175). Paris
has been created by its writers and thinkers; its café life and bohemian freedoms
became a life-style for Pizarnik. To live as a poet, to become poetry, was indeed
the surrealist dream.
The curious distancing of Pizarnik from classic surrealism had one last conse-
quence, beyond the vague grouping that adopted her in the early 1960s. Pizarnik
not only read the classic surrealist texts like Breton’s autobiographical novel
Nadja (1928) and wrote about it, but she also absorbed the already burgeoning
criticism. My sense is that she was like a postgraduate student, building up a

10 This last essay is in fact La condesa sangrienta under a different title, as Karl Posso
indicates in his essay in this volume.
11 For a list of Pizarnik’s critical texts, see the bibliography at the end of Florinda
Goldberg’s essay in this volume.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, SURREALISM AND READING 81

critical reading list. This dual activity of creative work and critical texts informed
her own work, not only as a critical poet, in Thorpe Running’s term, for it allowed
her to become a critic of surrealism.12 She especially attacked Breton’s promise
of ‘paradise regained’ in the freed unconscious. Pizarnik couldn’t ‘free’ her
unconscious, and found that the inner world was dark, very threatening and
always just out of reach, tauntingly immanent. To Breton’s famous boast that in
surrealism ‘les mots font l’amour’ in their erotic liberation on a page, Pizarnik
warned: ‘No, las palabras no hacen el amor hacen la ausencia’ (Correspondencia,
p. 304). Pizarnik found her voice as a critic of surrealism.
The merging of criticism and creative text was in the air. Octavio Paz even
defined modern poetry as a critical poetry, not only of morality and institutions
along 1920s surrealist lines, but also of poetry and language itself. Closer to
home for Pizarnik was Jorge Luis Borges, whose illuminating work of the 1940s
was, generically, a fusing of review, critical essay and short story to create a ‘fic-
ción’. Borges broke through into his most creative phase by pretending that a
story was in fact a book review – his hoax ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’ was
published in Historia de la eternidad (1936) and carried over into Ficciones
(1944). Every name mentioned in the text (for example, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy L.
Sayers and Richard Church) was an actual living writer or critic, only the book
and its plot were faked (so well, that a friend famously ordered the book
reviewed). Pizarnik’s take on this critical/creative fusion is somewhat different:
La condesa sangrienta appeared in book form in 1971 as a gloss on the surrealist
poet Valentine Penrose’s study of the Countess Báthory’s murdering of about
600 girls.13 Penrose’s was a genuine text, published in Paris in 1962 and read by
Pizarnik there. However, what is not stated anywhere in Pizarnik’s gloss is that
her ‘essay’ began life as a book review for the Mexican magazine Diálogos, and
also appeared in Testigo in Buenos Aires.14 Interestingly, in a letter, Paz referred
to it as a ‘nota’, with its journalistic sense, for Paz would have known of its
dependence on the Valentine Penrose book.15 A telling conjunction of reading in
Paris and writing a book review for an ignorant Hispanic public supplies the
epigraphs for her book review/essay. The first is, naturally, from Sartre. The sec-
ond is from René Daumal (one of Cortázar’s favourite fringe surrealists, cited in
Rayuela). The third is from Witold Gombrowicz (a Polish writer trapped in
Argentina during the war years to become, in translation, one of the key figures
in the alternative Argentine canon elaborated by Piglia and Aira). Then we have
Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Milosz, an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon elegy, Paz, Artaud,
the Upsala cancionero, Jouve and Sade. Turn these epigraphs into a reading list

12 Thorpe Running, The Critical Poem: Borges, Paz, and Other Language-Centered Poets
in Latin America (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1996).
13 Alejandra Pizarnik, La condesa sangrienta (Buenos Aires: Aquarius Libros, 1971).
14 Alejandra Pizarnik, ‘La condesa sangrienta’, Testigo, 1:1 (1966), 55–63. For a discussion
of this text see Karl Posso’s essay.
15 I would like to thank Fiona Mackintosh for references to material from the Princeton
Archives (box 9, folder 8, correspondence with Octavio Paz).
82 JASON WILSON

and we can grasp how much Pizarnik read around surrealism, and, through her
epigraphs, wanted to tell us, her readers, what she had been reading. We could
equally have listed the dedications to her poems in Árbol de Diana, with names
dropped like Cortázar, de Mandiargues, Esther Singer (Calvino’s Argentinian
wife), Alain Glass (a surrealist sculptor living in Mexico), Laure Bataillon (a
translator) and Paz’s prologue, to again catch that transient group life of Paris.
To live the literary life was liberating, but to sit down and write poems
remained a problem. In her diary, Pizarnik was acute about so much reading:
‘llegado el instante de escribir un poema, no soy más que una humilde muchacha
desnuda’ (Diarios, p. 80). Her writings are the result of this nakedness and rejec-
tion of her personal library of texts, quotations and associations. Octavio Paz
offered her his way out of this confrontation that leads to sterility, and advised
her to write essays (Diarios, p. 495). That is, reading and criticizing a book
would wake up her response and would lead to a poem. This technique was his
own strategy and he accompanied all his poems with critical essays that over-
lapped, so that they could be read together. Even Pizarnik found his work too
intellectual, too essayistic (Diarios, p. 476), but she followed his advice.
In 1970, in Testigo, she published the essay ‘Relectura de Nadja, de André
Breton’.16 The relationship of the main male surrealists to ‘women’ is complex
and one-sided. Already in 1971 Xavière Gauthier, in the wake of Simone de
Beauvoir’s ground-breaking attack on the male surrealists in Le Deuxième sexe
(1949), published her critique of how all the surrealists placed ‘woman’ on a
pedestal, turned her into myth, goddess of love, and denied her a concrete exis-
tence.17 Many critics have followed suit since. This ‘relectura’ is interesting, for
Pizarnik is obliged to take an oblique angle on the 1928 text, and her insights are
not that clear. That is, her reading does not depend on a shared rationality with
her reader. She writes elliptically as a poet. Indeed, she joked in her diary that
‘hacía poemas que ni yo comprendo’ and that work like her Extracción de la
piedra de locura ‘es muy difícil y nadie o casi nadie podría comentarlo con jus-
ticia’ (Diarios, p. 464). Her essay is divided into three sections. In the first,
Pizarnik focuses on Breton’s description of Nadja’s eyes (Prosa, p. 262); links
her to a tradition of ‘bellas extraviadas’ (Prosa, p. 263), women who find no
refuge in Hansel and Gretel’s hut, but vanish into the dark of a ‘gruta encantada’.
For Nadja is the night; ‘es el poema que sólo se atiene a la muerte’ (Prosa,
p. 263). So Nadja ‘emigrates’ from herself, to be locked in a dark house. The title
appeared academic – another re-reading – but the reading Pizarnik actually gives
us is opaque, personal and identificatory.18 Alejandra is Nadja: her insights come

16 Alejandra Pizarnik, ‘Relectura de André Breton’, Testigo, 5 (1970), 12–18. Quotations

from the essay will be referenced to the more readily accessible reprint in Prosa.
17 Xavière Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
18 According to Ana María Rodríguez Francia, Pizarnik sees Breton’s text as ‘una
oportunidad propicia para desplegar elementos de una Poética’. See La disolución en la obra
de Alejandra Pizarnik: ensombrecimiento de la existencia y ocultamiento del ser (Buenos
Aires: Corregidor, 2003), p. 337.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, SURREALISM AND READING 83

from thinking herself into Nadja’s skin. This led César Aira to posit that all her
poetry was a self-creation, a literary mask ‘como una Nadja en primera persona,
escrita por su personaje’ (Aira, p. 36).
The second section moves on to another detail; Pizarnik, like Borges in his
criticism, enters this work through what she calls ‘detalles privilegiados’. Breton
added photographs to Nadja as part of his revulsion for descriptive realism. But
he was refused permission to print a provocative wax statue from the Musée
Grevin. Pizarnik asks us why he wanted to include a photo of somebody who is
not Nadja and offers her ‘conjetura’, which is really a ‘certidumbre’. It is because
behind all women there is a ‘presentimiento de la mujer verdadera’ (Prosa, p.
264), at the end called Solange, who is the ghost of herself (Prosa, p. 265). We
have a typical Pizarnik substitution. Identity is an unreal reflection of a real
ghost. That is, we cannot quite make out our real selves, her illustration of
Rimbaud’s famous ‘Car JE est un autre’ in his letter to his school teacher Paul
Demeny in 1871.19 The elusive other in us. Again, Pizarnik’s reading is idiosyn-
cratic and personal.
The third section picks up Nadja’s phrase about time as the key to Breton’s
‘aventura laberíntica’ (Prosa, p. 266). She asks herself, and us: What did not
happen between them? There was no meeting; she arrived late. Breton’s fantasy
was to meet a beautiful naked woman in a wood, thus a desire made reality. Had
that happened, Breton would not have written his book (he would have lived it).
Pizarnik then adapts this ‘fantasy’ to make of writing itself a process of encircl-
ing a wood that you cannot enter, ‘un lugar vedado’ (Prosa, p. 267). Nadja her-
self seems to grasp the truth of Breton’s desire, but cannot satisfy it. Breton
remained too aware and was able to flee. Pizarnik summarizes the book: ‘Pero,
¿qué otra cosa sino huir hace Breton en este libro? Huye de Nadja, por supuesto;
y para ello le sobran motivos, comenzando por el primero: la locura de Nadja’
(Prosa, p. 267). There was to be no walk in the woods; the whole affair and the
book a ‘trop tard’, a rewrite of Poe’s ‘nevermore’. For Nadja also misses out,
there is no ‘canto del bosque destinado a la muchacha de ojos abiertos’ (Prosa,
p. 268). No salvation through love, nor through chance, nor through writing.
What Pizarnik takes from her re-reading is loss, a kind of grieving for Nadja.
Pizarnik’s supposed essay is as opaque as any of her so-called texts; she has
blurred the frontiers of essay and poem; she has read Nadja as her elusive self.
In her diary, Pizarnik divorces herself as a reader from her generation; ‘mis
jóvenes amigos vanguardistas son tan convencionales como los profesores de
literatura. Y si aman a Rimbaud no es por lo que aulló Rimbaud: es por el deslum-
bramiento que les producen algunas palabras que jamás podrán comprender’
(Diarios, p. 171). The clash between ‘howl’ and ‘words’, between horror and
anxiety and the comfort of writing is what she perceived in Nadja. As a reader,
she identifies so strongly with what she is reading that she becomes what she
reads and suffers the consequences. The most poignant outcome is that she

19 Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris: Gallimard, 1972),
p. 250.
84 JASON WILSON

remains Alejandra Pizarnik. In her diary she notes her debt to Breton as ‘inenar-
rable’ and gives an odd reason for this debt: ‘Tal vez es aquel que nada me enseñó
y no obstante es aquel que más influyó en mí’ (Diarios, p. 422). Her divergence
from him is what made her herself.
Pizarnik also twice wrote essays on her friend Julio Cortázar, like her, a stu-
dent of Artaud and avid reader of countless fringe surrealists. Her first piece was
written in 1961 and was a review, or even promotion, of Cortázar’s whimsical
and absurdist Historia de cronopios y famas (1962) with what she calls its ‘risita
zen’ (Prosa, p. 198). She outlines the way Cortázar divided up the world into
‘famas’, who stand for the enemies of art, for common sense and bourgeois pre-
caution, with the ‘esperanzas’ (not in the title) as idiots and the ‘cronopios’ as the
surrealists and others. Pizarnik lists them as Don Quixote, Charlie Parker,
Rimbaud, the Arcipreste de Hita and Cortázar himself (Prosa, p. 198). She iden-
tifies with him and with this tradition of metaphysical humour, telling her read-
ers, secretly, that she was an insider. She approves of Cortázar’s skill, his
‘apasionada minuciosidad’ (Prosa, p. 200), and claims this text as subversive
(Prosa, p. 201). But it is in her diary that she accuses Cortázar of ‘plagiarizing’
Henri Michaux. In her diary she wrote: ‘Olvido lo principal: Julio es, antes que
un gran escritor, un gran lector. También, como Eliot, es un gran plagiador’
(Diarios, p. 445). This is a Borgesian point: a famous writer is first a great reader;
a projection, we could say, of Pizarnik herself, a great reader of surrealism.
Pizarnik prepared an essay on Henri Michaux as a review of his book Passages
in 1963. She views Michaux as the ‘gran terapeuta’: writing as a cure of soul-
sickness. He has penned ‘la mejor poesía de nuestro siglo’, like Rimbaud or
Lautréamont (surrealism’s great models). She reckons that his work is an exor-
cism, a term she carries into her own work, of his own suffering and obsessions,
that it, the literary text, does not aim for beauty, but self-knowledge and cure.
She reads Michaux ‘con fervor’; his evocation of a piano is ‘perfecto’ (Prosa,
pp. 207–9). She also wrote about her mentor Octavio Paz (not collected in the
Prosa completa) in the form of a review of his collection Salamandra.20 Here
she offers a classification: Paz is not a surrealist, ‘es un poeta inclasificable, a
pesar de que está fincado en las más bellas conquistas del surrealismo: lo mara-
villoso, el mundo onírico’.21 He is and is not a surrealist, like all the group of
Latin Americans on the fringe of surrealism in Paris in the 1960s, many of whom
Pizarnik read, met, translated and commented on to then reject in her own work,
as she had done with Breton. In fact, as already cited, she found Paz’s poetry too
intellectual. So reading for Pizarnik is a kind of exorcism, as well as frequently
being an identification (especially with Rimbaud and Michaux).
The prose poem ‘Extracción de la piedra de locura’ from the book of the same
title taps into Pizarnik’s world, her fear of going mad, her fascination with mad-
ness (and especially the work and life of Antonin Artaud). Her fears about

20
For discussion of this review, see Florinda Goldberg’s essay in this volume.
21
Alejandra Pizarnik, ‘El premio internacional de Poesía y Salamandra’, in México en la
Cultura, 767 (1 December 1963), p. 5.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, SURREALISM AND READING 85

madness tie in with psychoanalysis and her different therapists, ending with the
eminent Enrique Pichon Rivière, himself a researcher into Isidore Ducasse, oth-
erwise known as Lautréamont (in other words, a very literary analyst).22 However,
her diary was an alternative kind of analysis; its language is sober and she
employs few metaphors. She even analysed her own literary style in 1962 as
poor, stiff language, with no music. She never thinks in sentences and reduces
everything to a few key words (Diarios, p. 286). In 1959, when Pizarnik thinks of
travelling to Paris she playfully wonders if ‘allí me curaría’ and decides probably
not (Diarios, p. 156). So her sense of herself as a person and as a writer is deeply
involved with the notion of ‘cure’. The cover of the first edition of Extracción de
la piedra de locura does not illustrate the famous Prado painting by Hieronymus
Bosch (El Bosco) titled in English ‘The Curing of Madness’. Instead, there is a
line drawing of a long-haired girl with long ribbon-like fingernails, juggling
some scissors and a comb (it could be a Dorothea Tanning). It does not identify
the artist. The Bosch of the Spanish title, however, looks to the modern eye like a
medieval torture scene. A man or doctor in a conical hat is trepanning a tubby
man, while a priest flicks holy water at him and a nun watches, balancing a book
on her head. Pizarnik’s cure is not so dramatic, for it is the writing of the piece
that is her confession and cure. That she focused on a Bosch affirmed her surreal-
ist heritage, since Bosch had become by the 1960s, in Sarane Alexandrian’s
words, ‘the most important pre-surrealist visionary’, on whose example the sur-
realists ‘relied most’.23 It is hard to decide whether Pizarnik interpreted the Bosch
painting as an allegory or just saw it as a dramatic reflection of her own situation.
Charles de Tolnay cites the inscription in Dutch to translate it as ‘master cuts out
the stones / my name is Lubbart das’ (it rhymes in the Dutch, and ‘das’ means
‘badger’ or ‘cheated’). A ‘stone’ was a common emblem of folly at the time. As
an allegory, then, this small oval painting expresses ‘the folly and uselessness of
all worldly healing’. The conical hat on the quack is the ‘funnel of wisdom’ and
the nun has placed on her head a book of medical knowledge.24 However, as the
editors of Bosch’s complete paintings and drawings noted, the painting remains
‘enigmatic’.25 The point that could be made, then, is that all ‘cures’ are impossi-
ble; that Pizarnik wanted to stay with her ‘stone’.
Pizarnik’s epigraph from the Flemish contemplative and mystic Ruysbroeck
(1293–1381) is in French and plainly states that the soul is sick and suffers, is
wounded and broken and that nobody heals it. It is part of her text; her prose
poem argues with that opinion of soul-sickness. Pizarnik is not interested in

22 See Juan Jacobo Bajarlía, Alejandra Pizarnik: anatomía de un recuerdo (Buenos Aires:
Almagesto, 1998), pp. 85–6. Pichon Rivière alluded to Bosch’s painting: ‘y ése es el verdadero
sentido de esa pintura [. . .] donde enseña que lo extraído de la cabeza del alienado no es una
piedra sino una flor’. Vicente Zito Lema, Conversaciones con Enrique Pichon Rivière sobre el
arte y la locura (Buenos Aires: Timerman, 1976), p. 38.
23 Sarane Alexandrian, Surrealist Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970), p. 10.
24 Charles de Tolnay, Hieronymus Bosch (London: Eyre Methuen, 1966), p. 54.
25 Jos Koldeweij, Paul Vanenbroeck and Bernard Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch: The
Complete Paintings and Drawings (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2001), pp. 148–9.
86 JASON WILSON

giving us a picture of Ruysbroeck, or his teachings: she simply reads herself

into the quotation. But one vital piece of information is ‘the spark of the soul’
and Ruysbroeck’s mystical path towards the ‘spiritual marriage’ (title of
Ruysbroeck’s book). If belief in God or any transcendental experience is
removed, then terms like ‘the abyss of the Godhead’, that ‘God is unknowable
and incomprehensible’, the ‘emptiness’ of all things and the traditional mystical
notion that ‘all words are foreign to the truth’, take on a poetic force close to
Pizarnik’s wager. The experience she sought is close to what Ruysbroeck called
the ‘dark silence in which all lovers lose themselves’, a phrase which echoes
Pizarnik’s intentions and failures.26 Pizarnik has read subtly about this kind of
experience (spurred on by Bataille). The prose piece opens with the arrival of
poor light and the first affirmation about reading:

La luz mala se ha avecinado y nada es cierto. Y si pienso en todo lo que leí

acerca del espíritu . . . Cerré los ojos, vi cuerpos luminosos que giraban en la
niebla, en el lugar de las ambiguas vecindades. No temas, nada te sobrevendrá,
ya no hay violadores de tumbas. El silencio, el silencio siempre, las monedas
de oro del sueño. (Poesía, p. 247)

This poor light could be a realistic reference to the sun having set; it could refer
to the start of the dark night of the soul. But the result is the same, a sense of
uncertainty where normal visual perception, open eyes, fails. Pizarnik then asks
the fundamental question: ‘Y si pienso en todo lo que leí acerca del espíritu’. She
has read copiously about illumination, but when she honestly examines herself
she sees ‘niebla’ and ambiguity. She then shuts her eyes. A crucial phrase of
intent to look inwards and not outwards, into the dark mind. She tells herself that
she won’t be illuminated: ‘No temas, nada te sobrevendrá, ya no hay violadoras
de tumbas.’ That is, the nocturnal terror world of vampires no longer exists; it is
just words, literature, reading. Outside literature, there seems to be nothing but
silence, and cheap exchange or gold coins of dreams (but not the alchemist’s
gold).
The second paragraph (stanza) of the text leaps to her voice, that voice that is
witness to having lived in the wood, but she now doubts if there was a green
‘alameda’ (Poesía, p. 247). Her great artistic desire is stated openly: ‘Te deseas
otra. La otra que eres se desea otra’ (Poesía, p. 247). She seeks some inner trans-
formation, but is locked out from her long dead past. Childhood, the ‘reino’, is
now ‘cenizas’. She may have read about many things, but she should be honest
and talk about what she knows: ‘Habla de lo que sabes’ (Poesía, p. 248). This
knowledge is inside her, not in books; ‘vibra en tu médula’ (Poesía, p. 248), it is
the pain of her bones, vertigo, her betrayal. So she turns her back on her epi-
graph, as she did with Breton, and focuses on herself. Her task is now to exor-
cise, and here the Bosch painting comes to light, to get rid of her inner demon.

26 F. C. Happold, Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968),

pp. 249–62.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, SURREALISM AND READING 87

‘Exorcise’ is a verb that alludes, as noted, to Henri Michaux’s Exorcismes (1943).

He views writing as an exorcism of inner battles. In her adulthood, ‘nada rima
con nada’ (Poesía, p. 248). The text then continues with a lament about loss,
about not being able to cross over into a painting and live inside it (Poesía,
p. 249), but she remains in suffering, like the man being trepanned in the Bosch
panel. I cite this paragraph as it refers to another unidentified painting – Pizarnik
trained with the Uruguayan surrealist Juan Batlle Planas to be a painter, and
often conceived of her poems as words drawn onto large white sheets:

Si de pronto una pintura se anima y el niño florentino que miras ardientemente

extiende una mano y te invita a permanecer a su lado en la terrible dicha de ser
un objeto a mirar y admirar. No (dije), para ser dos hay que ser distintos. Yo
estoy fuera del marco pero el modo de ofrendarse es el mismo. (Poesía,
p. 249)

A rough paraphrase would say that she wishes to escape into the world of art, a
world without pain or death or madness, a world of epiphanic bliss. She is now
aware that she is in the real world, outside the boundaries of the frame, but still
wants to offer herself, to become the young Florentine’s lover. The whole text is
built rhetorically on negatives; there are no pirates, no buried treasure, no sea
captains (all clearly derived from childhood reading and her stirred up imagina-
tion); what is there is the ‘espacio negro’ (Poesía, p. 250), the threshold into
‘locura’ and a hint at the poem’s title. Madness, and the suffering it entails, leads
to a desperately ironic rewriting of the famous Descartes aphorism, as she
laments: ‘Sufro, luego no sé’ (Poesía, p. 252); instead of light, she lies in dark-
ness. She had dreams of love (in the form of a poem within the prose piece),
dreams of finding her self through sex (‘la vía del éxtasis entre las piernas’), but
writing doesn’t make anything happen. Her ambition as a poet was a Mallarmean
dream of the total work: ‘Yo presentía una escritura total’ (Poesía, p. 253). But,
she asks, what happens when words arrive and betray you? ‘¿Qué significa tra-
ducirse en palabras?’ (p. 253). This essential statement gets to the core of her
poetics. The act of writing words down, however carefully – and Pizarnik was
very careful, a strict corrector of her own work – always leaves the living poet
behind. Words cannot be inhabited; they betray the speaker, leaving only a ghost
there, but not the self. Pizarnik has plans to perfect herself, to nurture her spirit,
and autodidactic plans to cure her poor grammar, but these dreams are now seen
to be ruins. The last paragraph opens with a ‘visión enlutada’ and more pain in
her bones. The truth is that through writing, there is no new self: ‘ningún
nacimiento’ (Poesía, p. 253). This failure of re-birth touches one of the great sur-
realist dreams. At the end of Breton’s 1935 lecture (which was read by another
surrealist as Breton was banned from the Congress of Writers), he cited Marx’s
call to transform the world and Rimbaud’s to change life: ‘ces deux mots d’ordre
pour nous n’en font qu’un’.27 The Cuban Revolution ushered in the New Man,

27 André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1962), p. 285.

88 JASON WILSON

while Paz in his 1950s and 1960s poetry claimed that poetry could change the
world by changing consciousness (in his Piedra de sol [1957] he wrote optimis-
tically: ‘si dos se besan/ el mundo cambia’).28 But Pizarnik denied this revolu-
tionary tradition, despite having been seduced by it. Her failure to become what
she read, to redeem Nadja’s own failure with Breton, leads to this self-definition:
‘Ebria de mí, de la música, de los poemas, por qué no dije del agujero de ausen-
cia’ (Poesía, p. 253). Her song means nothing, except ‘silence’, the last word in
the piece, and that mutates into night and death. What she means by silence is the
absence of music, not the staccato or elliptical text we have just read. A poet–
critic, Ricardo Herrera, pinpointed this block in her work as ‘la delectación en
explicar los mecanismos de la trampa (como si una minuciosa descripción del
tormento pudiera conjurar el dolor de estar atrapado en sí mismo)’.29 That min-
ute description is her text ‘Extracción de la piedra de locura’, a self-conscious
parable about not being able to change herself, again in Herrera’s words, of not
being ‘raptado por la sonoridad ingenua de las palabras’. Her critical self-analy-
sis, her reading of key surrealist writers like Rimbaud and Michaux, had elimi-
nated the traditional lyrical strengths of letting the words sing. Pizarnik’s
posthumous work, in its punning and jokes and obscenities, would simply con-
tinue this deafness to lyrical music.
What we have in this piece is an honest confrontation with the promises of
reading surrealism, poetry and the mystics; these promises have failed the poet,
and have resulted in a void at the centre of her texts. She did once believe in
these promises, but can no longer. This pattern of past faith in art and present
bleakness is close to the tempo of Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer (1873), which
opens with ‘Jadis’: as a child, he felt he had power, and rebelliousness, and he
gives many examples of this. The prose texts set up stories about what he had
experienced, but by the end he has seen through all the ‘lies’ without knowing
where to seek help (therapy): ‘Enfin, je demanderai pardon pour m’être nourri de
mensonge.’ The lies which have nourished him include especially the lies of
love, women and couples; rid of these, he can now be completely himself, ‘pos-
séder la vérité dans une âme et un corps’ (Rimbaud, Oeuvres complètes,
pp. 116–17). It is clear that Rimbaud here refers to his bitter acceptance of his
homosexuality. Yves Bonnefoy concluded that ‘l’homosexualité demeure à ses
yeux une passion négative, une provocation, un échec’.30 We could assert that
Pizarnik too is left with no beliefs, no sense that art is a cure for the soul, and
feeling that her sexuality is now categorically defined as homosexual. If reading
Rimbaud into Pizarnik is part of how she read herself into him, then the implicit
confessions include the failure of transforming herself through art, with the fur-
ther wound that when all the literary work is removed from her mind, what

28
Octavio Paz, Poemas (1935–1975) (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1979), p. 271.
29
Ricardo Herrera, ‘Lo negro, lo estéril, lo fragmentado o el legado de Alejandra Pizarnik’,
in Usos de la imaginación, ed. Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda (Buenos Aires: El Imaginero, 1984),
pp. 95–105 (p. 98).
30 Yves Bonnefoy, Rimbaud par lui-même (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), p. 91.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, SURREALISM AND READING 89

remains is a blank, silence, the white page. In a diary jotting she honestly wrote,
after years of reading him, that ‘yo no soy Rimbaud’ (Diarios, p. 164). But his
fierce dismissal of art – ‘Maintenant je puis dire que l’art est une sottise’
(Rimbaud, Oeuvres complètes, p. 117) – merges with her own despair; rather
than abandon ‘art’, like Rimbaud, to trade in the Middle East and North Africa,
Pizarnik surrenders to her own sense of impotence, that ‘art’ cannot cure her. So
we close with the Bosch painting and the title to her 1968 collection, Extracción
de la piedra de locura, where she is also the strange ‘nun’ with the book on her
head, having been driven Quixotically mad by so much reading.

Bibliography
Aira, César, Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1998)
Alexandrian, Sarane, Surrealist Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970)
Bajarlía, Juan Jacobo, Alejandra Pizarnik: anatomía de un recuerdo (Buenos Aires:
Almagesto, 1998)
Bédouin, Jean-Louis, Vingt ans de surréalisme, 1939–1959 (Paris: Denoël, 1961)
Bonnefoy, Yves, Rimbaud par lui-même (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970)
Breton, André, Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1962)
de Tolnay, Charles, Hieronymus Bosch (London: Eyre Methuen, 1966)
Depetris, Carolina, Aporética de la muerte: estudio crítico sobre Alejandra Pizarnik
(Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2004)
Dobry, Edgardo, ‘La poesía de Alejandra Pizarnik: una lectura de Extracción de la
piedra de locura’, in Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 644 (2004), 33–43
Gauthier, Xavière, Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971)
Happold, F. C., Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1968)
Herrera, Ricardo, ‘Lo negro, lo estéril, lo fragmentado o el legado de Alejandra
Pizarnik’, in Usos de la imaginación, ed. Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda (Buenos
Aires: El Imaginero, 1984), pp. 95–105
Koldeweij, Jos, and Paul Vanenbroeck, Bernard Vermet, Hieronymus Bosch: The
Complete Paintings and Drawings (Rotterdam: Nai, 2001)
Koremblit, Bernardo Ezequiel, Todas las que ella era: ensayo sobre Alejandra
Pizarnik (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1991)
Michaux, Henri, Antología poética, trans. Lysandro Galtier (Buenos Aires: Fabril,
1959)
Paz, Octavio, ‘Destiempos, de Blanca Varela’, in Obra Completa, III (Mexico: Fondo
de Cultura Económica, 1999), pp. 349–53
——, Corriente alterna (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1967)
——, Poemas (1935–1975) (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1979)
Piña, Cristina, Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991; 2nd edn, Corregidor,
1999)
Pizarnik, Alejandra, ‘El premio internacional de Poesía y Salamandra’, in México en
la Cultura, 767 (1 December 1963), p. 5
——, ‘La condesa sangrienta’, Testigo, 1 (1966), 55–63
——, ‘Relectura de André Breton’, Testigo, 5 (1970), 12–18
——, La condesa sangrienta (Buenos Aires: Aquarius Libros, 1971)
90 JASON WILSON

Rimbaud, Arthur, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Antoine Adam (Paris: Gallimard, 1972)
Rodríguez Francia, Ana María, La disolución en la obra de Alejandra Pizarnik:
ensombrecimiento de la existencia y ocultamiento del ser (Buenos Aires:
Corregidor, 2003)
Running, Thorpe, The Critical Poem: Borges, Paz, and Other Language-Centered
Poets in Latin America (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1996)
Wilson, Jason, ‘Después de la poesía surrealista’, in Ínsula, 512–13 (1989), 47–9
Zito Lema, Vicente, Conversaciones con Enrique Pichon Rivière sobre el arte y la
locura (Buenos Aires: Timerman, 1976)
 Alejandra Pizarnik, the Perceptive Reader

Florinda F. Goldberg

No es un producto del azar el que casi todos los grandes

poetas contemporáneos sean, paralelamente, grandes
críticos. No nos referimos a la crítica literaria de
carácter parcial . . . Pensamos en el poeta que se
aproxima a interrogar la poesía de una manera única y
casi siempre trágica.
Alejandra Pizarnik1

More than fifty years after the publication of her first collection of poetry and
thirty-five years after her death, we are in a position to map out the route taken
by criticism of Alejandra Pizarnik’s work. At first, critical interest was centred
on her poetry (including the prose poems and narratives), and this continues to
be the focus of many critical studies. Later, scholars and essayists turned their
attention to her ‘heterodox’ prose texts, particularly La condesa sangrienta and
La bucanera de Pernambuco. In recent years, in response to the publication of
the Correspondencia, Prosa and Diarios, critical emphasis has gradually shifted
to a study of other texts by Pizarnik, and to the analysis of her readings of liter-
ary works, whether classic, contemporary, canonical or marginal. Many ‘infor-
mal’ instances of these readings are to be found in her books, notebooks and
scrapbooks.2 Such studies allow for a greater understanding of Pizarnik’s literary
interests, of what she absorbed and whom she was influenced by, as well as what
she rejected, and the overall development of her own creativity:

Queda por realizar . . . un estudio de Pizarnik como lectora, que debería

comenzar por los subrayados de los libros de su biblioteca y extenderse a estos
interesantes testimonios de su admiración y feroz exigencia literaria [los cuad-
ernos de citas], para culminar en los muy interesantes estudios críticos que nos

1 Alejandra Pizarnik, ‘Leopold Sedar Senghor o la lucidez y el delirio’, Cuadernos, 70

(Paris, 1963), 89.
2 ‘El cuaderno verde, que por suerte y privilegio especial conservo, era un cuaderno –
entre varios – de citas que Alejandra copiaba con su aplicada letra de colegiala . . . Allí
aparecen mezcladas citas de e. e. cummings y de Quevedo, del Cancionero Medioeval y de
Artaud, de Tutebeuf y de Eluard’ (Correspondencia, p. 277). There is an example of Pizarnik’s
informal comments on literature in a letter to Ivonne Bordelois, where she analyses briefly
one line of a sonnet by Garcilaso (Correspondencia, p. 275).
92 FLORINDA F. GOLDBERG

ha dejado y que no han sido aún reunidos ni citados en su totali-

dad. (Correspondencia, pp. 277–8)

The analysis of Pizarnik’s critical discourse is therefore still in its early stages.
One obvious and necessary step in this direction would be the republication (or
at least the production of a comprehensive list) of the articles she originally pub-
lished in newspapers and magazines in Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Spain and
France, which are now difficult to track down:

Todavía está por hacerse el recuento de los trabajos críticos de Alejandra –

reseñas y entrevistas – que, lejos de la imagen exclusivamente narcisista que
suele presentarse de ella, nos muestran su profunda y adivinatoria capacidad
de empatía con escritores aparentemente muy alejados de su estilo y de su
temperamento, en los que sabía discernir la convergencia de ciertos sueños,
fantasmas o raíces estéticas comunes, coincidencias que proporcionaban una
arista inesperada y luminosa en la comprensión de esos autores para el público
lector. (Correspondencia, p. 26)

A preliminary list of Pizarnik’s critical texts is appended to this chapter. The

most comprehensive collection of her reviews is in the Prosa completa, which
comprises sixteen texts (two previously unpublished), one of which (La condesa
sangrienta) exceeds the bounds of a critical commentary on Valentine Penrose’s
book and is now considered to be a creative work by Pizarnik in its own right.
Unfortunately, the four reports published in Zona Franca between 1964 and
1966 are missing from the book, as is the important review of Octavio Paz’s
Salamandra (1962). Her review of Jorge Sergio’s Fondo arriba is available on a
website.3
In this first approach to Pizarnik as critical reader, I propose to consider a
limited selection of these reviews, supporting my analysis with reference to com-
ments and observations made in her letters and diaries.4 It is not my intention to
critique her literary criticism – which would seem like an arrogant comparison
with what I might have written on the same texts – but rather to look for corre-
spondences between her critical interests and focus, and her own poetics: ‘Su
potencialidad crítica era idéntica a su capacidad poética, porque su lectura y su
escritura eran en cierto modo una sola cosa’ (Correspondencia, p. 19).
Reading the reviews allows us to see varying degrees of interest and involve-
ment in the different authors and texts. Doubtless she had a variety of reasons
for undertaking reviews of particular texts, from personal pleasure to more
strategic motives – getting herself known, establishing a good working rela-
tionship with a particular journal, writer or group – not forgetting the question

3 http://sololiteratura.com/php/docinterno.php?cat=miscelanea&doc=361 First published

in La Gaceta de Tucumán, 22 June 1958.
4 In many cases we find mention in her diaries and letters of projected reviews or articles
which she never completed or published (to the best of my knowledge), for example the piece
on Cadalso (Diarios, p. 46). See also footnotes 12 and 17 and discussion on p. 99.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, THE PERCEPTIVE READER 93

of money (on the rare occasions when she was actually paid for writing
reviews).5 A clear example of ‘practical’ motivation for writing is to be found
in her commentary on the volume of sixteenth-century texts, Relación varia de
hechos, hombres y cosas de estas Indias meridionales, the first paragraph of
which is undisguised flattery of the publishing house Losada, who compiled
the selection. In addition, her own personal view emerges when she draws
attention to cases of ‘humor involuntario’ and spontaneous ‘expresiones de
alto valor poético’ in these voices of chronicles and conquistadors (Prosa,
pp. 203 and 204).6
Whatever the circumstances in which any particular article was written, what
matters is how Pizarnik detects and highlights in the text she is commenting
upon the convergences and divergences with her own ideas about writing and
language, which lends a productive and frequently provocative dialogic structure
to her commentaries. However, she does not use the writing of others merely as
a springboard for talking about her own work; she never loses sight of the object
of her analysis, yet at the same time she reflects in her comments – whether
explicitly or implicitly – the principles of her own personal poetics.7 What comes
across most strongly in these reviews is a sense of exceptional clarity, an extraor-
dinary ability to read in the most profound and active sense of the word, what
Ivonne Bordelois calls her ‘calidad de penetración’ (Correspondencia, p. 19).
‘Yo entiendo que era una crítica extraordinaria y tenía un don de lectura prodi-
gioso – para hacer una reseña se enfrascaba días y días con un libro hasta extra-
erle la médula – pero también tenía un golpe de vista fabuloso, iba hasta el centro
de una sola picada. Nunca recurría a teorías circundantes ni a previas reseñas
sobre los autores que trataba.’8
Her diaries and letters give us an insight into how she went about writing
some of her reviews, and the difficulties she encountered in the process (includ-
ing the inevitable disruption to her own writing).9 They also reveal her some-
times contradictory literary and emotional responses. For example, on 28 June
1964 she writes: ‘Terminé el artículo sobre Michaux. Mediocre y superficial.’
Then two days later: ‘E. y él admiraron mi artículo de Michaux. También los
demás artículos. Esto confirmó mi idea (¿errónea?) del esfuerzo inmenso que

5 For example, on 30 September 1964 she writes in her diary: ‘Carta de Sucre. Posibilidad
de hacer artículos. Alegría y alivio y, a la vez, angustia porque justamente ayer pensaba que mi
situación de hija de familia me permite leer y escribir’ (Diarios, p. 382).
6 Reviews will be cited from the Prosa (except that of Salamandra); details of the original
publications can be found at the end of this essay.
7 The only departure from this is in her review of Julio Cortázar’s ‘El otro cielo’, in which
Pizarnik ‘takes advantage’ of the quotation he uses from Lautréamont to include two paragraphs
of her own thoughts on this quotation. That she is perfectly aware of this ‘abuse’ is clear from
the fact that she modestly encloses these paragraphs in parentheses (Prosa, p. 246).
8 From personal correspondence with Bordelois, 30 May 2006.
9 In a letter to Antonio Beneyto, Pizarnik complains about needing more than a month to
write a single article. See From the Forbidden Garden: Letters from Alejandra Pizarnik to
Antonio Beneyto, ed. Carlota Caulfield (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003), p. 40.
94 FLORINDA F. GOLDBERG

necesito para hacer algo bueno’ (Diarios, pp. 369 and 371). Between 19 October
and 20 November 1964 we find the following notes, which chart Pizarnik’s con-
tradictory feelings towards Artaud and his work during the process of writing her
essay on him:

Lunes, 19 – Artaud. Deseos de escribir una página sobre su sufrimiento. Su

tensión física; sus conflictos con el pensamiento, las palabras. Pero sin retórica,
por favor, sin retórica. . . .
Domingo, 8 – Artaud – Mi angustia al tener que dedicarme a un solo autor . . .
(Diarios, p. 383)
Lunes, 10 [sic] – Confusión. No sé si me gusta Artaud.
Martes, 17 de noviembre – Alivio al prorrogar el artículo sobre A. para el lunes
. . . Iván K[aramazov]. Me fascina . . . El intelectual típico. Lo que nunca
podrás ser a causa de tus dificultades para pensar, para idear palabras. Por eso
Artaud te da tanto miedo. (Diarios, p. 384)
Viernes, 20 de noviembre – Terminé el artículo de Artaud. Le gustó mucho a
J.A. (Diarios, p. 385)

There are many other examples of textual and emotional self-criticism relating
to her work as a critic and reviewer:

El artículo sobre Z[ona] F[ranca] peca de generalizaciones. Nostalgia de lo

concreto, de los límites. No sé reconocer los límites. Cuando los tengo – en
este caso el artículo de ZF – los odio y quiero evadirme. (Diarios, p. 404; 17
August 1965)
[H]e aceptado la proposición de E[nrique] P[ezzoni] de comentar para Sur La
motocyclette. Esto significa uno o dos meses de fabricación de un artículo que
será tan excelente como inútil . . . Y en verdad, no me atreví a decirle no a E. P.
¿Y por qué no me atreví? Miedo de perder, siempre miedo de perder. (Diarios,
p. 478; 25 June 1969)

In the subsequent diary entries (Diarios, pp. 479–81) there is a work plan and
various comments that she obviously did not intend to include in the review,
which – according to Bordelois – ‘trasluce sólo en parte la ambivalencia de
Pizarnik con respecto a Mandiargues’ (Correspondencia, p. 291, note 95). The
most interesting of these comments is as follows: ‘lo principal de sus novelas es
el bello estilo, el artificio, cosas que nada tienen que ver conmigo’ (Diarios,
p. 479). This subjective criterion of what really matters to her as a poet, what she
feels to be essential, is a thread running through much of her critical work as
well as through her own informal comments on that work in her diaries. Writing
about the review of Octavio Paz’s Cuadrivio (1965), we see her consciously
dividing her time between criticism of works which really ‘speak’ to her and
those on which the critical gaze is perhaps more mechanically and reluctantly
focused as a task to be completed:
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, THE PERCEPTIVE READER 95

Debería dedicarme a la nota sobre Utrillo y, a modo de complemento poético,

el artículo sobre el libro de Octavio. El primero es trabajo; el segundo entra
más en lo mío. (Diarios, pp. 411–13; 2 February 1966)

The fact that a work may speak to her does not automatically make the process
of writing about it easier; indeed, there appears to be more of a sense of struggle
in precisely those cases. Yet the greater the struggle to communicate a reading of
these works, the greater her sense of achievement when she feels that her critical
writing adequately conveys her response to them:

El artículo sobre Octavio me enferma. Es demoníaco esto que me hace aceptar

artículos. (Diarios, pp. 411–13; 27 April 1966)
Largas horas con el artículo de Octavio. Por momentos estaba contenta. Esto
me da la ilusión de estar creando. No sé por qué trato con desprecio filisteo al
ensayo sobre Cernuda. Tal vez porque intuyo que es arbitrario o que la poesía
de C. es inferior y menos compleja de lo que O. dice. (Diarios, pp. 411–13;
3 May 1966)

Pizarnik’s relationship to the texts she is reviewing can be traced quite compre-
hensively through such ‘external’ informal commentary on the reviewing pro-
cess, but even more easily through the selective use she makes of the first person
in expressing judgements and reactions. This is not as obvious as it might seem,
if we recall that one of the conventions of book reviewing is the exclusive use of
the third person (less so now, but certainly very much the norm at that time), at
best semi-personified in the phrase ‘the reader’ or in the more empathetic but
vague ‘we’. Pizarnik naturally adheres to this general rule, but in cases where her
own personal involvement in the commentary or assessment is particularly
strong, she departs from the norm and uses the first person:

Por mi parte, he leído y releído con fervor especial los capítulos en que el poeta
se refiere a la pintura, a la música y a la infancia. (Review of Michaux; Prosa,
p. 207)
Girri hace hablar y pensar a los cuadros de Breughel en su poema – a mi juicio
el más bello del libro – titulado ‘Ejercicios con Breughel’. (Review of Girri;
Prosa, p. 221)

It is not surprising that the review with the most unequivocal first-person asser-
tions is that on Octavio Paz’s Salamandra (discussed further below); as Jason
Wilson notes in his essay in this volume, Paz actively encouraged Pizarnik to
practise literary criticism alongside her poetic work, so in writing on him she
gives full rein to this ‘authorized’ critical activity:

Ahora, en su nuevo libro, sus anteriores y maravillosas conquistas aparecen –

se me aparecen a mí – como tributarias del drama del lenguaje.
96 FLORINDA F. GOLDBERG

¿Promesa? Yo diría cumplimiento. Mejor dicho: es Salamandra quien me hace

decirlo.10

In some cases, the first person fulfils a metalinguistic function, by which Pizarnik
subjects her own critical discourse to the same level of scrutiny that she applies
to the literary texts she is analysing: ‘No quisiera soslayar en esta nota la sabrosa
comicidad de algunos pasajes hallados a lo largo del libro’ (Review of Relación
varia de hechos, hombres y cosas . . .; Prosa, p. 203). At times this metalinguis-
tic commentary on the first person’s critical approach is used for the purposes of
gentle irony: ‘Estos detalles, y tantos otros que no señalo, designan la pasión de
la exactitud de André Pieyre de Mandiargues’ (Review of Pieyre de Mandiargues,
La motocicleta; Prosa, p. 276). On other occasions this irony becomes more
explicit as Pizarnik uses the first person to brazenly assume full responsibility
for a damning remark: ‘Me apresuro a citar unas líneas más vivas y más vigentes
que este verso. Fueron publicadas en 1554 y su autor es Garcilaso’ (Review of
Molinari, Antología Poética; Prosa, p. 229).

The ‘problem’ cases: Molinari, Girri and Murena

In 1965 Pizarnik published a piece about Ricardo Molinari’s anthology in the
Venezuelan magazine Zona Franca (Prosa, pp. 223–9). The fact that it was out-
side Argentina probably made it easier for her to express herself sincerely, since,
given the tone and the rhetorical devices used, this review deserves to be included
in the ‘Humor’ section of the Prosa completa (were it not for the obviously
unamused irritation of its author). After an apparently flattering opening, which
is then revealed to be ironic – ‘Ricardo Molinari, el más celebrado poeta argen-
tino’ (Prosa, p. 223) – Pizarnik systematically demolishes this work generally
regarded as canonical, but which to her mind constitutes ‘una suerte de evasión
fuera de la poesía’ (Prosa, p. 229). Fair play and irony go hand in hand as she
alternates between more and less damning comments. For example, she acknowl-
edges the author’s potential for finding the right poetic turn of phrase, in saying
that he is acquainted with good rhetorical sources, and he uses emotions which
have traditionally lent themselves to poetic treatment. However, she then dis-
misses his actual poetic realizations as lacking in value and characterized by
banality, thus leaving this potential unfulfilled:

Para que la palabra poesía siga teniendo sentido es necesario condenar esa
mezcla de conformismo, complacencia e inautenticidad que implica un poema
astutamente confeccionado con los lugares comunes más muertos de una
determinada tradición literaria, y que está destinado . . . a halagar los sen-
timientos más fáciles. (Prosa, p. 229)

10 Pizarnik, ‘Salamandra, de Octavio Paz’, Cuadernos, 72 (1963), 90–3.

 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, THE PERCEPTIVE READER 97

By contrast, the principles according to which Pizarnik composed her own work
are implied: lack of conformity, revitalization of the language, authenticity and
the rejection of superficiality.
It must have been very taxing for her to review Alberto Girri’s El ojo (the
review appears in Prosa, pp. 218–22), as is clearly indicated by a brief note in her
diary: ‘El artículo sobre el libro de Girri. Mi darme en sacrificio’ (Diarios, p. 380;
10 September 1964). In my opinion, Pizarnik’s difficulty stems from her ambiva-
lence towards thematic concerns which partly overlap with her own, but which
Girri explores through a particular vision and way of writing that feels alien to
her. These thematic preoccupations include ‘[la] contienda de opuestos’, ‘[la]
sed’, ‘[el] ignorar cómo decir: yo soy’, ‘[el] retorno a un tiempo original, en
donde fuimos/ uno y unidad y abrazo: un verbo/ que carece de tiempos’ (Prosa,
p. 219), and the link between poem and painting in ‘Ejercicios con Breughel’.
Pizarnik makes it abundantly clear which texts she likes: ‘Hasta el alba’ is ‘per-
fectamente desesperado y hermoso’ (p. 218); ‘Relaciones y opuestos’ is ‘de gran
belleza’ and amazes the reader by transforming ‘verdades que . . . aún no nos han
habituado a que sean materia de canto’ (p. 219) into poetry; ‘Ejercicios con
Breughel’ is ‘a mi juicio el más bello del libro’ (p. 221). Her disagreement with
Girri’s poetics is to be found in ‘el curso seguro e igual de los poemas’ (p. 220),
in which opposites, rather than being reconciled, ‘se anulan mutuamente’ (p. 219).
It is curious that John King finds a link between Girri and Pizarnik, precisely
through this theme of contradiction: ‘La nostalgia de Girri por la unidad en un
mundo estructurado por la contradicción encontró un eco de tal vez la más impor-
tante poetisa joven que apareciera en Sur en los sesenta, Alejandra Pizarnik.’11 In
reviewing Girri, Pizarnik also objects to the fact that ‘Aquí, lo que el poema qui-
ere decir lo dice el poema,’ and she feels the lack of any kind of ‘halo . . ., subya-
cencia’ (p. 220). For her, poetry must communicate suggestively and allusively
beyond the direct referential meanings of the words; poetry should always ges-
ture beyond language to silence, death or music. So if a poem actually spells out
in so many words what it is trying to communicate, then the poem has failed to
reach the level of true poetry. Thus although the ‘peculiar carga del verso de
Girri’ transmits ‘cierta vibración’ to the reader, the limit imposed by the word
‘cierta’ reveals Pizarnik’s decisive judgement on Girri. His is a poetry that delib-
erately unveils and reveals enigmas, whilst for her, ‘el preguntar poético puede
volverse respuesta, si nos arriesgamos a que la respuesta sea una pregunta’ (p.
222).12 Furthermore, it is striking that in this article Pizarnik proposes a kind of

11 John King, SUR: Estudio de la revista argentina y de su papel en el desarrollo de una

cultura 1931–1970 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986), p. 241.
12 In a letter to Juan Liscano from 1965 or 1966 (after the review was published), Pizarnik
adds this comment: ‘Sin duda estarás de acuerdo conmigo en que Girri puede seducir o repeler
pero es uno de los escasísimos poetas serios, y además es importante en el sentido en que
influye en otros’ (Pizarnik’s emphasis); she also mentions having undertaken, at his request,
an interview for Zona Franca in which she had to ‘cambiar el tono de algunas respuestas, por
la sola razón de su aspereza’ (Correspondencia, pp. 174–6). To my knowledge, this interview
was never published.
98 FLORINDA F. GOLDBERG

opposition, perhaps ironic, between poets who are either ‘inspirados o extrema-
damente lúcidos’ (p. 219), when we know that in her own writing she was both at
the same time.13
The review of Héctor A. Murena’s El demonio de la armonía, published in
Sur in 1965 (Prosa, pp. 212–17), seems to have caused friction between her and
the author, as can be inferred from the stark reference in her diary a few months
later to ‘la hostilidad de Murena’ (Diarios, p. 410; 2 February 1966). However, it
appears that their relationship continued on reasonable terms, since in letters to
Bordelois in 1969, when she was planning her trip to the United States, she men-
tions that Murena had given her advice and addresses of potential places to stay
(Correspondencia, pp. 273 and 282). It is worth recalling that the fiction writer,
poet and essayist Héctor A. Murena – a controversial figure but prominent in the
Argentine literary and intellectual scene at that time – was on the editorial board
of Sur. Moreover, it should be noted that he was among the first to recognize the
value of Pizarnik’s poetry, and he dedicated his novel Las leyes de la noche
(1958) to her. The fact that Pizarnik was aware of the problems it might cause for
her lends greater weight to the honesty of her criticism, backed up by Ivonne
Bordelois’s comment that this review – like that of Girri – was precisely one of
those motivated by her need to ‘cuidar contactos’.14 In this case a sense of criti-
cal integrity triumphs over strategic flattery.
To begin with, Pizarnik’s analysis of this book – which towards the end she
will classify as ‘poco o nada fácil’ (p. 216) – maintains a sense of critical detach-
ment, whilst nevertheless dwelling on a theme which is dear to her as a poet,
namely the alternate use of ‘frases’ and ‘silencios’: ‘En ellos hay un perpetuo
decir acerca de algo que parece estar diciéndose en otra parte. Esa otra parte es
el invisible pero presentido interior del poema’ (p. 212). The following para-
graph praises the poem ‘Trabajo central’, which ‘poetiza [. . .] un instante privi-
legiado’ (p. 213) – the same idea which she had enthusiastically highlighted in
her review of Paz’s Salamandra. In it she identifies that ‘[u]na suerte de energía
primordial fundamenta ese instante en el que cesa toda oposición . . . las palabras
vuelven a ser las genuinas . . . la libertad del poeta se torna ilimitada’ (p. 213).
Her approbatory value judgement is explicit: ‘Esos versos dicen de la alegría
más alta’ (p. 213). The commentary then goes on to analyse Murena’s aspiration
towards ‘un lenguaje total’ and his consciousness of the difficulty of attaining it
in an everyday world full of ‘el murmullo caótico y el silencio estéril’ (p. 213).
We can recognize in these Pizarnik’s own themes, from both her poetry and her
conception of poetic art. For instance: ‘Decir libertad o verdad y referir estas
palabras al mundo en que vivimos o no vivimos es decir una mentira’ (‘El poeta
y su poema, Prosa, p. 299); similar views are also expressed in her responses to

13 ‘En cuanto a la inspiración, creo en ella ortodoxamente, lo que no me impide, sino todo
lo contrario, trabajar mucho tiempo un solo poema’ (‘El poeta y su poema’, Prosa, p. 299).
‘De allí mis deseos de hacer poemas terriblemente exactos a pesar de mi surrealismo innato y
de trabajar con las sombras interiores’ (Moia, 1972, in Prosa, p. 313).
14 Personal communication, 30 May 2006.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, THE PERCEPTIVE READER 99

Martha I. Moia (Prosa, pp. 311–15). Furthermore, almost all the lines that she
quotes contain words or images which are important in her own texts: ‘barco’,
‘naufragio’, ‘hablar con silencio’, ‘centro’, ‘jardín’, ‘puerta cerrada’. The same
happens with her interpretative paraphrases of the poems: ‘muro color de ceniza’,
‘poema de fuego’, ‘espacio feroz’ (pp. 213–14). But the critical blows, whether
ironic or resounding, are not long in coming:

en dos oportunidades le acontece caer en la mayor disonancia. . . . La voz se

crispa y apostrofa: ¡Feto de la tiniebla / arrojado entre lo impar, / tú me entien-
des, / edad de plomo! La voz grita: ¡que se aúlle! ¡que se aúlle más! Estos
ejemplos dan cuenta de un Murena excedido por los significados. Ha dicho lo
que quiso decir, sí, pero a costa de la poesía, sacrificándola. (Prosa, p. 215)

The critical tone then returns to descriptive reading, approval and even praise:
‘Cada serie de versos [en ‘La vida hacia todo’] es sostenida por la hermosa
partícula Sí inserta en el silencio’ (p. 215). But in the concluding paragraph,
Pizarnik the reviewer – hiding behind the cautious figure of the ‘lector más atento’
– pronounces a curiously ambiguous tribute, yet one which is consistent with
what she has been saying all along: on re-reading, this ‘lector atento . . . siente
una emoción muy particular ante ciertos versos de forma humilde, como por
ejemplo éstos: ‘es la tuya / mi mano’ . . . perfecta fórmula de una reconciliación’
(Prosa, pp. 216–17).15 It is obvious that both in this case and in that of Girri –
though perhaps with greater difficulty here – Pizarnik tried hard to overcome the
tension between public relations, her ambivalence towards the texts, and a sense
of critical integrity, by using these alternating critical evaluations.

Julio Cortázar: From cronopia to cronopio

. . . y me contento y me alegro como enormísima
cronopia . . .
(Letter to Ivonne Bordelois, February 1969,
Correspondencia, p. 274)

We know Julio Cortázar’s reactions to Pizarnik’s review of Historia de crono-

pios y de famas (Prosa, pp. 197–201) through his letters to her and to others.
Cortázar wrote to Laure Bataillon: ‘Alexandra a écrit un merveilleux compte-
rendu des Cronopios. Quelle sensibilité et quelle intelligence alliées – ce que
tient toujours du miracle! (Mais elle est quelque peu trop prodigue en éloges).’16
In letters to Francisco Porrúa, Cortázar describes her study as ‘muy bonito y

15 To anyone that knew Murena, it is quite clear that this reduction to the state of ‘humilde’
must have come across as an unpardonable insult; hence, doubtless, the previously-noted
hostility which Pizarnik complains of in her diary.
16 Julio Cortázar, Cartas, ed. Aurora Bernárdez (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2000), I, p. 559 (20
April 1963). The same ideas are reiterated in another letter to Bataillon dated 30 April 1963,
Cortázar, Cartas, I, p. 566.
100 FLORINDA F. GOLDBERG

muy fino’.17 On 24 June 1966, he thanks Pizarnik for her commentary on Todos
los fuegos el fuego (1966) in terms that clearly reveal the affinities that each per-
ceived in the other:

Una vez más, lo que me decís sobre mis últimos cuentos me toca de lleno
porque no tiene nada que ver con las cosas más o menos convencionales que
yo escucho a derecha o a izquierda. Hasta ahora sos la única que me ha dado
la alegría de sentir que mucho, en mis cuentos, es operación poética, nace de
ese territorio donde lentamente se pasean las Madres . . . algo tan evidente
como lo que ves vos cuando me leés. Y otra cosa que has visto muy bien . . .
es la complementaridad de los relatos que forman el libro . . . En fin, como
siempre vos ves mucho más lejos que cualquiera en ese terreno, sentís las
fatalidades que juegan en esas ceremonias, y a mí me basta con alguien como
vos para sentir que esos cuentos merecían escribirse.18

The review of Cronopios is clear evidence of the profound link Pizarnik felt with
Cortázar’s writing – a happy complement to the ties of friendship uniting them,
which are equally evident in Cortázar’s letters to her.19 However, writing to Ana
María Barrenechea on 30 March 1982 (almost ten years after Pizarnik’s death),
Cortázar endeavours to fix the limits of his relation with the young poet: ‘Mi
hermosa amistad con Alejandra no fue, a pesar de todo, una relación tan estrecha
como la que esos años mantuve con otras personas en París,’ and above all to
establish that there was never any romantic attachment between them, and that
Pizarnik was not (as she may at times have suggested) the model for la Maga in
Rayuela.20 Pizarnik’s text does enthuse, exuding happiness and a cronopial
delight not found in any of her other critical writings; no one else reviewed by
her was so directly and playfully praised (so much so that, as noted, Cortázar
himself thought that she was exaggerating somewhat). According to her, the key
to the book’s success lies in the fact that ‘[a]ctualmente, el humor literario es de
un “realismo” que sobrecoge’; whereas ‘este maravilloso libro de Julio Cortázar

17 Letters dated 29 October 1963 (Cortázar, Cartas, I, p. 629) and 13 February 1964
(Cortázar, Cartas, II, p. 682). In a letter to Porrúa (30 November 1964; Cortázar, Cartas, II,
p. 788) he talks about an interview that Pizarnik did with him; in a letter to Pizarnik he
mentions that Porrúa had read it, that ‘le gustó mucho’, and that he wanted a copy of it (30
November 1964; Cortázar, Cartas, II, p. 791); on 24 June 1966 he writes to her: ‘Me decías en
tu carta que ADÁN quería publicar tu reportaje sobre Rayuela . . . cosa que me alegraría mucho
porque me acuerdo muy bien de esas páginas, contá conmigo para cualquier posible
modificación . . . creo que tal como estaba nos exhibía a vos y a mí en la mejor de nuestras
formas’ (Cortázar, Cartas, II, p. 1041). To my knowledge, this interview was never
published.
18 Cortázar, Cartas, II, p. 1040; 24 June 1966.
19 See Cortázar, Cartas, II, pp. 791, 1039–41 and 1073–4; III, pp. 1390 and 1480 (dated 9
September 1971, in which he is clearly anxious about Alejandra’s state of mind), and III,
p. 1490 (the last letter, dated 20 January 1972), and in comments and recommendations
included in his correspondence with other people. Unfortunately, the letters that Pizarnik
wrote to him have not been published.
20 Cortázar, Cartas, III, p. 1765.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, THE PERCEPTIVE READER 101

alía perfectamente el humor y la poesía’ (Prosa, p. 197). It is not just that the
cronopios possess ‘cierto órgano en vías de extinción en el – digamos – hombre
actual: el órgano que permite la visión y percepción de la hermosura’ (p. 198).
They also undertake a ‘rechazo de la vida considerada como hábito y alienación’
(p. 201), and above all, the book ‘testimonia ejemplarmente de qué manera el
humor y la poesía son subversivos, y cómo y cuándo, ante el tejido confuso que
se presenta como mundo real, ambos – poesía y humor – proceden a exhibir el
revés de la trama’ (p. 201). That subversion is all the more serious insofar as ‘la
irrupción de la poesía y de lo maravilloso en lo que nos dan como realidad’
(p. 199) is ‘algo profundamente trágico’ (p. 200). According to Pizarnik’s assess-
ment, ‘[e]l humor de Cortázar . . . [s]iempre es humor metafísico . . . muchas
veces es feroz; pero su ternura es inagotable’ (p. 200). It is tempting to see here a
foreshadowing of Pizarnik’s own subversive humour, which will be much more
ferocious but also painfully tender. Another attitude shared by the two writers is
their precision in the writing process, their ‘apasionada minuciosidad’:
‘Maravillosa es la perfección con que Cortázar plasma sus relatos: aun el más
fantástico presenta una arquitectura acabada como una flor o una piedra. Se
puede decir que Cortázar no deja el azar librado al azar’ (p. 199).
The aforementioned comments made in letters about Todos los fuegos el fuego
never actually materialized in the form of a review, in spite of the fact that in a
letter to Emir Rodríguez Monegal dated 18 October 1966 Pizarnik refers to the
piece on this book being in preparation for Mundo Nuevo (the magazine
Rodríguez Monegal was in charge of in Paris), and she asks him for more time.
The way in which Pizarnik asks for an extension to the deadline appears to me to
reveal an element of ambivalence or lack of ease: ‘Si bien no me detendré en la
nota todo el tiempo que quisiera, que el libro merece, tampoco es posible confec-
cionar una nota simple y trivial.’21 For some reason, perhaps because Monegal
could not wait any longer, the project never came to fruition, and in November
Mundo Nuevo published a review of Todos los fuegos el fuego written by Aníbal
Ford.22
In 1968, the collection of essays La vuelta a Cortázar en nueve ensayos
included an article by Pizarnik on ‘El otro cielo’, one of the short stories from
Todos los fuegos el fuego.23 On this occasion Cortázar appears not to have been
particularly enthusiastic about her commentary, reading between the lines of his
letter to the editor of the volume: ‘Su ensayo [el de Néstor Tirri] me interesó
mucho más que cualquiera de los otros del libro . . . en los ensayos de Pizarnik,
Gregorich y Jitrik . . . hay una cantidad de cosas útiles para mí en cuanto escritor,
pero todos ellos se mueven en un territorio crítico más útil, pienso, al lector de
mis libros que a mí mismo.’24 Cortázar’s comments are not unjustified; this

21 Mackintosh, Childhood, p. 129.

22 Aníbal Ford, ‘Los últimos cuentos de Cortázar’, Mundo Nuevo, 5 (1966), 81–4.
23 La vuelta a Cortázar en nueve ensayos, ed. Sara V. Tirri and Néstor Tirri (Buenos Aires:
Carlos Pérez, 1968), pp. 55–62. Reproduced in Prosa, pp. 245–51.
24 Cortázar, Cartas (2000), II, p. 1300, 4 December 1968.
102 FLORINDA F. GOLDBERG

review is more academic and less empathetic than her review of Cronopios, apart
from the paragraphs on Lautréamont already mentioned.
Pizarnik’s diaries allow us to glimpse her reservations towards what is one of
Cortázar’s most heterodox texts, La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (1967). Her
first rather lengthy comment doubtless springs from the need to order her
thoughts about the book and its author, and compare them with her own position.
She begins with the subjects of plagiarism and pastiche, in an ambivalent tone
which suggests admiration tinged with envy at Cortázar’s skill:

Empecé La vuelta al mundo en 80 días [sic]. La evidencia de la impostura es

excesiva y, no obstante, la magia verbal de Julio más su seguridad de ser el
primero (que plagia a aut.[ores] desconocidos en Arg.[entina]) más su exaltación
al adoptar la pose de cronopio exaltado y desordenado, todo eso concede al libro
una dignidad inmensa. Olvido lo principal: Julio es, antes que un gran escritor,
un gran lector. También, como Eliot, es un gran plagiador, un gran calcula-
dor. (15 June 1968; Diarios, pp. 444–5)

As the introduction to the review proper continues, this feeling of envy becomes
explicit, and centred on one of her recurrent obsessions: the quasi-surrealist idea
of life and literature becoming one. Pizarnik admires Cortázar’s ability to live
for literature, without his rationality or his life being compromised. At the same
time, she objects to his appeal to playfulness and to colloquial language at the
expense of seriousness, seeing this as an attempt to attract a young or youthful
readership. This objection does not prevent her from understanding that she has
to learn from his use of language and his techniques if she is to nurture her own
writing – and indeed her own life. In the entry for 20 June 1968 Pizarnik contin-
ues with her discrepancies and her ironic yet serious tone: ‘Julio C. hace referen-
cia a los escritores “acrisolados” que escriben un lenguaje hierático. Cree que
porque él usa expresiones como “che, pibe” automáticamente deja de escribir
como un literato y escribe como cuando se conversa. Creo que se confunde, creo
que el español es hierático o es caótico.’ And then, after talking about something
else: ‘No logro saber por qué Julio alude al collage en su libro’ (Diarios,
pp. 445–6). The same day, another entry shows that Pizarnik carried on thinking
about the themes of humour and language, and particularly humour within
Argentinian writers. It is interesting that her musings lead her to propose a re-
reading not of Cortázar (in spite of what she had written about humour in
Cronopios) but of the pairing Borges–Bioy Casares: ‘Acaso convenga emplear
fichas para la sección humor, nada opuesta . . . a la carp[eta] Jaune con sus temas
infantiles. Deseo de argentinizar la carp[eta] de humor. Quiero descubrir los jue-
gos del idioma argentino. (B. Domecq: leer el nuevo y releer seis problemas)’
(Diarios, p. 446). This project indeed came to fruition (see Prosa, pp. 279–81),
but the paragraph also contains in a nutshell the idea for La bucanera de
Pernambuco, which Pizarnik would complete in 1970–71, with her own peculiar
mixture of humour and infantilism, her puns and word games with colloquial
language, and her construction of a (very Argentinian) Spanish which is
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, THE PERCEPTIVE READER 103

simultaneously chaotic, anarchic and obsessively controlled.25 Her reactions to

La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos continue for the next few days, with the
same ambivalence and with one important ally: ‘E[nrique] P[ezzoni] . . . me dijo
que el libro de J.C. lo exaspera por el tono. También a mí y sin embargo es un
libro que puede ayudarme a liberar mis prisiones literarias’ (22 June 1968;
Diarios, p. 446). On 23 June 1968, perhaps responding to a need to try and
restore her own faith in Cortázar, she notes down briefly a possible project:
‘Releer Cortázar y pensar en un libro sobre él’ (Diarios, p. 447). Four days later,
the ambivalence has become extreme – it is now all or nothing: ‘Deseos de aban-
donar el libro de J.C. y deseos, también, de leerlo de cabo a rabo’ (Diarios,
p. 448). And on 2 July 1968, the damning conclusion: ‘Acabé de leer el libro de
J.C. No me sirvió de mucho. Grandes palabras y conceptos remanidos’ (Diarios,
p. 449). Pizarnik’s reactions to Cortázar’s work thus seem to shed light on her
ambivalence as a critic; she desires to judge each text on its own merits, without
allowing personal relations to obscure her critical gaze, yet with those writers
who touch upon her fundamental concerns she finds it difficult to be impartial. It
is no other than Cortázar about whom she writes two years later, in an emotional
letter to Silvina Ocampo: ‘no dejes de decirle que el mero hecho de que él, Julio,
exista en este mundo, es una razón para no tirarse por la ventana’ (Correspondencia,
p. 208; 3 April 1970).

Octavio Paz: ‘ese momento de fusión’

Pizarnik’s commentaries on Octavio Paz’s texts Salamandra and Cuadrivio
allow us to compare her different critical discourses on two distinct genres
(poetry and the essay) by the same author; furthermore, of all her critical writ-
ings these are probably the ones in which she makes the most observations which
are relevant to her own ars poetica.26 The review of Salamandra enthusiastically
praises this book and Paz’s poetry in general: ‘desde sus primeros poemas y
ensayos viene iluminando problemas como la libertad, la poesía . . . Iluminándolos
con un pensamiento peculiar, encarnándolos en un lenguaje que es magia pura’
(original italics).27 She calls Paz ‘un poeta excepcionalmente lúcido’ (p. 91) and
singles out ‘la belleza violenta o delicadísima de sus poemas’ (p. 92). As I pointed
out earlier, her frequent use of the first person emphasizes both her personal
involvement and her empathetic identification with the poet and the texts. But
the review is broader and more far-reaching than mere eulogy. From the very
beginning, Pizarnik situates Paz’s entire œuvre within the problematics of mod-
ern poetry, understood in terms of ‘el drama inherente al decir poético’ (p. 90).

25 For a detailed discussion of Pizarnik’s humour and wordplay, see Evelyn Fishburn’s
essay in this volume.
26 Paz, with whom Pizarnik became friendly in Paris, had written the prologue to Árbol de
Diana, which appeared in 1962.
27 Cuadernos, 72 (1963), 90–3 (p. 90). I am quoting from the original version since it has
not been republished in the Prosa completa.
104 FLORINDA F. GOLDBERG

She supports this reading through quotations from Hölderlin, Heidegger,

Fernando Pessoa, Alain Bosquet, Claude Vigée, Albert Béguin and even from
Paz himself in his prologue to the Antología of Pessoa and in Libertad bajo
palabra. She recognizes herself in the poetic ‘mode’ of this book, in which ‘ante-
riores y maravillosas conquistas [de Paz] aparecen – se me aparecen a mí – como
tributarias del drama del lenguaje. Y ello no es asombroso: todo poeta auténtico
inquiere – en algún momento; a veces siempre – la significación o validez de la
poesía’ (p. 91). The ‘drama del lenguaje’ consists of its inherent ambiguity, sym-
bolized by Paz in the figure of the salamander, which is a sign of his ‘actitud e
inquietud ante la palabra: indecible cuando se quiere hablar de ella. Y sin
embargo. . .’ (p. 91). This ‘y sin embargo. . .’ leads us to the battleground which
is the home of modern poets (whether Paz or Pizarnik):28

Es esta una batalla que el poeta no cesa de librar: ‘Hemos perdido todas las
batallas / Todos los días ganamos una / Poesía’. Por esta victoria – obtenida
duramente día tras día – se accede a la presencia, a lo que existe . . . Batalla
ganada a pesar de todos, de todo; aun a pesar de sí mismo, de lo que llamamos
yo . . . El poeta-Sísifo-moderno: no puede decir, no puede no decir. (p. 91)

Pizarnik highlights the fact that this conflict with the word, which is never inno-
cent, leads Paz to construct through his poetry a ‘puente entre los temibles con-
trarios’ (p. 91), whilst nevertheless being conscious of the fact that ‘[y]a escrita
la primera/ palabra (hay otra, abajo,/ no la que está cayendo,/ la que sostiene al
rostro, al sol, al tiempo/ sobre el abismo: la palabra/ antes de la caída y de la
cuenta)’ (p. 92). To quote those of Pizarnik’s own texts in which the same prob-
lematic appears and even in the same images would be to quote a large portion of
her work; among her late poems, obvious examples would be ‘no, la verdad no
es la música’ and ‘Alguien cae en su primera caída’, and ‘Sólo un nombre’ from
her earlier work.29 Following on from the previous quotation, Pizarnik points out
Paz’s use of parentheses as ‘una suerte de segundo silencio . . . que el poeta
puebla de palabras’; she herself would use this device to great effect in her later
poetry, particularly in El infierno musical and Textos de sombra.30
At the same time, and despite her strong identification with Paz, through this
review we can see Pizarnik’s ambivalence towards Paz’s attainment of ‘momentos
privilegiados’ (p. 92) in which ‘[s]er y tiempo se vuelven sinónimos de plenitud’:
‘¿cómo soportar más esta fascinación aliada a una suerte de terror sagrado?’ (p.
93). Nevertheless, Pizarnik recognizes that in Paz the drama of language reaches
plenitude and a ‘himno de celebración y alabanza’, and she closes her comments
with the first few lines of ‘Himno entre ruinas’: ‘palabras que son flores, que son

28 Inevitably one associates this with Borges’s ‘And yet, and yet’ (‘Nueva refutación del
tiempo’, Borges [1960], p. 240).
29 From Textos de Sombra (dated 1971 and 1972) and La última inocencia (1956)
respectively; Poesía, pp. 431, 446 and 65. See Goldberg, Alejandra Pizarnik: ‘este espacio
que somos’ (Gaithersburg, MD: Hispamérica, 1994), pp. 25–6, 72–3 and 103–8.
30 See Goldberg, Alejandra Pizarnik, pp. 42–3, and 99–100.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, THE PERCEPTIVE READER 105

frutos, que son actos’ (p. 93). Did Pizarnik aspire to such joy in 1963? Almost ten
years later, just before her death, she would write: ‘Me pruebo en el lenguaje en
que compruebo el peso de mis muertos’ (Poesía, p. 450). To the very end, her lan-
guage was a ceaseless fight against words which ‘no hacen el amor/ hacen la
ausencia’ (Poesía, pp. 398–9); rather than the word as fruit, the word is seen ulti-
mately as something which can give the poet neither shelter nor sustenance.
In her extensive commentary on Cuadrivio from 1966, she closely follows
Paz’s own schema, situating the authors analysed (namely Rubén Darío, Ramón
López Velarde, Fernando Pessoa and Luis Cernuda) and the metadiscourse of Paz
in the context of the ‘drama inherente al decir poético’, here understood – follow-
ing Paz – as ‘una tradición de la ruptura que es, precisamente, la tradición de nues-
tra poesía moderna’ (p. 232). This time, Pizarnik does not use the first-person
singular, but she does take responsibility for judgements on aesthetic value, which
are always laudatory: ‘sus ensayos . . . relatan estas aventuras apasionantes del
espíritu’ (p. 232); ‘Paz se demora con particular felicidad en la prosodia’ (p. 234);
‘estas frases perfectas’ (p. 235); ‘el deslumbrante análisis de su misticismo erótico
[de Darío]’ (p. 236); ‘es muy exacta la definición de Paz’ (p. 239); ‘Esto, y mucho
más, revela al lector privilegiado que es Octavio Paz’ (p. 243). Above all, Pizarnik
praises Paz’s dual critical thrust, entering into dialogue with the work he is
analysing and simultaneously with himself, an interrogation ‘no sólo al poeta con
quien está dialogando sino también a sí mismo que está preguntando’ (p. 232).
Perhaps her approval stems from her own tendency to operate in the same way.
Her commentary on the section dedicated to Darío is the longest, in propor-
tion to the amount of space given to Darío in the corresponding section of the
original work. It is also the section which reveals the greatest affinity with her
own poetic interests, once again coinciding with those of Paz, who was doubtless
more interested in Darío than in the other writers studied in his book. Pizarnik
outlines Paz’s vision of modernismo in general and of Darío in particular, his
roots in Romanticism (especially the ‘nostalgia de un origen’, p. 233). Other
aspects she notes are pretensions to a cosmopolitan modernity, the recovery of
rhythm and music as productive nuclei of poetic language, discovery of the reli-
gious and revelatory power of poetry, a certain erotic mysticism and his fascinat-
ing eroticization of death. Predictably, given her own interest in Lautréamont (as
previously noted), she underlines the perhaps less important fact that Paz – unlike
other interpreters – remembers that Darío was ‘el primero, fuera de Francia, en
descubrir a . . . Lautréamont’ (pp. 234–5). Yet she completely bypasses those
aspects of the essay that do not directly interest her: the poet’s biography and the
description of the political and historical context of his life and work. In her criti-
cal discourse here, she frequently uses litotes (affirmation via negation), but this
is absent from other sections of the review, giving this particular section a certain
rhetorical air and possibly a tone of insecurity: ‘No deja de resultarle paradójico
a Paz que . . .’ (p. 233); ‘No resulta extraño, en consecuencia, que . . . (p. 233);
‘No es un azar si . . .’ (p. 233); ‘No es inútil recordar que . . .’ (p. 234); ‘Esta
segunda visión no deja de evocar . . .’ (p. 236). The section devoted to Paz’s
essay on López Velarde simply summarizes its main points, and Paz’s value
106 FLORINDA F. GOLDBERG

judgements;31 her only personal contribution is to point out the ‘valioso’ and
‘convincente’ nature of the parallels between troubadour love and that of the
Mexican poet, the most obvious being ‘amar al amor, a la Imagen más que a un
ser real, presente y mortal’ (211), a notion which was not entirely alien either to
Pizarnik’s own experience or to her poetry. After summing up Paz’s description
of the creation of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, Pizarnik highlights those points
with which she undoubtedly has the greatest affinity: alienation, searching for
the self, delicious yet poignant humour. She then places herself unequivocally
alongside Paz in a dramatic ontological statement: ‘compartimos con Octavio
Paz la convicción de que el verdadero desierto es el yo . . . porque nos encierra
en nosotros mismos, y así nos condena a vivir con un fantasma’ (p. 215).
The diary entry referring to writing this review includes a very scornful com-
ment about the section devoted to Luis Cernuda (Diarios, pp. 412–13). Indeed,
in that section of her review it is at times difficult to know whether Pizarnik is
talking seriously or sarcastically; for example: ‘Cernuda es el poeta del amor.
Nada más cierto, nada más complejo. Además de hablar del amor, habla también
del deseo, del placer y, al mismo tiempo, de la soledad. Son estos los temas cen-
trales de su obra. Y puesto que esa obra se llama La realidad y el deseo, no hay
duda de que el deseo fue, para Cernuda, un tema muy principal’ (p. 242).
Nevertheless, Pizarnik did find grist here for her poetic and existential mill: ‘cada
vez que amamos, nos perdemos: somos otros . . . Amar es transgredir’ (p. 243).
She agrees with Paz that what is fascinating about this work is ‘un doble movi-
miento de total entrega al poema y, simultáneamente, de reflexión acerca de lo
expresado’ (p. 244). Once again she responds positively to writing which com-
bines the creative with a process of reflection on that creation. In drawing atten-
tion to ‘el silencio que preexiste a las palabras auténticas y verdaderas, y sin el
cual las palabras son meras palabrerías o rumor’ (p. 244), we are reminded of her
criticisms of Girri for allowing the poem to speak too directly, devoid of the
sense of silence that true poetic words must have.
In the final paragraph, Pizarnik highlights the principal virtue of Cuadrivio: the
fact that not only does it demonstrate courage and freedom in daring to re-think
works that have been exhaustively commented upon, but above all it is character-
ized by ‘prosa fascinante que desanima todo intento de reducirla a otro lenguaje’.
Picking up what was said in her first paragraph about criticism as a dialogue, she
recalls that Paz himself ‘ha dicho, en otro libro, que los grandes poetas contem-
poráneos son también grandes críticos’ (p. 244). For her, the definition of a great
critic (as we can see from the piece on Senghor which prefaces this essay) did not
mean taking apart other people’s writing in minute detail, so much as searching
for answers to the reader’s own questions in the writing of others.

31 Though it is beyond the scope of the present study, it would be interesting to explore the
question of why Paz chose precisely López Velarde as representative of Mexico in his
quadrivium; his assessments of the writer are quite ambivalent and frequently reveal a hint of
somewhat insincere compromise. It seems significant that for the 1991 Seix Barral edition of
Cuadrivio, Paz markedly reduced this section of the book.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, THE PERCEPTIVE READER 107

In previous publications, my readings of the work of Alejandra Pizarnik have

been guided by what I call her spatial imaginary as a matrix for generating mean-
ing, a model through which I attempted to understand the complex relationships
established in her texts between the poet and the poetic material: the I-persona,
the world and writing.32 In some of her texts I found the configuration of a the-
atrical space, characterized by two clearly delimited sub-spaces, that of the per-
son who contemplates, and of the thing that is contemplated.33 In beginning to
look at her critical works, I think this model can equally well be applied to the
positions she adopts vis-à-vis the various authors and texts she reviews. This
dynamic could be described as follows: first, those cases in which Pizarnik main-
tains a rigid distinction between the analysing subject and the object of analysis
(Molinari, Murena, and Pieyre de Mandiargues); secondly, those instances where
she reaches across the divide to take what interests her from the author in ques-
tion, then rapidly returns to her own space. This applies in the majority of cases
– for example, Girri, Ocampo, Cuadrivio, Bonnefoy, Artaud, and Senghor.
Lastly, we have those cases where the dividing line becomes a meeting place for
recognition and empathy between reader and text, without dissolving completely
(Salamandra and Cronopios). On the dividing line between reader and text there
is frequently a mirror in which, quite knowingly, Pizarnik sees fragments of her
own face reflected. And since we are talking about mirrors, nothing better reflects
and illuminates the perceptiveness and method of Pizarnik as reader than what
she wrote about Paz the perceptive reader:

Ésta es su actitud crítica: un diálogo con la obra poética; un diálogo que no

excluye nada, desde el tiempo histórico que da fecha a la obra hasta el silencio
que alienta en ella. Octavio Paz no expone: busca, explora, interroga (no sólo
al poeta con quien dialoga sino también a sí mismo que está preguntando) y
sus ensayos dan cuenta de esos movimientos; ellos relatan estas aventuras
apasionantes del espíritu inseparable de la existencia. (Prosa, p. 232)

Bibliography
Borges, Jorge Luis, Otras inquisiciones (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1960)
Caulfield, Carlota, ed., From the Forbidden Garden: Letters from Alejandra Pizarnik
to Antonio Beneyto (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003)
Cortázar, Julio, Cartas, ed. Aurora Bernárdez, 3 vols (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2000)
——, Historia de cronopios y de famas (Buenos Aires: Minotauro, 1962)
——, Todos los fuegos el fuego (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1966)
——, La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1967)
Ford, Aníbal, ‘Los últimos cuentos de Cortázar’, Mundo Nuevo, 5 (1966), 81–4
Girri, Alberto, El ojo (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1964)
Goldberg, Florinda F., Alejandra Pizarnik: ‘Este espacio que somos’ (Gaithersburg,
MD: Hispamérica, 1994)

32 Goldberg, Alejandra Pizarnik, p. 16.

33 Goldberg, ‘Los espacios peligrosos’, pp. 78–9; Goldberg, ‘Un cuento olvidado’.
108 FLORINDA F. GOLDBERG

Goldberg, Florinda F., ‘Un cuento olvidado de Alejandra Pizarnik: “El viento feroz” ’,
Reflejos, 5 (1996), 18–24
——, ‘Los espacios peligrosos de Alejandra Pizarnik’, in Locos, excéntricos y mar-
ginales en las literaturas latinoamericanas, ed. Joaquín Manzi, 2 vols (Poitiers:
Université de Poitiers, Centre de recherches latino-américaines, 1999), II, pp.
77–91
King, John, SUR: estudio de la revista argentina y de su papel en el desarrollo de
una cultura 1931–1970 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986)
Mackintosh, Fiona J., Childhood in the Works of Silvina Ocampo and Alejandra
Pizarnik (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2003)
Moia, Martha Isabel, ‘Con Alejandra Pizarnik: algunas claves’, La Nación, 11
February 1973, p. 5; reprinted in El deseo de la palabra, pp. 246–51, and in Prosa,
pp. 311–15
Molinari, Ricardo, Un día, el tiempo, las nubes (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1965)
Murena, Héctor A., El demonio de la armonía (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1964)
Paz, Octavio, Salamandra (Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, 1962)
——, Cuadrivio – Darío, López Velarde, Pessoa, Cernuda (Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz,
1965)
Pieyre de Mandiargues, André, La motocicleta (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1968)
Pizarnik, Alejandra, La condesa sangrienta (Buenos Aires: Acuarius, 1971)
——, El deseo de la palabra, comp. Antonio Beneyto (Barcelona: Barral, 1975)
——, Textos de Sombra y últimos poemas, ed. Olga Orozco and Ana Becciú (Buenos
Aires: Sudamericana, 1982)
Tirri, Sara V. and Néstor Tirri, eds, La vuelta a Cortázar en nueve ensayos (Buenos
Aires: Carlos Pérez, 1968)

Critical Texts by Alejandra Pizarnik (in chronological order)

‘Antonio Porchia’, El Hogar, Buenos Aires, 1956
‘Fondo arriba’ [on Jorge Sergio, Fondo arriba], La Gaceta de Tucumán, 22 June
1958 http://sololiteratura.com/php/docinterno.php?cat=miscelanea&doc=361
‘El poeta desinteresado’, Sur, 278 (1962), 7–11 [poems by Yves Bonnefoy; intro.
and trans. Alejandra Pizarnik and Ivonne Bordelois]
‘Humor y poesía en un libro de Julio Cortázar: Historia de cronopios y de famas’,
Revista Nacional de Cultura, 160 (1963), 77–82 [republished in El deseo de la
palabra, pp. 208–14, and in Prosa, pp. 197–201]
‘Leopold Sedar Senghor o la lucidez y el delirio’, Cuadernos, 70 (1963), 89
‘Salamandra, de Octavio Paz’, Cuadernos, 72, (1963), 90–3 [also published in:
Courier du Centre International d’Études Poétiques, 45 (1963); Jorge Guillén,
Poésie intégrale (Brussels: Maison Internationale de la Poésie, 1963); México en
la Cultura, 767 (10 December 1963), p. 5; Octavio Paz, comp. Pedro Gimferrer
(Madrid: Taurus, 1982), pp. 195–200 (the last two re-translated back from
French)]
‘El poeta y su poema’, in Quince poetas, comp. César Magrini (Buenos Aires:
Centurión, 1963), pp. 129–30 [republished in Antología consultada de la joven
poesía argentina (Buenos Aires: Fabril, 1968), pp. 67–8, El deseo de la palabra,
pp. 243–4, and Prosa, pp. 299–301]
‘Obra selecta de Carlos Castro Saavedra’, Cuadernos, 91 (1964) [pages not known]
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK, THE PERCEPTIVE READER 109

‘Relación varia de hechos, hombres y cosas de estas Indias Meridionales (Textos del siglo
XVI)’, Cuadernos, s/n (1964) [pages not known; republished in Prosa, pp. 203–5]
‘Paisajes de Michaux’, El Nacional, Caracas (1964) [pages not known; republished
in Prosa, pp. 206–11]
‘Entrevista con Jorge Luis Borges’ [in collaboration with Ivonne Bordelois], Zona
Franca, 2 (1964) [pages not known]
‘Alberto Girri: El ojo’, Sur, 291 (1964), 84–7 [republished in Prosa, pp. 219–22]
‘Olga Orozco o la poesía como juego peligroso’, Zona Franca, 1:7–8 (1964) [pages
not known]
‘Notas sobre Bruno Schulz’, La República (Caracas), 3 May 1964 [pages not known]
‘Sobre T. S. Eliot’, El Corno Emplumado, 14 (1965), p. 89
‘La libertad absoluta y el horror’, Diálogos, 1:5 (1965), 46–51
‘Antonin Artaud, el verbo encarnado’, Sur, 294 (1965), 35–9 [republished in Antonin
Artaud, Textos (Buenos Aires: Aquarius, 1971), El deseo de la palabra, pp.
237–42, and in Prosa, pp. 269–75]
‘La condesa sangrienta’, Testigo, 1:1 (1966), 55–63 [republished in Prosa, pp. 282–96]
‘Silencios en movimiento’ [on El demonio de la armonía by Héctor A. Murena], Sur,
294 (1965), 103–6 [republished in Prosa, pp. 212–17]
‘Antología poética de Ricardo Molinari’, Zona Franca, 26 (1965), 50–3 [republished
in Prosa, pp. 223–9]
‘Un equilibrio difícil: Zona Franca’, Sur, 297 (1965), 108–9 [republished in Prosa,
pp. 230–1]
‘Cinco poetas jóvenes argentinos’, Cuadernos, 99 (1965), 31–5 [on L. J. Bartolomé,
B. Eichel, M. Satz, F. Gorbea, and M. Pichon Rivière]
‘Una tradición de la ruptura’ [on Cuadrivio by Octavio Paz], La Nación, Buenos
Aires, 26 June 1966 [republished in Octavio Paz, comp. Alfredo Roggiano
(Madrid: Fundamentos, 1979), pp. 205–19, and in Prosa, pp. 232–44]
‘Entrevista con Victoria Ocampo’, Zona Franca, 35 (1966), 14–19
‘Entrevista con Juan José Hernández’, Zona Franca, 40 (1966), 24–5
‘Sabios y poetas’ [on El gato de Cheshire by Enrique Anderson Imbert], Sur, 306
(1967), 51; a different version appears in El deseo de la palabra, pp. 233–6, and
in Prosa, pp. 259–61
‘Entrevista con Roberto Juarroz’, Zona Franca, 52 (1967), 10–13
‘Notas sobre un cuento de Julio Cortázar: “El otro cielo” ’, Imagen, 25 (1968), 5–6
[republished in La vuelta a Cortázar en nueve ensayos, comp. Sara V. de Tirri and
Nestor Tirri (Buenos Aires: Carlos Pérez, 1968), pp. 55–62, El deseo de la
palabra, pp. 215–23, and in Prosa, pp. 245–51]
‘Relectura de Nadja de André Breton’, Imagen, 32 (1968), 5 [republished in Testigo,
5 (1970), 12–18, El deseo de la palabra, pp. 199–207, and in Prosa, pp. 262–8]
‘Dominios ilícitos’ [on El pecado mortal by Silvina Ocampo], Sur, 311 (1968), 91–5
[republished in El deseo de la palabra, pp. 224–32, and in Prosa, pp. 252–8]
‘La motocicleta de André Pieyre de Mandiargues’, Sur, 320 (1969), 101–5 [repub-
lished in Prosa, pp. 274–8]
‘Yves Bonnefoy, Poemas’, trans. Alejandra Pizarnik and Ivonne Bordelois, La
Nación, Buenos Aires, 28 November 1971
‘Humor de Borges y Bioy Casares’ [manuscript, 1971 or 1972; published in Prosa,
pp. 279–81]
 Alejandra Pizarnik’s ‘palais du vocabulaire’:
Constructing the ‘cuerpo poético’

Fiona J. Mackintosh

In this essay I should like to propose a reading of Pizarnik’s textual production

and aesthetic preoccupations which links all aspects of her output. An examina-
tion of her ‘diarios de lectura’ (henceforth DL), which contain notes and critical
analyses of her eclectic reading from Quevedo to Blanchot, and the notebooks of
the ‘palais du vocabulaire’ (henceforth PV), in which she carefully records
phrases from other writers’ work for her own poetic process, reveals a pattern
which seems to underlie the apparently divergent facets of her work.1 The pat-
tern relates to what I see as the central problem in Pizarnik’s entire output and
indeed attitude: a constant tension between the external and the internal. The
forms this tension takes are multiple, and in different modes of expression (diary,
essay, note-taking, poetry) the ways in which it manifests itself become more or
less metaphorical. In some poems the external–internal tension gives rise to a
nexus of contradictory images, and in some of her readings the sense of an inter-
nal–external dialectic provides a strong interpretive strategy. The occasional ste-
rility of this binary is alluded to in a droll phrase which Pizarnik quotes from the
Real Academia Española dictionary definition of ‘círculo vicioso’: ‘Abrir es lo
contrario de cerrar, y cerrar es lo contrario de abrir’ (Princeton, box 3, folder 9,
p. 188).
A few examples will suffice to indicate the prevalence of this interior/exterior
dialectic in the whole spectrum of her writings, from DL and diaries to poetry:

‘En mi cuadro del mundo, existe un vasto reino exterior y un igualmente vasto
reino interior. Entre ambos se sitúa el hombre, enfrentándose ora al uno ora al
otro y, según su humor y su temperamento, tomando al uno por la verdad

1 My approach of looking at PV and DL to shed light on the poetry and other works is in
some ways the reverse of that taken by María Negroni, whose excellent book on Pizarnik aims
to ‘leer la sombra en Alejandra Pizarnik . . . para armar el rompecabezas de sus genealogías,
descubrir su biblioteca secreta’, El testigo lúcido: la obra de sombra de Alejandra Pizarnik
(Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2003), p. 18. I also refer readers to Florinda F. Goldberg’s important
and detailed examination of a spacial imaginary in Pizarnik’s work, based around the antithesis
‘cerca–lejos’, Alejandra Pizarnik: ‘Este espacio que somos’ (Gaithersburg, MD: Hispamérica,
1994), p. 19.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S ‘PALAIS DU VOCABULAIRE’ 111

absoluta, negando o sacrificando al otro.’ (Jung; copied by Pizarnik into her

Notebook, August 1960 [Princeton, box 4, folder 3])
hasta cuándo esta intromisión de lo externo de lo interno, o de lo menos interno
de lo interno, que se va tejiendo como un manto de arpillera sobre mi pobreza
indecible (Poesía, p. 257)
El surrealismo ha explorado la [presión] de lo imaginario sobre lo real, de lo
interno sobre lo externo. (Princeton, box 4, folder 3)

Obviously this relationship between the external and the internal could be read
through any number of lenses – psychoanalytical (especially given Pizarnik’s
lifelong analysis sessions), phenomenological, Romantic, Surrealist. Indeed, her
copious notes on Breton include underlining the phrases ‘un modelo puramente
interior’ and ‘la representación interior’, and she takes notes on Breton’s Le
Surréalisme et la peinture (1928), and Situation surréaliste de l’objet, observing
how Surrealism is liberated from reproducing forms of the exterior world
(Princeton, box 8, folder 14). A letter from Octavio Paz suggests yet another way
of interpreting the ‘interior’: ‘Tal vez la verdadera vía está en Occidente . . . No
un regreso al Oriente sino, desde Occidente, a nuestro más acá, a nuestro “espa-
cio interior”.’2 My aim here is simply to look at references to this exterior/
interior tension in works of self-fashioning such as the diaries and notebooks,
drawing comparisons with the published poetry and prose where appropriate.3 I
hope to demonstrate that for Pizarnik the process of constructing the body poetic,
and the place in which this process happens, ‘El lugar de los cuerpos poéticos’
(Poesía, p. 254), are continually construed or apprehended (in all its intellectual,
physical and fearful senses) in terms of an exterior/interior dialectic. As I shall
go on to explore, this dialectic finds its expression in two particular metaphorical
nexuses: metaphors of buildings or dwelling-places ranging from ‘gruta’ to
‘palacio’ (hence the connection to the ‘palais du vocabulaire’), which offer the
body either shelter or entrapment, and metaphors of clothing, which likewise can
protect the body or become constraining, like a shroud. The body itself is the
primary site of external/internal conflict, seen as the place from which the poetic
voice issues yet in which it is somehow confined. So there is a clear overlap
between the discourse of the exterior/interior relating to dwelling places and
clothes, and the discourse relating to the body.

2 Letter dated 22 Dec. 196[?], Princeton, box 9, folder 8. The internal and the external
could also be read as coincidentiae oppositorum, which Anna Soncini sees as a recurrent trope
in Pizarnik’s poetry. ‘Itinerario de la palabra en el silencio’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos:
Los complementarios, 5 (1990), 7–15 (p. 10).
3 Ana María Moix, in her review of the Prosa completa (2002), sees the different modes of
writing as influencing one another; for instance, she says of Pizarnik’s critical essays that they
are ‘una auténtica poética que arroja no poca luz sobre su propia escritura’. ‘La niña, la
muñeca y la muerte’, Clarín: Suplemento Cultura y Nación, 14 September 2002 [consulted
online; n.p.].
112 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH

The external: literary tradition and the ‘palais du vocabulaire’

Perhaps the most significant aspect of the exterior for Pizarnik is that of other
literary texts, the ‘canon’ of works which is in the public domain and against
which her poetry will be measured; what others might more immediately associ-
ate with the outside world is frequently dismissed by her as ‘lo utilitario’, though
seen as threatening rather than neutral.4 Immediately we are presented with the
difficulty of separating the internal from the external, since books exist exter-
nally as physical objects, but the only way in which they have value (other than
in a commercial or abstract cultural sense) is as texts, through the process of
reading and internalizing them mentally. So the first self-positioning Pizarnik
has to undertake is that of the self in relation to this ‘internalized’ (or ingested)
external textual tradition. PV thus plays a crucial role, mediating her relationship
to external literary tradition, and – as we shall see shortly – providing the build-
ing blocks for creating her own literary edifice. Pizarnik’s diaries clearly demon-
strate her preoccupation with inserting herself into a literary tradition. She even
assembles a kind of ‘family album’ composed of photographs, cut out from
newspapers, of all those writers she most admires – Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine,
Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Claudel and Breton (Princeton, box 8, folder 15).
Yet, as outlined by Quevedo – in a passage which she copies out from his letters
– regarding one’s own posterity, a distinction has to be made between becoming
worthy of some kind of monument, and trying to create that monument for one-
self. Here we have the first of our building metaphors:

‘morir dignos de que otros les fabriquen templos, no es pretensión, sino mérito;
fabricarsele así viviendo, sospecha es de que se idolatra y no se conoce. . . .
disfrazar en palacio la sepultura, engaño es, no confesión . . .’ (‘De las epís-
tolas y últimas cartas de Francisco de Quevedo’, Princeton, box 3, folder 9,
pp. 289–91)

Extrapolating from this quotation, we can read Pizarnik’s relationship to her own
poetic work as highly ambivalent: on the one hand she wants to construct her
own poetic edifice, which will be worthy of being placed alongside her chosen
literary precursors, thereby adding her individual talent to that tradition (pace
Borges and T. S. Eliot); but on the other, as she sees others fabricating around her
the kind of ‘templo’ of her as the young talented poet, she has a horror of not
being able to sustain that admiration. Quevedo’s linking of palace with grave
also seems to express for Pizarnik her fear about her poetry’s survival – her hor-
ror of falling into ‘convencionalismos poéticos y literarios’ (Diarios, p. 170),
which, if realized, would turn her poetic edifice from palace to grave, and she
would be walled up inside it, like the Bloody Countess in her castle. This idea of
the poet being condemned to creating his own tomb is echoed by her beloved

4 The ‘interior’ world in a social and domestic sense is equally threatening – ‘el círculo
familiar te tiene cautiva’, she notes in PV1 (Princeton, box 4, folder 7, p. 33)
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S ‘PALAIS DU VOCABULAIRE’ 113

Mallarmé: ‘Para Mallarmé . . . el caso del poeta en una sociedad que no le per-
mite vivir es el de un hombre que se aisla para esculpir su propia tumba’
(Princeton, box 4, folder 3). Another example clearly indicates this dangerous
ambiguity relating to the poetic edifice; Pizarnik reads Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s
poem ‘Karma’, but she only chooses to copy into her PV the first two lines. This
is the whole first verse:

Quiero una casa edificar

como el sentido de mi vida,
quiero en piedra mi alma dejar
erigida.
(Valle-Inclán, ‘Karma’; lines in italics copied into PV1
[Princeton, box 4, folder 9, p. 23])

By choosing not to copy out the whole verse, Pizarnik shapes Valle-Inclán’s
desire to express her own; she wishes to construct an edifice as the meaning of
her life, or – ambiguously – similar to the meaning of her life. However, the idea
of leaving her soul erected and fixed in stone is apparently too rigid a prospect
(and perhaps ‘demasiado viril’, as she comments of Octavio Paz elsewhere).5
For Pizarnik, palace and grave become two poles representing the potential pow-
ers and pitfalls of poetry, from the splendid creative potential of the palais du
vocabulaire to the various desperate poems composed as if ‘de ultratumba’.
As part of the poet’s ongoing engagement with the ‘exterior’, DL shows a
belief in the importance of being acquainted with literary and poetic tradition (an
acquaintance which will form what Miguel Dalmaroni terms her ‘densa red
intertextual’).6 Nora Catelli sees this as one of the main elements in Pizarnik’s
notes and diaries, pointing out that we get a much clearer picture of her as a kind
of ‘educanda’ from these sources, a picture which until now has been obscured.7
For instance, Pizarnik declares in her diary: ‘Nada podré hacer si no me impongo
un método de trabajo. Y en primer lugar, un método de aprendizaje literario’
(Diarios, p. 122), and in the notebooks she sets out a ‘method’ for reading, quot-
ing Federico Bleifarben (Princeton, box 4, folder 5, p. 90). She plans tasks such
as reading certain authors or certain topics (for example, ancient Mexican civili-
zation), and also devotes notebooks and index cards to her linguistic develop-
ment (a more literal ‘palais du vocabulaire’) with lists of synonyms for such key
words as ‘inefable’ or ‘augurar’ (see Princeton, box 4, folder 8, and box 4, folder
7, p. 25 respectively). Often she will underline certain synonyms – perhaps indi-
cating a preference, or an intention to incorporate this word more actively into
her vocabulary. For example: ‘fascinar – alucinar, encandilar, seducir, embaucar,

5 See Frank Graziano, Alejandra Pizarnik: Semblanza (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura

Económica, 1984), p. 277.
6 Miguel Dalmaroni, ‘Sacrificio e intertextos en la poesía de Alejandra Pizarnik’, Orbis
Tertius: Revista de teoría y crítica literaria, 1:1 (1996), 93–116 (p. 96).
7 Nora Catelli, ‘Invitados al palacio de las citas’, Clarín: Suplemento Cultura y Nación, 14
September 2002 [consulted online; n.p.].
114 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH

deslumbrar, turbar, encantar’; ‘atraer: absorber, aspirar, hechizar, arrebatar,

seducir, perturbar’ (Princeton, box 8, folder 13).8 These words become recogniz-
able building blocks of Pizarnik’s poems.
The autodidacticism coupled with a continual sense of inadequacy is reiter-
ated in the diaries; at the same time, in both poetry and notes, Pizarnik repeat-
edly expresses (or copies out quotations which express) a sense of dislocation,
orphanhood, ‘extranjería’ and not-belonging, which has been attributed by crit-
ics to her Jewishness and to her family’s forced emigration from Russia prior to
the Second World War. This combination of non-belonging, diffidence and the
obsession with learning about literary tradition and language produce a powerful
drive towards creating an alternative place through poetry: ‘Escribes poemas/
porque necesitas/ un lugar/ en donde sea lo que no es’ (Poesía, p. 318). However,
this quest for an other place where what is not, will be, and where the poet can
belong, is coupled with the realization that that place is nowhere: ‘Sábete y
entiende que no es aquí tu casa . . . Esta casa donde has nacido no es sino un
nido, es una posada donde has llegado, es tu salida para este mundo; aquí brotas
y floreces . . . tu propia tierra otra es . . .’ (Aztec song, copied out by Pizarnik
[Princeton, box 4, folder 9, p. 27]). Or as Cervantes more humorously puts it
(and Pizarnik at times sees the humorous side, at least in her reading of others),
‘Por el camino del ya voy,/ se llega a la casa del nunca’ (Princeton, box 4, folder
9, p. 130).

Dwelling places
Pizarnik’s poetic solution to this problem of radical dislocation and yet of need-
ing to be part of an external tradition (such as Modernism in the non-Hispanic
sense of the term) is double. First, she aims to construct a literary edifice (through
PV and through her autodidactic activity) within which to be protected, whilst
projecting outwards her own poetic identity; to quote Wallace Stevens’s ‘Of
Modern Poetry’, which she read and underlined in Spanish translation, ‘Tiene
que edificar / un nuevo escenario’ (Princeton, box 3, folder 9, p. 219). Secondly,
she also simultaneously wishes to construct for herself – through her own poetry
– a more metaphorical ‘morada’ within language, variously denominated the
‘pequeña casa de la esperanza’ (Poesía, p. 430), the ‘pequeña casa del canto’
(Poesía, p. 435) or ‘Casa de la mente’, which is both created by and protectively
houses the figure of the poet: ‘la casa mental/ reconstruida letra por letra/ palabra
por palabra/ en mi doble figura de papel’ (Poesía, p. 355).9 She is thus creating
for herself a protective place and space within poetic language, a kind of interior
barricaded against the exterior, which threatens the poet with not-belonging and
rejection: ‘El lenguaje es un desafío para mí, un muro, algo que me expulsa, que

8 These and all subsequent underlinings are the author’s own, unless otherwise indicated.
9 Patricia Venti has noted how Pizarnik also seeks a similar kind of ‘morada’ through her
diaries, in ‘Los diarios de Alejandra Pizarnik: censura y traición’, Espéculo, 26 (2004) [n.p.].
Consulted online at http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero26/diariosp.html
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S ‘PALAIS DU VOCABULAIRE’ 115

me deja afuera’ (Diarios, p. 286). This expulsion is explicitly linked to her Jewish
heritage: ‘Talmud. ¿Qué Dios es este que destruye su propia casa y expulsa a sus
propios hijos?’ (Diarios, p. 379). But the basic paradox is inescapable: shoring
oneself up in language as defence against language itself.
As well as the concept of a ‘casa’ within language, Pizarnik in auto-didact
mode explores synonyms and definitions for various other kinds of dwelling-
places. For instance, in taking notes on Bachelard, she lists ‘cavernas, grutas,
antros, criptas’ and seems to approve of his gloss on ‘gruta’, since it is a ‘reposo
amparado y tranquilo’, ‘morada sin puerta (Encerrada no, protegida sí). Relación
con el afuera y el adentro’ (Princeton, box 4, folder 5, p. 86). In such a dwelling
without a door, the relationship between inside and out, between internal and
external is more fluid, protecting without enclosing, and it is towards such a
threshold or liminal space that she aspires.
Having established this concept of the ‘morada’ within language, the question
obviously arises of how to construct it. Words are the building blocks, and words
are repeatedly associated by Pizarnik with hard materials – ‘he sufrido con las
palabras de hierro, con las palabras de madera, con las palabras de una materia
excepcionalmente dura e imposible’ (Diarios, p. 189); ‘El peligro de mi poesía
es una tendencia a la disecación de las palabras: las fijo en el poema como con
tornillos. Cada palabra se hace de piedra’ (Diarios, p. 159). The problem that
Pizarnik expresses here is that in constructing her dwelling place in poetry, the
words become lifeless; not only is there a constant tension between external and
internal, but also between fluidity and mobility on the one hand, and fixity or
immobility on the other. And yet, whilst complaining of this metaphorical fixity
of her words, the poet simultaneously laments the fact that they can never actu-
ally become solid objects. In the same way that she asks, rhetorically and desper-
ately, ‘si digo pan, ¿comeré?’ (Poesía, p. 399), she writes despairingly – though
as if contradicting it through erasure – ‘escribo palabras/ quisiera escribir pie-
dras’ (Princeton, box 5, folder 4; Pizarnik’s crossing-out). Pizarnik thus repeat-
edly expresses doubt at her ability to construct this poetic edifice: ‘mi desconfianza
en mi capacidad de levantar una arquitectura poética’ (Diarios, p. 159).10 Indeed,
the sense that her quest for this protecting literary place will always be unsuc-
cessful is suggested by one of the many René Char quotations which she copies
into her notebooks, a quotation which indicates that the place of poetry may not
actually be any ‘morada’, but merely the means by which to get into that morada
– like the key into Alice’s garden: ‘Une clé sera ma demeure’ (Princeton, box 3,
folder 9, p. 15).
Nevertheless, the poetry keeps repeating the gestures towards building, despite
‘el fracaso de todo poema’ (Poesía, p. 398), and the first gesture is that of laying
the foundation stone, a stone laid with public ceremony to celebrate the founding
of the edifice. Thus Pizarnik’s ‘Piedra fundamental’ can be seen symbolically as
one of her key poems, if not the most important, and in this poem we see the

10 Susana Chávez Silverman, in her essay in this volume, links this anxiety about a poetic
edifice, particularly in prose, to Naomi Schor’s gendered rhetorics of genre.
116 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH

uniting of the imagery of poetry as edifice with that of poetry as the body, in the
phrase ‘Sus ojos eran la entrada del templo’ (Poesía, p. 264). As with the phrase
‘yo y la que fui nos sentamos/ en el umbral de mi mirada’ (Poesía, p. 113), which
indicates both a bodily and a temporal threshold (back into childhood), there is
here an equation between the body and a building, where the threshold of the
building is crossed at the point of entry into the body. Here, the eyes (tradition-
ally windows of the soul) are the point of entry to the temple, which as Alfredo
Rosenbaum points out, is ‘[el] lugar donde habita lo permanente, lo que trasci-
ende, lo Uno que está más allá de todo, donde se encuentra la Verdad’.11
Nevertheless, since by way of the gaze the eyes look outwards from the body as
well as allowing access to the ‘temple’, they become simultaneously entrance
and exit.
This opens up the liberating possibility of the self escaping from its own inte-
riority, in order to enter the other. Pizarnik notes down a phrase of Flaubert which
expresses such a possibility: ‘A force de regarder un caillou, un animal, un tab-
leau, je me suis senti y entrer’ (Princeton, box 4, folder 5, p. 86). But conversely,
the self can often be seen not only as unable to enter the other, but also as only
ambiguously present within itself, being either divided or absent. Pizarnik puts
into PV quotations which explore both of these interior issues of identity: first,
quoting Francisco de Aldana: ‘entrarme en el secreto de mi pecho/ y platicar en
él mi interior hombre’, which offers a traditional view of a self divided between
outer (public) and inner (private); secondly, drawing on Brecht: ‘Dentro de mí
los veo cómo vagan/ por una casa en ruinas’, which already indicates a loss of
control, a distancing, and a sense of dissolution which links the body to a build-
ing once more; and thirdly, using Amir Guilboa to express an interior absence:
‘la que está dentro de mi nombre/ . . . / no estaba’ (Princeton, box 4, folder 9,
pp. 135 and 125). Pizarnik’s much quoted poem ‘Sólo un nombre’ carries strong
resonances of this latter quotation. So the dwelling place, the body and even the
name are all viewed ambiguously, as possibly housing a divided or absent self.

Moradas ideales: paper palaces and protective clothing

The ambivalence of this body-dwelling, and of Quevedo’s temple–tomb, is car-
ried over into another key Pizarnik image, that of the childish house which is
both beautiful and sinister, echoing the phrase ‘siniestra como una casa de
muñecas’ from her reading of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (Princeton, box 4,
folder 9, p. 99). The link between Pizarnik’s unstable poetic buildings and the
world of childhood is apparently strengthened by a note saying ‘Andersen /
palacios de papel’ (Princeton, box 3, folder 3). This presumably refers to Hans
Christian Andersen’s celebrated ability for making fantastic paper cut-outs,

11 Alfredo Rosenbaum, ‘Un infierno centrífugo: Glosas a “Piedra fundamental” de

Alejandra Pizarnik’, in Poéticas argentinas del siglo XX, ed. Jorge Dubatti (Buenos Aires:
Belgrano, 1998), pp. 195–202 (p. 197).
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S ‘PALAIS DU VOCABULAIRE’ 117

which, according to Jens Andersen, accompanied his story-telling performances;12

Andersen created little figures such as the paper girl from ‘The Steadfast Tin
Soldier’, which seem to be re-created in the fragile creatures peopling Pizarnik’s
poetry, for example ‘Noche compartida en el recuerdo de una huida’ with its
‘Muñequita de papel’ (Poesía, p. 258). Andersen also made theatrical tableaux
(again, compare Pizarnik’s poem ‘La verdad del bosque’ [Prosa, p. 34], in which
the fairytale story is played out ‘en mi pequeño teatro’) and grander paper cas-
tles, and fairytale or Oriental palaces – a very vulnerable and flimsy form of
shelter. It is as though the morada has to be fragile so as not to become threaten-
ing, and in recognition of the ephemeral nature of the childhood paradise. There
is frequently a more positive charge on dwelling-places associated with child-
hood, as well as those linked to Pizarnik’s realm par excellence, the night: ‘El
espléndido palacio de papel de los peregrinajes infantiles’ (Poesía, p. 287);
‘cuando el palacio de la noche/ enciende su hermosura’ (Poesía, p. 128), but
note that this latter is subtitled (Un dibujo de Klee), which recalls such pictures
as his ‘Palace partially destroyed’, an abstract building in the process of becom-
ing ruins.
If the ‘palacios de papel’ fail to protect, the poet then has recourse to clothing
as defence against the external. Some of the clothes metaphors come from unex-
pected sources, for example tangos. Tango is not something often associated
with Pizarnik’s lyrical poetry by critics, who tend to see it as only pertaining to
the more vulgar register of the humorous and obscene prose works.13 However,
the tango lines ‘Afuera es noche y llueve tanto/ . . . / hoy tu palabra es como un
manto’ (Princeton, box 4, folder 9, p. 40) link directly to this protective clothing
theme within the lyric poetry. Pizarnik is conscious that her collecting of words,
in PV, is part of the poetic process leading to ‘adornment’, but her attitude
towards it (like her attitude towards the poetic edifice) is ambivalent: ‘coleccio-
nar palabras, prenderlas en mí como si ellas fueran harapos y yo un clavo’
(Diarios, p. 198). Pizarnik also positions herself abjectly as a poor naked girl
waiting for beautiful words (with which to cover this nakedness): ‘llegado el
instante de escribir un poema, no soy más que una humilde muchacha desnuda
que espera que lo Otro le dicte palabras bellas y significativas’ (Diarios, p. 80).
Frequently she alters or re-arranges the quotations in PV to make them suit her
particular dilemmas – like cutting the coat to suit her cuerpo poético. For exam-
ple, in the poem ‘En un ejemplar de Les Chants de Maldoror’ she uses the phrase
‘triste como sí misma, hermosa como el suicidio’, which she has borrowed – but
adapted and transplanted – from Lautréamont, whose original phrase is: ‘triste
comme l’univers, belle comme le suicide’ (Chant 1, Strophe 13, referring sar-
donically to a toad). So where for Lautréamont it is the universe which is sad, in
the internalized world of Pizarnik, it is she who is sad. In a typical internal/
external mapping, the universe becomes the self and vice versa.

12 Jens Andersen, ‘Scissor Writing’, at http://www.kb.dk/elib/mss/hcaklip/intro-en.htm

13 For a discussion of parodic dialogue with invented tangos in the person of Carol from
Los perturbados entre lilas, see Evelyn Fishburn’s essay in this volume.
118 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH

Humour is not absent from this idea of language as clothing; since – tradition-
ally – the diary is a space for more intimate, confessional revelations, Pizarnik
amusingly refers to her diary as undergarments: ‘En esa época [1955] me levan-
taba y me ponía la ropa y mi diario íntimo (una especie de “prenda íntima”) y
antes de acostarme me desnudaba del diario y de la ropa’ (Diarios, p. 243). But
in the late prose works, the idea of language as clothing becomes harshly sati-
rized; in a reductio ad absurdum, the characters of Los poseídos entre lilas are
wearing literary clothing, as if the resultant cacophonous laughter will cover the
naked void that the ‘garments’ in the form of literary works could not cover.
Segismunda sports a ‘capa gris modelo Lord Byron o Georges [sic] Sand’, along
with ‘pantalones de terciopelo rojo vivo modelo Keats, una camisa lila estilo
Shelley, un cinturón anaranjado incandescente modelo Maiakovski y botas de
gamuza celeste forradas en piel rosada modelo Rimbaud’ (Prosa, p. 166).
Ultimately, the garments of words will never be perfectly-fitting, since – borrow-
ing Lichtenberg’s phrase, noted by Pizarnik – ‘la expresión le queda a la idea
como una prenda holgada’ (Princeton, box 4, folder 9, p. 85).

The internal: literary consumption and digestion

I have talked so far about the external, and the poet’s relationship to it; about
creating a protective layer between inner self and outer poetic tradition in the
form of a literary covering or edifice which will protect the poet and present a
persona. I have also indicated the overlap or slippage between building and body
metaphors. This overlap is particularly apparent in the poetic process of con-
structing a literary morada, since for Pizarnik it involves a process of ingestion
of other literature, a taking-in of the work of other writers, which is then digested
and transmuted into her own work; as Delfina Muschietti puts it, ‘una gran obra
como la de Pizarnik no hace sino fagocitar sus lecturas’.14 Her reading process
involves being alert to new things in her ‘cocktail biblius’ (Diarios, p. 40), but
particularly those which strike a chord with sensations she has experienced; what
Jason Wilson’s essay calls ‘personal identificatory reading’. Reading Proust she
exclaims: ‘Mi ser vibra con los sentidos erguidos, atentos en su puesto’ (Diarios,
p. 36). However, the dangers inherent in drinking this ‘cocktail biblius’ are clear
to her: asking where the sweet poetry of Huidobro and Vallejo has gone, she says
she has contributed to its loss, along with ‘Millones de epígonos con cuadernil-
los indigestos que vagan junto a los prostitutos del arte a comprar una aproba-
ción’ (Diarios, p. 67). So the poet must guard against ingesting and internalizing
literature but then not ‘digesting’ it properly and failing to produce something
new and original.
We can see the digestion process at work in the poem ‘Los pequeños cantos’
XIX (Poesía, p. 397), which is in fact constructed by a collage (or co-ordinated

14 Delfina Muschietti, ‘Las tres caras de Alejandra Pizarnik’, review of Pizarnik’s Poesía
completa (Barcelona: Lumen, 2001), Página/12 (Argentina, July 2001). Reproduced at http://
www.lainsignia.org/2001/julio/cul_077.htm
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S ‘PALAIS DU VOCABULAIRE’ 119

separates, to continue the clothing metaphor?) of two quotations she copied out
previously into her notebooks and PV:

triste músico Poesía oriental; copied out Princeton,

box 4, folder 9, p. 68)
entona un aire nuevo ,,
para hacer algo nuevo (Lichtenberg; copied out box 4, folder 9,
p. 62; PV)
para ver algo nuevo ,,

So what might be perceived as coming from within, as interiority which is then

externalized through expression, is always derived from a process of ingesting the
external. Although, as Negroni says, ‘el espacio en Pizarnik, vale la pena insistir,
es siempre un interior’ (El testigo lúcido, p. 34), nevertheless this interior is
engaged in a continual exchange with the exterior. Thus the poetic process involves
not only the external metaphor of shelter, but also a movement from external to
internal in the creative process, followed by externalization once again. At its
most parasitic, Pizarnik’s work feeds extensively off pre-existing texts, as noted
by María Negroni and others. For example, Los perturbados feeds off Beckett’s
Fin de partie, and La condesa sangrienta off La Comtesse sanglante by Valentine
Penrose – though also unacknowledged others, such as Jean Starobinski’s essay
‘L’Encre de la Mélancolie’ (see Diarios, p. 397) and Thomas de Quincey’s ‘Sobre
el llamado a la puerta en Macbeth’ (see Princeton, box 4, folder 5).15 These ‘host’
texts are sometimes her own poems, but frequently those of others. Pizarnik is
able to justify this by reference to a passage of Robert Lebel, quoted by Julio
Cortázar: ‘Todo lo que ve usted en esta habitación o, mejor, en este almacén, ha
sido dejado por los locatarios anteriores; por consiguiente no verá gran cosa que
me pertenezca, pero yo prefiero estos instrumentos del azar’ (Princeton, box 5,
folder 5). In this quotation the room – or warehouse – is a kind of debased version
of the ‘palais du vocabulaire’, where previous occupants (of the language) have
left random phrases, which become her chance ‘objets trouvés’. She spells out
this interpretation by adding a parenthetical comment of her own: ‘(otro pretexto
para el plagio – inaugurado por Pound y Eliot)’ (Princeton, box 5, folder 5).

Interior inspiration de algún lado

What is important, however, is that the Modernist borrowing should be balanced
out by that which feels authentic, even if this idea of interiority is continually
dissolving and collapsing. In order to avoid falling into the trap of being either
clichéd or derivative, Pizarnik highlights a need for naming things ‘con palabras

15 Valentine Penrose, La Comtesse sanglante (Paris: Mercure de France, 1962). Noted by

María Negroni in ‘La condesa sangrienta: notas sobre un problema musical’, Hispamérica,
68 (1994), 99–110 (p. 100). The Starobinski essay is from Tel Quel, 10 (1962), and the de
Quincey is published in translation in Sur, 289–90 (1964).
120 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH

que nos surgen de algún lado, como pájaros que huyen de nuestro interior, porque
algo los ha amenazado’ (Diarios, p. 79). Taking apart this statement, we have
once again the external/internal problem: the poet must give of herself, from the
‘interior’, yet the words come from the nicely ambiguous ‘algún lado’, which
calls to mind either the ‘otro lado’ frequently invoked in her poetry, or the chap-
ters of Cortázar’s Rayuela which are neither ‘Del lado de acá’ nor ‘Del lado de
allá’ but rather ‘De otros lados’, or even the nowhere place of PV whence all
quotations are ingested, to then rise up and flee at the threat of loss of identity, of
asphyxiation and poetic death or madness. Indeed, the fear of madness (seduc-
tively ever-present in Pizarnik) is experienced as a sensation of lack of distinc-
tion between the external and the internal: ‘Ni mundo externo ni interno. Vacío
absoluto’ (Diarios, p. 156).
The idea of inspiration coming from a deliberately undefined place ties in
with Pizarnik’s suspicious and scornful attitude both towards the question of
nationalism in literature and towards her general sense of exile and rootlessness;
the question of where her ‘morada literaria’ will be built is a sensitive one and
she utterly rejects stereotypical ‘argentinidad’:

Pampa y caballito criollo. Literatura soporífera. Una se acerca a un libro argen-

tino. ¿Qué ocurre? Viles imitaciones francesas, modismos en bastardilla,
fotografías pesadas del campo. De pronto aparece un escrito rrrrealista [sic].
¡Magnífico! Encuentro entonces palabras como ‘puta’ escrita cincuenta veces
o diez variaciones más made in Dock Sud: Descripción de la viejita, del mate
y de doña XX. . . . ¡Siento que mi lugar no está acá! (ni en ninguna parte quisi-
era decir). Quizá mi queja contra mi patria sea agresión nacida en base a alguna
impotencia literaria. (Diarios, p. 27)

There are five main points arising from this somewhat flippant dismissal: first, in
general terms, the shadow of Borges’s essay on ‘El escritor argentino y la
tradición’ (which she quotes in her ‘Reportaje para El Pueblo’, Prosa, pp. 307–8);
secondly, the mention of vile French imitations, which indicates a certain anxi-
ety of influence, since a large proportion of PV is composed of quotations from
French writers – Baudelaire, Nerval, Rimbaud, Proust, Breton and Blanchot;
thirdly, the reaction against realism, which reminds us that for Pizarnik this outer
‘ordinary’ world is both alien and threatening, ‘ese mundo que no es mío, [d]el
mundo exterior’ (Diarios, p. 67); fourthly, her sense of belonging nowhere; and
finally, her persistent sense of, as she puts it, literary impotence, of doubting her
own abilities. This doubt, both in herself and in the linguistic building blocks of
the edifice she constructs, is what contributes to the perpetual crumbling of that
edifice and the break-down of the cuerpo poético in the later prose.

Language as tomb or prison

Before the collapse of the poetic edifice, there is the stage of the poet no longer
feeling protected but rather entrapped or entombed by it. The poet’s role then
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S ‘PALAIS DU VOCABULAIRE’ 121

becomes that of warning of this threat, but the space from which the poet speaks
is precisely that of the threshold of the tomb, as expressed in these lines by Darío
which Pizarnik transcribes: ‘Voy a ponerme a gritar/ Al borde de los sepulcros’
(Princeton, box 4, folder 9, p. 61). Pizarnik also expresses this threatening, enclos-
ing aspect of language via her notes on Blanchot’s reading of Lautréamont:

Lo que vuelve amenazante su lectura: nos sentimos encerrados en el libro (es

un libro cerrado, un bloque, sin fisuras, las palabras han tapado las salidas, el
horizonte es de palabras y más allá hay todavía palabras. Al mismo tiempo, el
lenguaje se pone a existir como una cosa. Algo impenetrable, lleno de sí
mismo.
(Maurice Blanchot, La part du feu (Gallimard, Paris, 19[49]) v. ‘De Lautréamont
a Miller’. Princeton, box 4, folder 5, p. 68)16

So the discourse that Pizarnik is producing (poetically) or reproducing (through

her readings) is marked by metaphors of language as prison and entrapment.
Like the Morellian wall of words in chapter 66 of Cortázar’s Rayuela, words can
become dangerously constraining, trapping the poet.17 This leads to a further set
of building metaphors in Pizarnik’s discourse, clustered around the image of the
prison:

cuidado con las palabras

(dijo)
...
te hundirán en la cárcel (Poesía, p. 307)

Three times in the poem ‘Endechas’ the poet addresses herself directly as
‘Aprisionada’ (Poesía, p. 289), and later, in a nightmarish reversion of the
fairytale ‘¡Abre sésamo!’, words, instead of protecting, begin claustrophobically
to enclose: ‘Las palabras cierran todas las puertas’ (Poesía, p. 358). The image of
the closed door, ‘La horrible visión de la puerta cerrada’ (Diarios, p. 209), recurs
obsessively in her diaries, from a ‘canción judía’ that she loved in her childhood
(‘Adónde iré. Golpeo cada puerta y cada puerta está cerrada’ [Diarios, p. 178])
to a total enclosure which leaves no way out except through suicide: ‘Veo cer-
rado. Ni afuera ni adentro’ (Diarios, p. 185). Struggling to open the door is
simultaneously a struggle with the cage of the body, the bones: ‘Alguien quiso
abrir alguna puerta. Duelen sus manos aferradas a su prisión de huesos de mal
agüero’ (‘Desfundación’, Poesía, p. 221) and the room becomes ‘una habitación
irrespirable’ (Diarios, p. 257).
As with the Utopia of poetry, we do also see the humorous side of this crisis
of exterior and interior, summed up in the figure of ‘Doña Juana la Loca’, whose

16 For the original, see Maurice Blanchot, ‘De Lautréamont à Miller’, in La part du feu
(Paris: Gallimard, 1949), pp. 160–72 (p. 163).
17 Julio Cortázar, Rayuela (1963), ed. Andrés Amorós (Madrid: Cátedra, 1988), p. 531.
122 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH

surreal yet pathetic dialogue will find its echo in Pizarnik’s use of the ‘reina loca’
figure and nonsense dialogues with Mme Lamort:

. . . dijo un día a su aya:

—Quisiera probarme mi esqueleto.
El aya le contestó:
—El esqueleto lo llevamos dentro, alteza.
Lloró toda una larga tarde al saberlo. (Princeton, box 4, folder 9,
p. 162)

The tension of claustrophobia yet potential for expression is highly visible in the
pair of poems ‘El deseo de la palabra’ and ‘La palabra del deseo’. In the first, the
poet hears laughter and the breath of ‘los prohibidos’ from within the walls, and
senses the imminent scattering of her childhood selves through some crack in the
wall, yet she goes between ‘muros que se acercan, que se juntan’, as if closing in
on the poet (Poesía, p. 269). In the second poem, the desire is to enter: ‘(Yo no
quiero decir, yo quiero entrar)’ (Poesía, p. 271); its non-specificity makes it
sound like an existential longing, though it could also echo ‘Piedra fundamen-
tal’, where the poet wanted to ‘entrar en el teclado para entrar adentro de la
música para tener una patria’ (Poesía, p. 265). She copies out Nerval’s ‘Vers
dorés’ (Princeton, box 3, folder 9, p. 279), one line of which continues this vein
of paranoia about walls: ‘Crains, dans le mur aveugle, un regard qui t’épie’.
The prison image and the sense of imprisonment and lack of air in the body
become linked together: ‘Si escucharas mi rumor a celda minúscula/ poblada de
agonizantes/ mi jadeo de asfixiada’ (Poesía, p. 310). Another phrase in the dia-
ries indicates the body becoming trapped, the eyes (once entrance to the temple)
now have bars across or in front of them, this very ambiguity highlighting the
continual slippage between the body as imprisoned and as imprisoning: ‘¿Las
rejas en mis ojos o las rejas frente a mis ojos?’ (Diarios, p. 279). An even more
extreme example is found in an unpublished prose poem, very much in the style
of the ‘de ultratumba’ poems such as ‘Extracción de la piedra de locura’, ‘Noche
compartida en el recuerdo de una huida’ or ‘El sueño de la muerte’. In this, the
confining room, as definitively closed as a coffin, is the backdrop for a nightmar-
ish scene where a hydra-like monster obstructs the poetic persona’s throat, which
cannot be distinguished from the prison. The only escape is the lava flow of lan-
guage from the poet’s memory, via her throat and tongue to ‘exteriority’, which
is now signified by Unamuno-like ‘niebla’, the very substance which had once
been a positive yet ethereal part of her poetic edifice or landscape in the form of
the ‘cornisa de niebla’ in poem 12 of Árbol de Diana. We know from Cristina
Piña’s biography that Pizarnik was reading Unamuno’s existential ‘nivola’
Niebla (in which the character Augusto Pérez claims his right to commit suicide)
a few months prior to her death.18 Of course the image of ‘cornisa de niebla’ is

18 Cristina Piña, Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991; 2nd edn, Corregidor,
1999), p. 199.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S ‘PALAIS DU VOCABULAIRE’ 123

ambiguous; if meaning the cornice or eaves of a building, this is still under the
protection of the roof, but if referring to a rocky ledge or outcrop, this is much
less protected. This vaporous ‘niebla’ with which the poet imagines becoming
fused in the last line is figured as at once city and body, walled up but opening its
great gates.

no puedo, adentro de las paredes . . . no puedo escribir. Y los armarios las

puertas cerradas, no con llave sino claveteadas como la tapa de un féretro (no
oí los martillazos pero vi las rojas cabecitas de los clavos entre las sucias flores
de papel y todas las noches oía rasguidos de uñas detrás de las puertas, tal vez
alguien quería salir fuera abrir las puertas claveteadas como un ataúd, y lo sentí
debatirse toda la noche sentí que se debatía el amurallado en mi cuarto, y cómo
arañaban sus dolían las manos de medusa, las del monstruo de siete caras en
su prisión o en mi garganta, no discierno, no sé separar los dominios. . . .
la palabra se derrama de a sílabas, hirviente, de tu memoria a tu garganta, de
tu lengua a la exterioridad, a la niebla. . . .
Morir, entrar en la niebla. Fusionarme con una figura de niebla que es una
ciudad que es un cuerpo que se abre las grandes puertas de la ciudad amural-
lada. (Princeton, box 7, folder 44)

This apocalyptic sense of release and opening out, which is intimately and
explicitly linked to death, is mirrored by the gradual break-down of the poetic
edifice. We see this even in ‘Piedra fundamental’, as if to say that the very foun-
dation stone on which the whole poetic edifice is constructed is one which con-
tains within itself its own destruction.

The internal: from ingestion to asphyxiation

The link between the poetic body and the poetic edifice is also indicated by the
other meaning of ‘palais’ – not simply palace, but palate (and related therefore to
taste and to the process of eating, swallowing). The prevalence of imagery in her
poetry associating words with the throat is striking, not simply the throat’s
importance as the seat of the voice – as she puts it, ‘mi garganta es la capital de
mi cuerpo’ (Diarios, p. 226) – but in a harsh physical sense as a passage which
may be blocked by language. For example, in ‘En contra’: ‘Palabras en mi gar-
ganta. Sellos intragables. . . . El sabor de las palabras, ese sabor a semen viejo’
(Prosa, p. 22); or ‘Anillos de ceniza’: ‘Y cuando es de noche, siempre,/ una tribu
de palabras mutiladas/ busca asilo en mi garganta’ (Poesía, p. 181). These images
echo a phrase by Konstantine Kavafis which she copied out in her notebook
(Princeton, box 3, folder 9, p. 105): ‘y sufría no poco por tener/ vocablos amon-
tonados en su interior’. Not only is the poet afflicted by asphyxiation, but also
potentially by drowning – but a drowning in silence rather than words: ‘me
ahogaba, era como si estuviera tragando silencio’ (Prosa, p. 40). The throat is
therefore the vehicle for voicing a primordial sense of lack; as expressed in this
quotation Pizarnik takes from Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva: ‘jamás había conocido
124 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH

otra cosa que la estrecha prisión de su jaula, pero albergaba sin embargo el sen-
timiento de que le faltaba algo y expresaba esta necesidad de lo desconocido
mediante su garganta’ (Princeton, box 4, folder 9, p. 56).
Pizarnik perhaps also draws such imagery from the Swiss poet André Corboz.
She copies out an extensive passage from him, which contains many of the ele-
ments key to the expression of her dilemmas and desires: the poet’s throat as a
kind of threshold via which the voice can emerge from nightmarish enclosure;
the wall; and the dwelling approached laboriously through language:

La materia misma del aire está constituida por un amontonamiento continuo

de túneles, de pozos, de cámaras, de torres, de grutas y de escaleras que espe-
ran la forma vehemente de tu voz. Más allá, está el espesor; más acá, la trans-
parencia. Pero el punto de encuentro fulgura en la garganta del poeta, que se
encaja en el espacio como un puñal, para dar su sentido a una poesía impa-
ciente a través de todos sus músculos, donde se empeña la conquista inmensa,
crispada aún, de la altitud con cuatro puertas.
El poder de las llaves.
Todo poema comienza por el vacío. . . . Hasta el frente a frente final con el
muro. . . . Hay que acercarse al hogar sílaba por sílaba. (André Corboz,
Visión de la poesía: Princeton, box 3, folder 9, pp. 254–5)

The violence of this imagery points out the central danger of Pizarnik’s desire
for a literary language which will be a morada or a covering. In order to fashion
this morada, Pizarnik has to ingest literary language of others, and these words
may turn against her: ‘Las palabras oscuras nos cierran la salida’ (J. Garcés;
Princeton, box 4, folder 9, p. 83). It is therefore seen as incredible that poetry can
be produced at all in the circumstances: as in this quotation she takes from
Malraux: ‘el mayor misterio es que en esta prisión extraigamos de nosotros mis-
mos imágenes con potencia suficiente para negar nuestra nada’ (PV, Princeton,
box 4, folder 5, p. 80).
So, paradoxically, it may only be when the walls of this carefully constructed
building are breached that poetic language can break forth: ‘Cuando a la casa del
lenguaje se le vuela el tejado y las palabras no guarecen, yo hablo’ (Poesía,
p. 223). As Christian Gundermann puts it, ‘the lyrical voice does not speak
despite the “flying roof” but because of it.19 There is therefore always a conflict
between inside and outside: inside the poet is asphyxiating, yet she has to be
within to write. But expression can only be free beyond the walls. ‘Comencé a
asfixiarme entre paredes viscosas (y sólo debo escribir desde adentro de estas
paredes). . . . (Y luchas por abrir tu expresión, por libertarte de las paredes)’
(Prosa, p. 32).
The protective shelter of literary language is therefore seen in various meta-
morphoses as a prison, a torture chamber, a cell, a hospital room, a corridor, a

19 Christian Gundermann, ‘Occult Couches in the Pampa: Reviewing Three Recent Books
on Twentieth-Century Argentina’, Latin American Research Review, 41:1 (2006), 211–21
(p. 221).
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S ‘PALAIS DU VOCABULAIRE’ 125

labyrinth, or a tomb (as in the Quevedo). Likewise, what were clothes may
become a shroud: ‘Las metáforas de asfixia se despojan del sudario, el poema’
(Poesía, p. 289). She also noted this idea when reading the Lebanese surrealist
poet Georges Schehadé (Princeton, box 4, folder 9, p. 30). This in turn, in ‘otra
vuelta de tuerca’, gives rise to the idea of death as ultimate shelter: ‘al abrigo de
la muerte’ (Princeton, box 3, folder 3, p. 5, under the heading ‘palais V.’). What
was the poetic body’s sustenance and life blood may become something that
drowns it, suffocates it, wounds or causes thirst: ‘Sed sin desenlace. Separada
del acto de beber, de saciar’ (Diarios, p. 166). The failure to quench thirst is a
symbolic representation of a disjunction between the internal desires and the
failure of the external to satisfy them. Stuttering and chronic asthma, both of
which were concrete physical conditions suffered by Pizarnik, become part of
this metaphorical tension, symbolising a radical difficulty with language and the
production of language. Even the works which she feels are most ‘interior’ to
her, cause this kind of suffering. ‘Siento un libro dentro de mí. Un libro que me
atraganta. Un libro que me obstruye la respiración. Y yo no permito que salga.
¡No! Pero ¿por qué?’ (Diarios, p. 51). Yet the process of writing the diary, con-
fessing this sense of strangulation, simultaneously relieves the sensation: ‘Si no
fuera por estas líneas, muero asfixiada’ (Diarios, p. 52).
Thus the poetic act is a matter of life and death and is always intimately linked
to the body; hence her often-quoted phrase, linked to Paz and the surrealists,
about wanting the poetic act to be one with living: ‘el sueño de morir haciendo el
poema en un espacio ceremonial donde palabras como amor, poesía y libertad
eran actos en cuerpo vivo’ (Prosa, pp. 40–1). Pizarnik adds to this the unattrib-
uted phrase ‘cobrar cuerpo (las palabras cobran cuerpo)’ (Princeton, PV2, box 5,
folder 6, p. 8), which seems at once to reveal the workings of the auto-didact,
who is exploring linguistic phrases as objects, and those of the poet, who is
extrapolating from this to the possibilities and limitations of all linguistic and
literary endeavour. So the cuerpo poético is both the poetic persona’s body, and
the body of language and literature upon which its risky enterprise draws, and by
which it is simultaneously sheltered and confined.

Internal to external: birth

Confinement in its obstetric sense leads us to another metaphor commonly
applied to the creative literary process, that of birth. Parallel to the release from
the confining building, is that from the confining body, whereby the internal-to-
external movement of birth is seen both as a liberation and as an expulsion. In
the poem ‘El sueño de la muerte o el lugar de los cuerpos poéticos’, the poet
gradually moves to speak from a place which is ‘más desde adentro’ (Poesía,
p. 254) and proceeds to witness her own birth from within herself:

mi cabeza, de súbito, parece querer salirse ahora por mi útero como si los
cuerpos poéticos forcejearan por irrumpir en la realidad, nacer a ella, y hay
126 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH

alguien en mi garganta, alguien que se estuvo gestando en soledad, y yo, no

acabada, ardiente por nacer, me abro, se me abre, va a venir, voy a venir. El
cuerpo poético, el heredado, . . . un grito, una llamada, una llamarada, un lla-
mamiento. (Poesía, p. 255)

This paradoxical birth of the poetic self that is also other (mi cabeza/ella) from
the self, in an action which is simultaneously active (me abro) and passive (se me
abre), and which produces a Joycean stream of self-conscious literary play on
the word ‘llama’, seems to sum up the irreducible tension of the external and
internal. Pizarnik returns to the birth image in the following diary extract: ‘Es
como golpear las paredes irrisoriamente herméticas de una cueva laberíntica. Es
como un feto batiendo las entrañas de su madre y rogando que lo dejen salir, que
se asfixia’ (Diarios, p. 87). Note that crucially, the context here does not make
the subject of the main verb clear; perhaps ‘es’ describes poetry or life, or both.
Yet being born is not simply blessed release from the sensation of asphyxiation
or from enclosure in the labyrinth; it is also expulsion and lack. As Pizarnik
underlines in her notes taken from Blanchot on Freud, ‘Nacer, es, después de
haber tenido todas las cosas, carecer de pronto de todas las cosas, y ante todo del
ser. . . . Todo le es exterior [al niño], y él mismo es casi ese exterior: lo de afuera,
la exterioridad radical sin unidad, la dispersión sin nada que se disperse; la
ausencia que no es ausencia de nada es al principio la única presencia del niño’
(Princeton, box 4, folder 5, p. 102). Such absence leads to an anxious desire to
regress: from a ‘casa de la mente’ we move to a ‘Sala de psicopatología’ where
in desperation the poetic voice tries to re-enter the original place of security, the
original morada prior to birth. However, the harsh words used to describe the
womb speak the violent resentment of desperation: ‘pero luego una quiere volver
a entrar en esa maldita concha’ (Poesía, p. 412).

How to reconcile the internal and external?

Pizarnik’s discourse returns obsessively to these images of entrapment or obsta-
cles, and to the idea of opening out to be free of them. But the opening out is
always towards ‘cosas tan interiores y espirituales, para las cuales comúnmente
falta lenguaje’, as San Juan puts it in a passage copied out by Pizarnik (Princeton,
box 3, folder 9, p. 23); the sense that the only language beyond this wall (or
beyond its ruins) is a spiritual one is reinforced by the quotation she takes from
Alberti’s Sobre los ángeles: ‘Sumergiéndome, enterrándome profundo, pro-
fundo, en mis propias ruinas, echando los escombros sobre mi cabeza . . . Y
entonces se me revelaron los ángeles . . .’ (Princeton, box 4, folder 9, p. 133).
The liberating sensation as the prison or wall crumbles may remove barriers
between internal and external in the sphere of the metaphors of building, but in
terms of the parallel process in the sphere of the cuerpo poético, the body is
damaged (by the ‘filo’ of language, Poesía, p. 307) and there is no way of heal-
ing the resultant wound (Poesía, p. 415). Indeed, the whole textual body has
become what María Negroni characterizes, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, as
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S ‘PALAIS DU VOCABULAIRE’ 127

‘un cadáver “textual” ’, or perhaps more appropriately – given the link between
body and building – a ‘cadaver room’ (pace Sylvia Plath).20
This impasse is reformulated yet again in terms of the external and internal by
way of what Pizarnik calls, referring to La condesa sangrienta, ‘un problema
musical’. In formulating this problem, Pizarnik draws on Jean Starobinski’s writ-
ings on melancholy, but adds to them the element of music (with its associated
qualities of rhythm and dissonance). Pizarnik feels that this ‘musical’ problem
might be resolved if she were able to write in prose, and she returns to the favou-
rite morada idea (Diarios, p. 275).21 But she nevertheless realizes that this will
not remove the internal/external aspect (Diarios, p. 353). So this problem of the
internal/external, of the cover/asphyxiate dialectic, leads the poet to declare: ‘Yo
no miro/ nunca el interior de los cantos. Siempre, en el fondo, hay una reina/
muerta’ (Poesía, p. 425). Yet – as Calderón would have us believe – this ‘interior’
is also source of the night: ‘La puerta/ (mejor diré funesta boca) abierta/ está, y
desde su centro nace la noche, pues la engendra dentro’ (Princeton, box 4, folder
9, p. 53), which is the ambiguous realm that is frequently associated in Pizarnik’s
poetry with the creative process: ‘Toda la noche hago la noche’ (Poesía, p. 215).22
The fact that in Pizarnik’s above-quoted poem it is the interior of song that is
mentioned is significant; music cannot escape the problematics of language,
because as song, it is indissolubly linked to language. Furthermore, music has
rhythm, which, as we have seen in the case of the melancholic ‘condesa sangri-
enta’, can become distorted, leading to an incompatibility between the exterior
world and the interior ‘casa de la mente’.23 All these contradictions come together
in the ambiguous image of the ‘Cantora nocturna’; in the poem of that title, her
song corrodes the distance between thirst and the hand that seeks the glass, but
the singer is dead, with ‘niebla verde’ on her lips and ‘frío gris’ in her eyes
(Poesía, p. 213).
So, is the poetic body condemned to being, or being housed in, a place of tran-
sit? Can it only be a ‘Casa de citas’, literally built from quotations, site (cite) of
promiscuous meetings and a place where one cannot dwell, but only pass through,
always on the point of leaving or entering? Since a surrealistic fusion of external
and internal is impossible, the only option for the poet is to try to keep the external

20 María Negroni, ‘Alejandra Pizarnik: Melancolía y cadáver textual’, Inti: Revista de

literatura hispánica, 52–3 (2000–01), 169–78 (p. 175); and also El testigo lúcido, p. 19. I
came to the Plath phrase through Shane Weller’s article ‘The Deaths of Poetry: Sylvia Plath
and the Ethics of Modern Elegy’, Textual Practice, 20:1 (2006), 49–69 (p. 55).
21 See Susana Chávez Silverman’s essay in this volume for a discussion of this genre
question in terms of gender.
22 Note that Calderón’s lines, spoken by Rosaura near the beginning of his famous play La
vida es sueño, link the body with a dwelling place (in this case a bleak rocky prison in the
mountains of Poland) by the metaphor of door as fateful mouth.
23 An interesting internalization of music into the body can be seen in a sketch Pizarnik
makes in her 1954 Diary, which consists of a stick person with a large body which contains a
stave, a treble clef and some notes, as though the music were inside the body. In Princeton,
Series I: Diaries, box 1, folder 1, Diary 1954, last page (unnumbered).
128 FIONA J. MACKINTOSH

and internal in productive tension, and perhaps Pizarnik’s poetic persona will
thereby manage to achieve (albeit briefly) an ‘insuring insecurity’.24
The whole trajectory of this internal/external dilemma which I have been
charting can be summed up in three unpublished poems:

no sirvo sino para acumular en migarganta

letras terrores lonegroenlosojos delacto
(Princeton, box 6, folder 6; word spacing [sic])

Quisiera investirme de mí para poder

ser otra.
(Me estoy yendo al afuera del poema).
(‘Esbozo’, Princeton, box 6, folder 24)

en ese jardín o muerte de que hablo

escuché la música interna de tu mirada,
jardín, callejón sin salida,
oscuro, silencio, silencio. 15-5-1970 (Princeton, box 6, folder 7)

From the piling up of words in the throat, the words of PV which threaten to
stifle her creative voice, the poet then expresses a desire to escape beyond the
confines of the self and the poem (the clothing metaphor at once containing or
covering and releasing the cuerpo poético); the poet is in a continual process of
movement towards the outside of the poem, a process underlined by the use of
the gerund; but the final destination, the ultimate morada, is a garden which is
death. In that final place the poet has heard the internal music (which is only a
metaphorical music communicated visually) of the other, but this transcendent
experience will not be communicated, since even the garden has become a place
of enclosure, a ‘callejón sin salida’.

Bibliography
Aira, César, Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1998)
Blanchot, Maurice, ‘De Lautréamont à Miller’, in La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard,
1949), pp. 160–72
Catelli, Nora, ‘Invitados al palacio de las citas’, in Clarín: Suplemento Cultura y
Nación, 14 September 2002 [consulted online; n.p.]
——, ‘Ráfagas de Alejandra Pizarnik’, in El País: Babelia, 3 January 2004, p. 5
Cortázar, Julio, Rayuela (1963), ed. Andrés Amorós (Madrid: Cátedra, 1988)
Dalmaroni, Miguel, ‘Sacrificio e intertextos en la poesía de Alejandra Pizarnik’,
Orbis Tertius: Revista de teoría y crítica literaria, 1:1 (1996), 93–116
Graziano, Frank, Alejandra Pizarnik: Semblanza (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1984)

24 Paraphrasing the closing lines of Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Go not too near a house of
rose’, which Pizarnik copies out in Spanish translation (Princeton, box 3, folder 9, p. 39).
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S ‘PALAIS DU VOCABULAIRE’ 129

Gundermann, Christian, ‘Occult Couches in the Pampa: Reviewing Three Recent

Books on Twentieth-Century Argentina’, Latin American Research Review, 41:1
(2006), 211–21
Lasarte, Francisco, ‘Más allá del surrealismo: la poesía de Alejandra Pizarnik’, in
Revista Iberoamericana, 125 (1983), 867–77
Moix, Ana María, ‘La niña, la muñeca y la muerte’, in Clarín: Suplemento Cultura y
Nación, 14 September 2002 [consluted online; n.p.]
Muschietti, Delfina, ‘Las tres caras de Alejandra Pizarnik’, review of Pizarnik’s
Poesía completa in Página/12, July 2001; accessed at http://www.lainsignia.
org/2001/julio/cul_077.htm [n.p.]
Negroni, María, ‘La condesa sangrienta: notas sobre un problema musical’,
Hispamérica, 68 (1994), 99–110
——, ‘Alejandra Pizarnik: melancolía y cadáver textual’, Inti: Revista de Literatura
Hispánica, 52–3 (2000–01), 169–78
——, El testigo lúcido: la obra de sombra de Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario: Beatriz
Viterbo, 2003)
Piña, Cristina, Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991)
——, Poesía y experiencia del límite: leer a Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires:
Botella al Mar, 1999)
Rosenbaum, Alfredo, ‘Un infierno centrífugo: glosas a “Piedra fundamental” de
Alejandra Pizarnik’, in Poéticas argentinas del siglo XX, ed. Jorge Dubatti
(Buenos Aires: Belgrano, 1998), pp. 195–202
Sola, Graciela de, ‘Aproximaciones místicas en la nueva poesía argentina: acerca de
la obra de Alejandra Pizarnik’, in Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 73 (1968),
545–53
Soncini, Anna, ‘Itinerario de la palabra en el silencio’, in Cuadernos Hispano-
americanos: Los complementarios, 5 (1990), 7–15
Venti, Patricia, ‘Los diarios de Alejandra Pizarnik: censura y traición’, in Espéculo,
26 (2004) [n.p.]; consulted online at http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero26/
diariosp.html
Weller, Shane, ‘The Deaths of Poetry: Sylvia Plath and the Ethics of Modern Elegy’,
Textual Practice, 20:1 (2006), 49–69
Wilson, Jason, ‘Surrealism and Post-Surrealism’, in the Cambridge History of Latin
America, X: Latin America since 1930: Ideas, Culture and Society, ed. Leslie
Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
 Alejandra Pizarnik’s Poetry:
Translating the Translation of Subjectivity

Cecilia Rossi

¿Qué significa traducirse en palabras?

Alejandra Pizarnik (Poesía, p. 253)

This essay was part of a PhD thesis, submitted in 2006, which comprises the
translation into English of Pizarnik’s Poesía completa, with the exception of the
disowned early work La tierra más ajena (1955).1 In the first part, I explore
Pizarnik’s subjectivity and her ambiguous positioning of the first-person subject
in language. I then move on to a consideration of the practical difficulties that
arise on a phonological and syntactical level for the translator of Pizarnik as a
result of this often multiple persona.
‘Toda la noche espero que mi lenguaje logre configurarme’ Pizarnik says in
the poem ‘L’Obscurité des eaux’ (Poesía, p. 285), from the last collection pub-
lished in her lifetime, El infierno musical (1971). A few lines below, she adds: ‘A
mí me han dado un silencio pleno de formas y visiones.’ For Pizarnik night is
when language becomes her language, and hence poetry, and where, through this
transformation of word into poem, she is configured, in the sense that she is
gathered together, takes form, or, in other words, gains subjectivity. Pizarnik is
concerned with the night and its silence; it is in the silence of the night that she
chases the words that will make poems. It is there that she constructs her own
subjectivity within her poetry. The poem is the place, the ‘morada’ or dwelling,
where this subject comes to exist and live:

Escribes poemas
porque necesitas
un lugar
en donde sea lo que no es (Poesía, p. 318)

In this respect, ‘lo que no es’ can be read not only as her visions and dreams, but
also as her own subjectivity.

1 All translations are mine and unpublished, except poems from Árbol de Diana (1962), early
versions of which appeared in Comparative Criticism, 22 (2000), 211–23, and a selection from
Los trabajos y las noches (1965) published in Modern Poetry in Translation, 3 (2005), 119–27.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S POETRY: TRANSLATION 131

This does not mean that at all times the passage from silence to language, or
from vision to word, and hence to subject, is a smooth one. Many times the poet
is ‘perdida en el silencio/ de las palabras fantasmas’ (Poesía, p. 319), chasing
what cannot be said: ‘Yo era lo imposible y también el desgarramiento por lo
imposible’ (Poesía, p. 358). My concern is not with the success or failure of this
enterprise, but with this search for subjectivity in language. And the first issue to
be addressed here is the understanding of ‘subjectivity’ as different positions in
language.
This idea that the ‘subject’ can be equated to a position in language, and in
this particular case, poetic language, relates to Julia Kristeva’s discussions of the
subject-in-process. It seems appropriate to refer to Kristeva’s theoretical explo-
rations of the subject to analyse Pizarnik’s translation of subjectivity, since two
of the starting points for Kristeva’s study are poets who occupied a pre-eminent
position in the construction of Pizarnik’s oeuvre, namely, Mallarmé and
Lautréamont.
According to Kristeva this subject is ‘questionable’ as to its identity, while the
processes it undergoes are ‘unsettling’ as to its place within the semiotic or sym-
bolic order.2 The starting point for Kristeva’s understanding of the subject is that,
contrary to what structural linguistics states, ‘a subject of enunciation takes
shape within the gap opened between signifier and signified that admits both
structure and interplay within’.3 Kristeva relies on Husserl’s discussion of the
judging consciousness of the transcendental ego to affirm that ‘the predicative
(syntactic) operation constitutes this judging consciousness, positing at the same
time the signified Being (and therefore the object of meaning and signification)
and the operating consciousness itself’ (Kristeva, Desire in Language, p. 130).
This predicative operation, as Kristeva adds, is a ‘thetic operation because it
simultaneously posits the thesis (position) of both Being and ego’ (Kristeva,
Desire in Language, p. 130). So, the subject is neither a historical individual nor
a logically conceived consciousness, but the ‘operating thetic consciousness pos-
iting correlatively the transcendental Being and ego’ (Kristeva, Desire in
Language, p. 130).
In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva states that all enunciation,
whether of a word or of a sentence, is thetic, in that it implies a separation or
break from the semiotic field or chora (linked to basic pulsions or drives and
pre-Oedipal processes).4 This semiotic category is to be differentiated from ‘the
realm of signification, which is always that of a proposition or judgement, in
other words, a realm of positions’ (the symbolic realm). Thus, in order for the
subject to separate through its image and from its objects, image and objects

2 Leon S. Roudiez, ‘Introduction to Julia Kristeva’, in Desire in Language (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1992), p. 17.
3 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice
Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 127–8.
4 Julia Kristeva, ‘The Thetic: Rupture and/or Boundary’, in Revolution in Poetic Language,
trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 43.
132 CECILIA ROSSI

must first be posited in a space that becomes symbolic. In this way the process
of signification for Kristeva is built upon this tension between the semiotic and
the symbolic. In poetic language the thetic nature of the signifying act becomes
more apparent. Such is the case in Pizarnik’s poetry and the positing of herself
in poetry; the poem becomes the place where this tension between the semiotic
and the symbolic is played out.
One of the first steps in this positioning of the subject in language can be
found in Pizarnik’s second collection, La última inocencia (1956), which ends
with the three-line poem ‘Sólo un nombre’:

alejandra alejandra
debajo estoy yo
alejandra

‘Sólo un nombre’ in Pizarnik’s case is not just a name. She was born ‘Flora’,
known as ‘Blímele’ within the Jewish community of Eastern European immi-
grants who had settled in Avellaneda in the 1930s, and as a poet chose to call
herself ‘Alejandra’. As Tamara Kamenszain says, the repetition of ‘alejandra ale-
jandra’ is already the start of versification, as it produces a heptasyllable through
the elision of the final and first ‘a’, which acts as the girl’s christening as poet.5
The result is the creation of a new place where the poet comes into being: ‘debajo
estoy yo’ – the poet lies below, underwriting every signature of the one who is in
the world. She has now acquired a body with which to write ‘el cuerpo del
poema’ (Poesía, p. 269). Yet, this is a christening which ironically also functions
as an epitaph, as hinted at by ‘debajo estoy yo’. This would indicate the early
realization that this process of writing oneself into poetry, becoming one with it,
would also lead to death. Pizarnik’s aesthetics revolved around the understand-
ing of poetry in absolute terms.
It can be said that, at this stage, Alejandra the poet has different aspirations
from those of Flora: Alejandra’s desire to become a poet means she is ready to
renounce everything else. Five years after the publication of La última inocencia
she writes in her journal:

La vida perdida para la literatura por culpa de la literatura. Quiero decir, por
querer hacer de mí un personaje literario en la vida real fracaso en mi deseo
de hacer literatura con mi vida real pues ésta no existe: es literatura. (Diarios,
p. 200)

It is clear from these words that there is a constant struggle and tension in her
between writing and living, between obeying the desires she experiences, and
making something out of them that can become literature. A few lines above the
quoted entry, she admits not knowing what she wants, what will become of her,

5 Tamara Kamenszain, Historias de amor (y otros ensayos sobre poesía) (Buenos Aires:
Paidós, 2000), p. 103.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S POETRY: TRANSLATION 133

where she’ll be led to by ‘este modo de vida, esta manera de morir’ (Diarios,
p. 199). She is constantly bombarded by ‘frases llenas de sentido, ritmo hastiado
de mi silencio inquieto’ (Diarios, p. 199).
It is not surprising, then, that her experience of being torn between life and
death, between nothing and silence and the word, leads her to search for solace
in literature; ‘la muerte se muere de risa pero la vida/ se muere de llanto/ pero la
muerte pero la vida/ pero nada nada nada’ (Poesía, p. 62). She writes in ‘Poema
para Emily Dickinson’:

Del otro lado de la noche

la espera su nombre,
su subrepticio anhelo de vivir,
¡del otro lado de la noche! (Poesía, p. 64)

That she should write at this stage that ‘la espera su nombre’ on the other side of
night is significant, since the night’s silence is the ‘espacio de revelaciones’
(Poesía, p. 156); on the other side of night, her name is no longer Flora but
Alejandra, the poet, thus foregrounding this split between her person and her
poetic being. The ‘personaje alejandrino’ had been born.6 Thus, in the poem that
follows in this collection, she signs her name as poet, ‘Sólo un nombre’ (Poesía,
p. 65). What also becomes clear at the end of this volume is that she has chosen
literary models to follow along the road to becoming a poet.
In 1962 she published her groundbreaking collection Árbol de Diana, where
it becomes apparent that this ‘leap from herself’ (‘He dado el salto de mí al
alba’ – poem 1, Poesía, p. 103) has effectively taken place, so that she now
positions herself in the text as different subjects.7 Thus, it is not uncommon to
find phrases like ‘la silenciosa en el desierto’ (Poesía, p. 105), ‘la viajera con el
vaso vacío’ (p. 105), ‘la pequeña olvidada’ (p. 106) and ‘la que ama al viento’
(p. 109) throughout this collection.8 There are also among the brief poems in
Árbol de Diana those that refer directly to this split in the subject. For example,
poem 13:

explicar con palabras de este mundo

que partió de mí un barco llevándome (Poesía, p. 115)

In line 2 the verb partir means ‘to leave’ and ‘to sail away’. But it also means ‘to
break’; the poet plays with this meaning, as she implies that the subject has been
split. When translating this poem it was impossible for me to keep the pun on the
Spanish verb partir; instead I aimed to imply the fragmentation of the subject

6 César Aira, Alejandra Pizarnik (Barcelona: Ediciones Omega, 2001), p. 13.

7 For another discussion of this theme, see Florinda F. Goldberg’s chapter ‘El espacio
fracturado del yo’, in Alejandra Pizarnik:‘Este espacio que somos’ (Gaithersburg, MD:
Hispamérica, 1994), pp. 65–73.
8 For an exploration of the positive or negative charge attached to such gendered images
by Pizarnik, see Susana Chávez Silverman’s essay in this volume.
134 CECILIA ROSSI

elsewhere. In the case of English, ships take feminine pronouns, so the phrase
‘sailed from me taking me with her’ – ending in ‘her’ and where ‘me’ is repeated
and twice refers to the voice of the poem – allows for ambiguity and the identifi-
cation of split/ship with split person/poet, or, split subject.
The first line, ‘explicar con palabras de este mundo’, is smoother than the
second line, ‘que partió de mí un barco llevándome’, which has a broken rhythm.
The use of sounds such as /k/ and /p/, on the one hand, and the unusual repetition
of two forms of the first-person pronoun, ‘mí’ (dative) and ‘me’ (accusative), on
the other, contribute to this change in rhythm. These two personal pronouns, ‘mí’
and ‘me’ (in ‘llevándome’), tag behind the verb like the wake of a ship. But there
is also the form of versification chosen by Pizarnik: she has made use of the
‘endecasílabo’, the traditional verse form of the sonnet, except that here we have
just two lines, not fourteen, carefully arranged into one stanza: two solitary lines,
adrift in the open sea of the blank page. Both poem and poet have suffered frag-
mentation, thus intensifying the link between them, calling to mind ‘haciendo el
cuerpo del poema con mi cuerpo’ (Poesía, p. 269). This image of the break-up or
fragmentation of identity, of the body as a ship that breaks up so that one part
sails away from the other, is indeed poignant and calls to mind Rimbaud’s ‘I is
someone else’, where poetry becomes the means to undertake the full explora-
tion of one’s subjectivity.9
The brevity of these poems has been discussed by Cristina Piña; Pizarnik her-
self commented on this in 1968: ‘Cada día son más breves mis poemas: peque-
ños fuegos para quien anduvo perdida en lo extraño’ (Prosa, p. 299). In this
brevity, Piña sees a high concentration and compression of meaning, and a uni-
fying effect on the subject. ‘Traza una especie de “círculo encantado” ’, Piña
says, where the subject maintains a principle – or fiction – of unity.10 In Kristevan
terms this shows that the semiotic element in her poetry is being kept in check by
the symbolic order. In later collections the poems are longer; they are often writ-
ten in ‘prose’, where the lengthening of the line allows for a change in the pace
and an extensive use of repetition. This appears to point to an inversion in the
linguistic process, from the symbolic back to the semiotic field.11 In the longer
poems it is clear that the splitting of the subject within the poem, seen in Árbol
de Diana, gives way to a de-structuring of subjectivity where the poet – who she
is and who she was – coexist and enter into a dialogue. In the title poem of
Extracción de la piedra de locura (1968) we find these different subjectivities
interacting with one another:

Si vieras a la que sin ti duerme en un jardín en ruinas en la memoria.

Allí yo, ebria de mil muertes, hablo de mí conmigo sólo por saber

9 Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete, trans. Wyatt Mason (New York: Modern Library,
2002), p. 365.
10 Cristina Piña, Poesía y experiencia del límite (Buenos Aires: Botella al Mar, 1999),
p. 110.
11 Piña, Poesía y experiencia del límite, p. 110.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S POETRY: TRANSLATION 135

si es verdad que estoy debajo de la hierba. No sé los nombres.

¿A quién le dirás que no sabes? Te deseas otra. La otra que eres
se desea otra. ¿Qué pasa en la verde alameda? Pasa que no es verde
y ni siquiera hay una alameda. Y ahora juegas a ser esclava para
ocultar tu corona ¿otorgada por quién? ¿quién te ha ungido? ¿quién te
ha consagrado? El invisible pueblo de la memoria más vieja. (Poesía,
p. 247)

This multiplicity of subjects calls to mind the existence of a fragmented body

and perhaps even the absence of a subject before the mirror-stage. This, as Piña
explains, leads to a poetic rhythm which echoes the overlapping of voices in a
fragmented dialogue.12 This interplay of subjectivities poses several problems
for the translator, which are not, in my view, at all dissimilar to the problems that
this type of poetic language poses for the poet herself. Where the poet is seeking
to express the ‘I’ in ways that mirror her own ‘making’ or ‘configuring’ as sub-
ject, the translator needs to find ways to mirror this search in the target
language.
So in terms of translation, this process of the poet’s ‘making’ or ‘configuring’
– which I have discussed following Cristina Piña’s reading – calls for different
strategies, principally with reference to two main levels of linguistic analysis:
the phonological, where I will be looking at rhythm, and the syntactical, where I
will be looking at reference and the use of pronouns. I will divide this discussion
into three stages; first I will look at examples from La última inocencia and Las
aventuras perdidas, and discuss the positioning of the poet in various metaphors
of subjectivity. Secondly, I will discuss examples from Árbol de Diana and Los
trabajos y las noches, looking at the continued use of metaphors of subjectivity
and then at the problem of referentiality. Finally, I will look at examples from
Extracción de la piedra de locura, and at a small selection from her ‘poemas no
recogidos en libros’, which span nearly two decades of the poet’s life, from 1956
to 1972, concentrating on the shift of her poetic language towards prose and the
de-structuring of the subject.

La última inocencia and Las aventuras perdidas: The Making of the

‘I’ through Metaphors of Subjectivity
In one of her last poems, dated 1972, the year in which she died, Pizarnik asks
the question: ‘¿Quién es yo?’ (Poesía, p. 430). Such departure from the usual
grammatical form of ‘quién soy yo’ and the switch to the third person have the
disturbing effect of ‘objectifying’ the ‘I’ in the poem. The initial question is fol-
lowed by another question: ‘¿Solamente un reclamo de huérfana?’ which high-
lights the theme of orphanhood, very much present throughout Pizarnik’s works.13

12
Piña, Poesía y experiencia del límite, p. 112.
13
On the theme of orphanhood, see Fiona Mackintosh’s Childhood in the Works of Silvina
Ocampo and Alejandra Pizarnik (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2003), pp. 147–53.
136 CECILIA ROSSI

Indeed, this is a willed orphanhood that will allow her to break away from family
and past in search of poetry. As mentioned earlier, not only does she decide to
abandon her first name, Flora, in La última inocencia, but she tries out different
names, or phrases with which to name herself, always carefully avoiding the use
of the first person; it is what we can term an ‘accusative subjectivity’. In fact, it
can be argued that the first time that the nominative pronoun ‘yo’ is explicitly
used in this collection is in the last poem, ‘Sólo un nombre’, which can be read as
the ‘christening of the poet’, as previously discussed.
There are, in fact, two instances before the last poem, where ‘yo’ is used, but
both defy the sense of identification with the poetic persona or poet. In ‘Noche’
the persona exclaims ‘¡Qué sé yo!’ (Poesía, p. 57), which is in itself a set phrase,
and therefore does not result in an affirmation or statement of her identity, but
renders the ‘yo’ void of existential significance. The second use of ‘yo’ is found
in ‘Siempre’, in which the persona claims she is ‘cansada de la espera del yo de
paso’ (Poesía, p. 63), where ‘de paso’ is another set phrase meaning ‘just passing
through/visiting’ or ‘on the way’ (with the implication of ‘to some other place’).
In conjunction with ‘yo’ the effect is quite destabilizing, as it implies that the
persona is waiting for herself, to be gathered together, or configured, while doing
something else; another reading is that her self or identity is always just passing
through, not stable or fixed. Both readings prove almost impossible to render
satisfactorily in English. I opted for ‘tired of waiting for myself on the way’
because it maintains the strangeness of the original image and creates a certain
degree of ambivalence as to its possible meaning. The poet is waiting for herself
(which can also be read as her self) while on the way – possibly to some other
place where she can ‘vivirme’/live myself, as she says in the second poem, called
‘Origen’, in Las aventuras perdidas.
This absence of ‘yo’ in her first collection is possible thanks to the use of
‘sujeto tácito’ in Spanish, which allows for verbs to be conjugated in the first
person but without actually including the pronoun ‘yo’ in the body of the text.
Nevertheless, the most common form of self-address is the third person through
the use of the formula ‘article plus noun’, as if the noun chosen were a mask
behind which she hides. Indeed, in the opening poem, ‘Salvación’, the second
line reads ‘Y la muchacha vuelve a escalar el viento’ (Poesía, p. 49). We need to
remind ourselves of Pizarnik’s own words regarding the meaning of ‘the wind’
as metaphor to understand the full significance of this phrase. In an interview
with Martha Isabel Moia, Pizarnik says ‘tengo amor por el viento aun si, precisa-
mente, mi imaginación suele darle formas y colores feroces. Embestida por el
viento, voy por el bosque, me alejo en busca del jardín’ (Prosa, p. 312). And it is
only a few lines earlier that Pizarnik affirms we are all ‘wounded’ by this funda-
mental ‘desgarradura’ that writing attempts to heal, and that Moia considers to
be caused by the wind, among other factors. The poem ‘Salvación’ closes with
another reference to the ‘muchacha’, who ‘halla la máscara del infinito/ y rompe
el muro de la poesía’ (Poesía, p. 49). In these two instances I chose to translate
‘muchacha’ as ‘young woman’, rather than ‘girl’, precisely with the intention of
signalling her arrival at ‘poetry’: ‘finds the mask of infinity/ and breaks the wall
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S POETRY: TRANSLATION 137

of poetry’. This is the ‘girl’ who has become ‘poet’. In fact, Pizarnik uses the
term ‘la mujer solitaria’ only a few pages later, in ‘Origen’ (the fourth poem),
whose opening line is ‘hay que salvar al viento’ (we have to save the wind). The
decision to use ‘young woman’ instead of ‘girl’ led me to change the title of the
third poem in the collection, ‘La de los ojos abiertos’, which in my first draft
read as ‘Girl with Eyes Open Wide’. It is precisely this type of phrase that can be
regarded as a metaphor of subjectivity, where again Pizarnik the little girl/poet
seems to play hide and seek, challenging the world to find her, only to discover
that she is the one behind the mask in the poem: ‘She with Eyes Open Wide’ who
looks on while ‘la vida juega en la plaza/ con el ser que nunca fui’ (life plays in
the plaza/ with the self I never was) (Poesía, p. 51). This example also illustrates
the impossibility of avoiding ‘I’ until the last poem in the collection, which the
Spanish source text does, because of the grammatical constraint of English,
which does not allow for the use of the ‘sujeto tácito’: so ‘y aquí estoy’ becomes
‘here I am’.
A further difficulty which I encountered with this poem, and which also
relates to the idea of the split subject as a theme in Pizarnik’s work, is the use of
the word ‘ser’ as a noun in the second line of ‘La de los ojos abiertos’. As ser is
both infinitive verb ‘to be’, and noun when used with the article, as in ‘el ser’, it
leads to complications in translation. These complications are intensified given
Pizarnik’s preoccupation with the idea of ‘self’ or ‘subject’. In ‘Extracción de la
piedra de locura’ she writes: ‘mi cuerpo se abría al conocimiento de mi estar/ y
de mi ser confusos y difusos’ (Poesía, p. 252), thus adding another layer of dif-
ficulty when separating ‘estar’ from ‘ser’, both verbs-turned-noun and both
translating into English as ‘to be’. My decision to translate ‘estar’ and ‘ser’ as
‘being’ and ‘self’ respectively was taken early on. The difference between my
first version and the definitive translation in the case of the above line concerns
the place of the adjectives ‘confusos’ and ‘difusos’ in the line. So my first ver-
sion reads thus: ‘my body opened to the knowledge/ of my confused and dif-
fused being and self’, which follows the sentence structure most commonly used
in English, placing adjectives before nouns (an example of domestication), but
this was changed for ‘my body opened up to the knowledge of my being/ and
self confused and diffused’, where I have succeeded in keeping the emphasis on
the split between ‘being’ and ‘self’ on account of the position of these two words
in the poem, at the end of one line and at the beginning of the next. My transla-
tion of ‘ser’ as ‘self’ can be justified in that the verb ‘ser’ points to an essence,
something fixed or immutable, while ‘estar’ relates to a state, which may shift,
hence the use of ‘being’ with the ‘–ing’ termination, suggestive of this differ-
ence. I have kept to this translation of ‘ser’ and ‘estar’ throughout the poems, for
the sake of consistency.
Another indirect way of addressing herself which Pizarnik uses in the first
collection is by using the second-person pronoun. In ‘La enamorada’ (which I
translated as ‘Woman in Love’) the ‘I’ addresses herself as ‘alejandra’ and then
as ‘you’: ‘te arrastra alejandra no lo niegues/ hoy te miraste al espejo’ (Poesía,
p. 53) (dragging you alejandra do not deny it/ today you looked at yourself in the
138 CECILIA ROSSI

mirror). It is interesting to note that at this stage Pizarnik needs to claim owner-
ship of her name, challenging the irony posited by the phrase ‘nombre propio’
(proper noun, but literally meaning ‘own name’), since our own name is proba-
bly the word we can claim least ownership of, unless we use it as Pizarnik does,
a name that was not hers to begin with but that she grows to own. It is a form of
address that precedes the repetition of her name in ‘Sólo un nombre’, where she
comes to own her name fully as poet.14
It is in her next collection, Las aventuras perdidas, that her journey towards
her other self becomes clear through the repeated use of several ‘metaphors of
subjectivity’, as Cristina Piña explains (Piña, Alejandra Pizarnik, p. 81). In the
poem that opens the volume, entitled ‘La jaula’, she becomes ‘angel’, ‘bird’, and
though the sun shines outside, she says ‘Yo me visto de cenizas’ (Poesía, p. 73),
showing an attraction to night and death. But the ‘I’ in the opening poem also
refers to herself as ‘I’ when she says ‘Yo lloro debajo de mi nombre’ (I weep
underneath my name), thus establishing a clear link with the ‘I’ in ‘debajo estoy
yo’ from ‘Sólo un nombre’ in her previous collection. Hence, my choice as a
translator to keep the same preposition ‘underneath’ and, in this case, create a
further sound effect through assonance in the repetition of the phoneme /i:/ in
‘weep’ – a compensation for the repetition of the sounds in ‘yo lloro’, where ‘yo’
and ‘lloro’ alliterate in porteño Spanish through the repetition of the //
phoneme.
In ‘Hija del viento’ the use of the second-person pronoun ‘tú’ instead of ‘yo’
is another device which has the effect of opening a gap between the person and
the poetic persona, and can be likened to the effect of similes when the ‘I’
addresses herself as someone else, someone like her, but not herself. In fact, it
can be said the ‘daughter of the wind’ is in itself another metaphor of subjectiv-
ity, where the poet sees herself as the daughter of this wind or force, the cause of
this fundamental ‘desgarradura’ or wound, which poetry attempts to heal. In
‘Hija del viento’, thus, it is this ‘you’ who ‘lloras debajo de tu llanto’ (Poesía,
p. 77) (you weep underneath your weeping).
It is interesting to note that in Pizarnik’s early poetry there is the occasional
use of similes (or comparisons) alongside metaphors of subjectivity, but later
on, these comparisons give way to metaphors. For example, in Las aventuras
perdidas, the poem ‘Cenizas’ opens with the first-person pronoun in the plural,
though hidden in the verb (through ‘sujeto tácito’): ‘Hemos dicho palabras’
(Poesía, p. 82), and only in the last stanza does the ‘yo’ appear, followed by a
simile: ‘Yo ahora estoy sola/ como la avara delirante/ sobre su montaña de oro’
(Poesía, p. 82). The use of the linguistic sign of comparison here has the effect
of creating a distance between the two terms of the comparison ‘yo’ and ‘avara’.
This is a rare instance, though, as Pizarnik tends to prefer the metaphor as a
figure of speech. In creating an identification between the terms, the metaphor
is absolute, and thus acts as a true substitute for subjectivity rather than as a

14 See Cristina Piña, Alejandra Pizarnik: una biografía (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991; 2nd
edn, Corregidor, 1999), p. 44.
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S POETRY: TRANSLATION 139

simple comparison. In Pizarnik’s journal entries we also see her understanding

of metaphor as a trope that allows for the subject to identify with the others she
is/was. This is because of the faith she places in the poem, as a place in which
to be configured. For example, on 21 October 1963 she writes: ‘Hablar de sí en
un libro es transformarse en palabras, en lenguaje. Decir yo es anonadarse, vol-
verse un pronombre algo que está fuera de mí’ (Diarios, p. 344). It is clear from
these words that poetry, language, is the place where she allows herself to ‘live
herself’, where ‘I’ turned pronoun (reflexive), and thus outside herself, can be
– not only one but many, because to say ‘yo’ for Pizarnik is merely an act of
faith (Diarios, p. 308).
These metaphors of subjectivity often pose problems for the translator, who
has to juggle with meaning, sound and rhythm, as well as with the length of the
lines. In the third and fourth collections especially, given the brevity of some of
the poems, the surrounding space is as important as the body of the text. In the
next section I will look at the problems of translating these metaphors into
English in Árbol de Diana, Los trabajos y las noches and in later poems.

Taking the Leap from Herself to Others in Árbol de Diana and

Los trabajos y las noches
Árbol de Diana opens with a poem in which the ‘I’ clearly states that ‘He dado el
salto de mí’ (Poesía, p. 103), and – as previously observed – throughout the col-
lection there are instances of metaphors for this elusive ‘I’ that splits, leaves,
travels, abandons her other self, or selves, and, most importantly, becomes ‘fixed’
in the poem. As the poems are so brief, I felt these expressions needed to be kept
concise in English, given that the poems have been conceived in a way that is
related to visual art and to music, following the understanding of ‘poetry as a
space, with a musical conception of the poem that values silences, and with a
certain philosophy of nakedness through words’.15
The greatest difficulty for me as a translator was trying to abide by what I
will call the ‘word for word’ principle, where one word in Spanish finds its
English correlative. I found this rule impossible to follow. Noun phrases such as
‘la silenciosa’ or ‘la viajera’ made up of a definite article followed by an adjec-
tive-turned-noun pose the greatest challenge. Thus, ‘la silenciosa’ becomes ‘the
silent one’ and ‘la viajera’ ‘the traveller’, both losing their gender specificity. In
poems where these expressions are followed by possessive pronouns, which in
English are gender-marked, as opposed to the Spanish ‘su’, this loss is soon
made up for. But in the case of poem 4, ‘la pequeña olvidada’ becomes ‘the
forgotten little one’ since the insertion of either ‘girl’ or ‘young woman’ was to
my mind textually heavier than ‘one’. It is important to remember that these
poems are not usually read in isolation, but as part of a whole collection, and

15 Jaime D. Parra, Místicos y heterodoxos (Barcelona: March, 2003), p. 142.

140 CECILIA ROSSI

this fact is intensified not only by their individual brevity and terseness, but also
by their thematic cohesion.
Poem 7 posed a different kind of challenge, again related to the use of per-
sonal pronouns and gender specificity:

Salta con la camisa en llamas

de estrella en estrella,
de sombra en sombra.
Muere de muerte lejana
la que ama al viento. (Poesía, p. 109)

There is no reference to the gender of the subject until the very last line of the
poem, where ‘la que ama al viento’ is literally ‘the woman who loves the wind’.
As in the instances discussed above, one of my concerns was to avoid the clumsy
sounding ‘woman’ so ‘the one in love with the wind’ was my first option, since
the gender was stated in the first line in the target text, through the inclusion of
the possessive pronoun ‘her’: ‘Her shirt on fire, she jumps’. Going over this line
again made me realize that I could do away with the possessive pronoun and thus
start the poem not with the verb, but with a phrase that was not overtly gender-
marked: ‘Shirt on fire, she jumps’. While in Spanish the verb occupies the
emphatic position at the beginning of the line, at least in English I managed to
place it at the end of the line, also a position of emphasis. But the last line, and
the metaphor of subjectivity, still posed a problem, since I felt that expressions
with ‘one’ were to be one of my last resorts as a translator, as they added a con-
siderable number of extra words. I eventually arrived at the following line: ‘she
who loves the wind’. It is precisely this kind of noun phrase, made up of the
nominative pronoun in the subject position, followed by a defining relative
clause, that found its way again and again into the translation of other similarly
constructed phrases in Spanish. For example, in a much later poem called ‘Sobre
un Poema de Rubén Darío’ (first published in La Nación in 1972), she says: ‘La
que no supo morirse de amor y por eso nada aprendió’ (Poesía, p. 371), which
becomes in English: ‘She who never knew how to die of love and hence learned
nothing’. There are several more examples where this is the case, but I am more
interested in discussing here those instances where I opted against using this
phrase in the target poems. Poems 32 and 36 in Árbol de Diana both contain the
expression ‘la dormida’:

Zona de plagas donde la dormida come

lentamente
su corazón de medianoche.
(Poem 32; Poesía, p. 134)

en la jaula del tiempo

la dormida mira sus ojos solos
(Poem 36, first stanza; Poesía, p. 138)
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S POETRY: TRANSLATION 141

In both cases I considered using ‘she asleep’ instead of ‘the one asleep’, but
decided against it for reasons of rhythm and sound. Thus, poem 32 reads:

Plague-zone where the one asleep slowly

eats
her midnight heart.

On the one hand, ‘the one asleep’ alliterates with ‘where’ through the repetition
of the semivowel /w/. Alliteration is immediately followed by assonance through
the repetition of /i:/ in ‘asleep’ and ‘eats’, which echoes phonologically the typi-
cal Pizarnik ‘combination game’ so often found in her poems.16 On the other
hand, if we consider ‘eats’ to be part of the first line this gives us a ten-syllable
line whereas in Spanish we have a thirteen-syllable line.17 This is not a typical
Spanish verse-form, yet in poem 36 ‘la dormida mira sus ojos solos’ is a hen-
decasyllable line, the most common ‘verso de arte mayor’ and also the typical
line found in Spanish sonnets. Although Pizarnik was an advocate of ‘vers libre’
and a follower of Mallarmé’s idea that the use of traditional forms of versifica-
tion were to be fractured to give way to new forms, we sometimes find in her
poetry typical forms of Spanish versification.18 So I translated the hendecasyl-
lable in poem 36 into an iambic pentameter: ‘the one asleep looks at her lonely
eyes’. In poem IX of ‘Los pequeños cantos’ – a sequence of very brief poems or
chants, first published in 1971 in the Caracas magazine Árbol de fuego – we
find:

mi canto de dormida al alba

¿era esto, pues? (Poesía, p. 387)

My translation reads:

my song of woman asleep at dawn

was this it, then?

because other possibilities involving ‘she’ or ‘the one’ were either awkward, or
failed to specify the gender. In poems from the ‘Poemas no recogidos en libros’,
there are instances where it was necessary to use noun phrases containing
‘woman’. Such is the case of the prose poem called ‘Cuadro’:

16 Jaime D. Parra links Pizarnik’s passion for ‘la combinatoria’ to her Jewish roots (see
Parra, pp. 137 and 143).
17 It is worth noting that in Piña’s anthology of the complete works the adverb ‘lentamente’
is part of the first line. It is one of several cases where there is no agreement between the
various printed versions of Pizarnik’s poems; such discrepancies call for a careful study of
Pizarnik’s manuscripts at Princeton University Library.
18 In this respect, see Ana María Rodríguez Francia’s study of Pizarnik’s poetry, La
disolución en la obra de Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2003), pp. 81–2.
142 CECILIA ROSSI

Ruidos de alguien subiendo una escalera. La de los tormentos,

la que regresa de la naturaleza, sube una escalera de la que baja
un reguero de sangre. Negros pájaros queman la flor de la
distancia en los cabellos de la solitaria. Hay que salvar, no a la flor,
sino a las palabras. (Poesía, p. 353)

Sounds of somebody going up a staircase. The woman of torments,

the one who returns from nature, climbs a staircase down which flows
a trail of blood. Black birds burn the flower of distance in the hair of
the solitary woman. We must save, not the flower, but the words.

‘The one who returns from nature’ seemed the best option as I had already cho-
sen ‘the woman of’ for ‘la de los tormentos’. Something different happens with
‘en los cabellos de la solitaria’, since the prepositional phrase indicating posses-
sion excludes the use of the nominative pronoun ‘she’. So the only option was to
echo ‘woman’ in a sentence which flowed quite rhythmically in English thanks
to the monosyllabic and alliterative ‘black birds burn’ at the start.
The poem ‘La oscura’ (Poesía, p. 351) posed a similar challenge but in this
case it was not the poem but its title that posed the problem. My first version –
which is also my last – read thus:

And why did I talk as if silence were a wall and words the
colours destined to cover it? And who said it feeds on music
and cannot weep?

It seemed to me that the only way to avoid the negative connotations of the
expression ‘the dark one’, as well as the structure ‘the-[adjective]-one’, or the
word ‘woman’, was to introduce the nominative pronoun to mark the gender.
The adjective ‘obscure’ for ‘oscura’ is closer in sound to the Spanish word and
refers to a state of mind, rather than a physical characteristic; hence: ‘She the
Obscure’. ‘Obscure’ is highly suggestive, and works well in this context, if only
because the title now calls to mind for an English readership Hardy’s novel Jude
the Obscure.
Apart from the translation problem posed by these metaphors of subjectivity,
the brief poems in Árbol de Diana and Los trabajos y las noches challenge the
translator because of their condensation of image and meaning. An example of
this condensation of poetic language is to be found in poem 24 (inspired by a
drawing by Wols):

estos hilos aprisionan a las sombras

y las obligan a rendir cuentas del silencio
estos hilos unen la mirada al sollozo (Poesía, p. 126)

these threads imprison shadows

and force them to account for silence
these threads tie sight to sob
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S POETRY: TRANSLATION 143

The fact that neither a preposition nor an article is necessary in English in the
opening line, causes the line to have a much shorter syllabic count. Also, the use
of monosyllabic words, especially in the last line, results in a gentle, musical
rhythm similar to that of the Spanish line. Moreover, I chose to translate ‘mirada’
as ‘sight’ to gain a further alliterative effect in the last line. This helps reproduce
the gentleness of the rhythm, which leaps from tie to sight (linked by assonance)
to sob (linked by alliteration).
Another problem that poses a great challenge for the translator in these brief
poems is the issue relating to referentiality and personal pronouns, especially
when it comes to the translation of a subjectivity that is not gender-marked. In
Pizarnik’s first collections, the strategy of looking at both text and context, at the
poem as a whole and at the poems surrounding it, can easily solve most ambigui-
ties in connection with gender. But in Los trabajos y las noches this is often not
the case. In poems such as ‘Duración’ and ‘Tu Voz’, the use of the third-person
singular pronoun ‘he’ in the opening line in ‘Duración’ seems to be justified by
the use of the masculine pronoun implied in the adjective ‘emboscado’ in the
opening line of the next poem, ‘Tu Voz’: ‘emboscado en mi escritura’ (Poesía,
p. 165). While ‘Tu voz’ announces the masculine presence it is addressing right
at the beginning of the poem, my target text remains unspecific as to the gender
of who ‘sings in my poem’, applying the principle of compensation.
But the poem ‘Sentido de su ausencia’ is too far from ‘Tu Voz’ in the collec-
tion to justify the use of the masculine pronoun. So, the target text is, as the
source text, unmarked from the point of view of gender, yet slightly more abstract
in nature:

si yo me atrevo
a mirar y a decir
es por su sombra
unida tan suave
a mi nombre
allá lejos
en la lluvia
en mi memoria
por su rostro
que ardiendo en mi poema
dispersa suavemente
un perfume
a amado rostro desaparecido (Poesía, p. 172)

And the final version in English:

if I dare
look up and speak
it is because of the shadow
so gently bound
to my name
144 CECILIA ROSSI

far away
in the rain
in my memory
by its face
that burning in my poem
beautifully disperses
the scent
of a dear face gone

In order to translate the Spanish possessive pronoun ‘su’, which could be either
‘his’ or ‘hers’ or ‘its’, I opted for the definite or indefinite article and thus retain
in the target text the intrinsic ambiguities of the poem in expressing the subjec-
tivities in question. I chose to use the possessive pronoun ‘its’ in the ninth line as
a way to refer back to ‘the shadow’.
My rejection of the first version of this poem, which used the masculine pos-
sessive pronoun, was informed by a refusal to read the poem as a conventional
love poem. I briefly considered the use of the second-person pronoun ‘you’ but
soon rejected this idea as the poem is clearly not addressing someone else – as
do other poems in Los trabajos y las noches. It is true that the poem can be read
as a love poem, but given the fracture and split of the poet’s persona, it can also
be read as a melancholic appeal of subject to shadow. We hardly need remind
ourselves of how charged the word ‘shadow’ is in the Pizarnik corpus – with its
references to Lautréamont, and the frequent use of ‘Sombra’ as a character in
poems such as ‘El entendimiento’ (Poesía, p. 405) and ‘Escrito cuando sombra’
(Poesía, p. 406) – to see the plausibility of this reading.
‘Donde circunda lo ávido’ (Poesía, p. 168) is another poem where the inde-
terminacy of gender causes several problems in translation. To begin with, the
abstract nature of the title seems to resist translation and for the translator
invokes Ezra Pound’s much-revered dictum ‘go in fear of abstractions’.19 It was
clear that ‘the avid’ could simply not be used, as an adjective anteceded by the
definite article is nominalized, and thus the implication would have been that
‘lo ávido’ referred to people. ‘Encircled by avidity’ sounded strange but was
soon ‘familiarized’ by the context of the poem, especially the more I translated
Pizarnik and created a special language for her poetry that worked in English
for individual poems and across the body of her poetry as a whole. ‘Donde cir-
cunda lo ávido’, however, posed a series of problems due to the use of ‘sujeto
tácito’: ‘cuando sí venga’ suggests the arrival of someone or something. It is
rooted in ambiguity, so any marks of gender would imply a specific reading. If
the third-person masculine or feminine pronoun were used, then the poem
would become a sort of ‘love poem’, when it could also function self-referen-
tially, speaking of the problem of writing and the poem’s arrival, especially

19 Ezra Pound, ‘A Retrospect’, in Jon Cook, Poetry in Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004),
p. 85. In connection with the problem of poetry in translation and the use of abstractions, see
Seamus Heaney’s essay ‘The Impact of Translation’ in The Government of the Tongue
(London: Faber & Faber, 1998).
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S POETRY: TRANSLATION 145

when the desire implied by ‘avidity’ could be read, within the Pizarnik corpus,
as desire for the word, the poem, the language that will make her. The use of the
third-person pronoun ‘it’ could imply the following: when the poem or lan-
guage comes, her eyes will shine, whereas now, waiting, at the core of things,
there is just a rumour, a mere hint of this flight implied in naming, which is
‘alentado’ (‘kindled’ in my version) by this mysterious ‘it’. So in my final ver-
sion the poem reads thus:

When it does come my eyes will shine

with the light of whom I weep
but now it kindles a rumour of light
in the heart of every thing.

It is clear then that personal pronouns have an important role to play in Pizarnik’s
poems. The absent ones – those implied by the verb form but not explicitly
included in the poem – often bear more meaning than those in the text.
Apart from pronouns in the subject position in the sentence, Pizarnik’s poetry
uses reflexivity to suggest the splitting of the ‘I’: the ‘I’ becomes both subject
and object. These verb forms with the reflexive pronoun attached come across as
strange and estranging, as Pizarnik often uses a verb which is not normally used
reflexively. This is a characteristic of her early collections which intensifies in
the later volumes. For example, she says in the third stanza of ‘Mucho más allá’
from Las aventuras perdidas: ‘¿A qué, a qué/ este deshacerme, este desan-
grarme,/ este desplumarse, este desequilibrarme’ (Poesía, p. 95), which becomes
in my last version: ‘and so why, why/ this unmaking of myself, this bleeding to
death/ this plucking of my feathers/ this losing my balance’. Keeping the repeti-
tion of ‘myself’ would have rendered the lines too long and awkward. At other
times the reflexive pronoun occurs in the title, such as ‘En un lugar para huirse’
(Poesía, p. 184) (from Los trabajos y las noches), leading to a rather lengthy title
in English: ‘In a Place to Escape Oneself’. In Árbol de Diana, poem 17 also
makes use of the reflexive pronoun ‘se’ with the resulting difficulty in English:
‘la hermosa autónoma se canta, se encanta, se cuenta casos y cosas’ (Poesía,
p. 119) (the beautiful automaton charms and chants to herself, telling herself
tales and things). In order to avoid a clumsy rhythm, I opted to minimize the use
of ‘myself’ and where I could not keep the assonance, I sought to introduce allit-
eration elsewhere. This sentence is immediately followed by ‘nido de hilos rígi-
dos donde me danzo y me lloro en mis numerosos funerales’ (a nest of rigid
threads where I dance and mourn myself at my numerous funerals). The pho-
neme /θ/ is repeated in ‘things’ and ‘threads’, while the vowel sound /e/ in
‘myself’ is echoed in ‘telling’ and ‘thread’. It is worth highlighting, as a conclud-
ing remark to this section, that although in the first four collections we see the
subject splitting into two, being reflected, named and addressed by metaphors,
and even becoming an object, it is always an interplay between ‘I’ and ‘the other’.
In the later collections, it is a concert of voices that we hear speaking, sometimes
at the same time.
146 CECILIA ROSSI

I Voices / I the Big Leap

In Pizarnik’s later works, starting with the poems in Extracción de la piedra de
locura, the influence of, or desire for, the semiotic chora becomes more appar-
ent, which means that the rhythmic flow is intensified. This happens particularly
through the use of repetition, not only of words or phrases, but of the sounds in
the words themselves. ‘El sueño de la muerte o el lugar de los cuerpos poéticos’
is a good example of this change in the rhythmic structure:

me abro, se me abre, va a venir, voy a venir. El cuerpo

poético, el heredado, el no filtrado por el sol de la lúgubre
mañana, un grito, una llamada, una llamarada, un llamamiento.
Sí. Quiero ver el fondo del río, quiero ver si aquello se abre, si
irrumpe y florece del lado de aquí, y vendrá o no vendrá (Poesía,
p. 255)

I open, am opened up, she’ll come, I’ll come. The poetic body,
inherited, never reached by the sun of the dismal morning, a cry,
an outcry, a crying out, bright fire. Yes. I want to see the bottom of
the river, I want to see if that thing opens, bursts, and blooms here,
this side, will it won’t it come

In order to achieve the dream-like quality of the repetition, the incantation of this
kind of poetic language, I needed to juggle with the various elements of the sen-
tence, making more changes on the syntactic level than the lexical. But undoubt-
edly, it is the phonic repetitions mentioned at the end of the previous section, in
connection with poem 17, that pose the greatest challenges for the translator. For
example, in ‘Sous la Nuit’, a poem dedicated to her father, Pizarnik writes: ‘Grito
mentalmente, el viento demente me desmiente’ (Poesía, p. 420). However much
I played around with this phrase, I could only maintain the repetition of the
vowel /e/ twice, while I managed the alliteration of /m/ in three instances:
‘Mentally I shout, demented winds belie me’.
One-line poems where this repetition is of utmost importance to the pace of
the sentence can also seem, at a first glance, to resist translation: ‘entrar entrando
adentro de una música al suicido del nacimiento’ (Poesía, p. 421). In my English
version it becomes ‘to enter entering inside music to suicide to birth’, a much
shorter line and, sadly, far less musical owing to the high incidence of one-sylla-
ble words in the target language. Or again, in ‘. . . Del silencio’, a poem from the
manuscripts that Pizarnik took to the home of the poet Perla Rotzait in 1971, she
says ‘lo que se ve, lo que se va, es indecible’ (Poesía, p. 358). This repetition of
syntax and sound proved almost impossible to capture effectively in English:
‘what we see, what goes, cannot be said’, is my final version, but it is still rather
unsatisfactory. Previous versions include: ‘What can be seen, what has gone, is
unsayable’, and ‘What we see, what goes, we cannot speak/cannot be said.’
It is precisely because Pizarnik has de-structured and dislocated her own sub-
jectivity that her poetic language plays such discordant notes. It moves inexorably
 ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK’S POETRY: TRANSLATION 147

towards its own demise, towards a poem that speaks the unspeakable, or simply
silence. This search for the maximum expression of language leads her to despair,
to saying things like ‘escribiendo/ he pedido, he perdido’ (Poesía, p. 427). In the
translation process I have tried to minimize the loss of these phonic and rhythmic
features, without sacrificing the semantic level, aiming to create in English a
poetic language that would configure a distinct Pizarnik voice in harmony with
the concert of voices of her texts.

Bibliography
Aira, César, Alejandra Pizarnik (Barcelona: Omega, 2001)
Cook, Jon, Poetry in Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)
Goldberg, Florinda F., Alejandra Pizarnik: ‘Este espacio que somos’ (Gaithersburg,
MD: Hispamérica, 1994)
Heaney, Seamus, ‘The Impact of Translation’, in The Government of the Tongue
(London: Faber & Faber, 1988)
Kamenszain, Tamara, Historias de amor (y otros ensayos sobre poesía) (Buenos
Aires: Paidós, 2000)
Kristeva, Julia, Desire in Language, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice
Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981)
——, Revolution of Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Walker (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984)
Mackintosh, Fiona J., Childhood in the Works of Silvina Ocampo and Alejandra
Pizarnik (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2003)
Parra, Jaime D., Místicos y heterodoxos (Barcelona: March, 2003)
Piña, Cristina, Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1991; 2nd edn, Corregidor,
1999)
——, Poesía y experiencia del límite: leer a Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires:
Botella al Mar, 1999)
Pizarnik, Alejandra, Obras Completas, ed. Cristina Piña (Buenos Aires: Corregidor,
1994)
Rimbaud, Arthur, Rimbaud Complete, trans. and ed. Wyatt Mason (New York:
Modern Library, 2002)
Rodríguez Francia, Ana María, La disolución en la obra de Alejandra Pizarnik
(Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2003)
 The ‘Complete’ Works of Alejandra Pizarnik?
Editors and Editions

Cristina Piña

The dead are indeed weak. A few days later Valéry is

already allowed to look at the papers and, for fifty
years now, with a constant and surprising regularity,
important and indubitable, previously unpublished
manuscripts keep coming to light, as if Mallarmé had
never written more than since his death.
Maurice Blanchot1

Throughout the twentieth century there are numerous examples of polemics aris-
ing from posthumous editions of texts by culturally significant authors. Some of
these polemics relate to what we – as Jacques Derrida puts it – conventionally
call ‘literature’, and others to what we tend to denote as ‘intimate genres’, encom-
passing that peculiarly ambiguous space inhabited by correspondence, diaries,
memoirs, notes and even marginal notes.2 Pizarnik’s work – and I use that term
in a Foucauldian sense,3 fully aware of the fact that we have no absolutely fixed
idea of it – has joined the long list of examples, basically since the publication of
her Diarios in Lumen, which their editor Ana Becciú refers to as ‘un libro más en
la obra de Pizarnik’ (Diarios, p. 7). A polemic surrounds not only this text and
the two previous volumes edited by Becciú, but also other texts, and its theoreti-
cal implications are far-reaching. Indeed, shortly after the long-awaited publica-
tion of the Diarios in Spain, Ana Nuño – who wrote an enthusiastic prologue to
the Prosa completa, which had appeared two years earlier (Prosa, pp. 7–9) –
published a somewhat negative review in La Vanguardia, outlining certain short-
comings of the edition, which may be summarized in two basic points.4 First,

1 Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Book to Come’, in The Book to Come (1959), trans. Charlotte
Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 224–44 and 263–6 (p. 265, note
6).
2 Jacques Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York:
Routledge, 1992), pp. 161–220; see also ‘The Double Session’ (1970), in Dissemination
(1972), trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), pp. 173–286.
3 Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New
York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 101–20, especially pp. 103–4.
4 Ana Nuño, ‘Esperando a Alejandra: Diarios’, in La Vanguardia Digital, 31 December
2003 [n.p.].
 THE ‘COMPLETE’ WORKS OF ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK? 149

there is a question mark over Becciú’s interpretation of the censorship imposed

by Pizarnik’s sister Myriam on any reference to the writer’s private life; Becciú
subsequently presented the cuts she had made as artistic choices, stemming from
a desire to offer a ‘literary diary’ along the lines of the now legendary diary of
Virginia Woolf (edited by her husband Leonard). Secondly, it is not clear why
Becciú only decided to explain a few of the many abbreviations which occur in
the text; unless the reader is from Buenos Aires, and of a certain age and cultural
background, he or she is faced with what Nuño terms a ‘sopa de letras’, lacking
explanatory notes with regard to places, books, and poems cited. This review was
followed by Patricia Venti’s article on Pizarnik’s diaries, which is more specific
about what was excluded from the published version, bringing to bear informa-
tion from the material deposited by Aurora Bernárdez in Princeton University
Library in 1999. The following extract gives an indication:
Con los diarios de Pizarnik, han ocurridos [sic] dos cosas: primero, cuando la
autora regresó a Buenos Aires, quiso reescribir algunas entradas para publicar-
las en revistas literarias y segundo, después de 30 años de su muerte, su albacea
ha suprimido más de 120 entradas, además de excluir casi por completo el año
1971, y en su totalidad el año 72. Las omisiones están distribuidas a lo largo
del diario, cuya materia suele referirse a temas sexuales o íntimos. También se
excluyeron fragmentos de textos narrativos que muestran las costuras de la
escritura, que a posteriori serán reelaborados para su publicación.5

Furthermore, Venti questions the editor’s apparently unjustified decision (see

Diarios, p. 8) to make a kind of collage out of the three existing versions of the
diary for 1962–64, comprising the version in diary entries, the notebook ‘1962–
1964’, and folders of revisions from the same period.
Despite negative critical reception of the editing of Diarios, critics appear not
to have objected to the Poesía completa and Prosa completa (also edited by
Becciú), although they too present certain problems, and confront us with unre-
solved theoretical issues and critical inconsistencies, which I propose to investi-
gate in this essay. These issues, and the radically uncategorizable nature of
Pizarnik’s writing which they highlight – writing which demonstrates an extreme
‘subversive juridicity’ (Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, p. 216) – mean that the prob-
lem can be addressed even without having consulted the Pizarnik archives in
Princeton. Regarding this concept of subversive juridicity, Derrida points out
that on the one hand it ‘requires that self-identity never be assured nor reassur-
ing’, and on the other hand it ‘supposes also a power to produce performatively
the statements of the law, of the law that literature can be, and not just the law to
which literature submits’ (Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, p. 216). In this sense,

literature itself makes law, emerging in that place where the law is made.
Therefore, under certain determined conditions, it can exercise the legislative

5 Patricia Venti, ‘Los diarios de Alejandra Pizarnik: censura y traición’, in Espéculo, 26

(2004) [n.p.]; accessed at www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero26/diariosp.html
150 CRISTINA PIÑA

power of linguistic performativity to sidestep existing laws from which, how-

ever, it derives protection and receives its conditions of emergence. (Derrida,
‘Before the Law’, p. 216)

Nuño and Venti are justified in signalling the bad faith of pretending to make a
virtue (in this case a Woolf-style literary diary) out of necessity (Myriam
Pizarnik’s prohibition), and they are right to call for a critical edition setting out
as far as is possible a reliable corpus which would dispel some of the doubts cast
on Pizarnik’s published work by the Lumen editions. Nevertheless, and in rela-
tion to the Derrida quoted above, such an edition would still not solve the prob-
lem stemming from the very nature of this writing as extreme. It is articulated at
the limits of what is historically understood to constitute literature, at the limits
of genre and the aesthetic. This said, however, I consider it important to flag up
certain problematic aspects of both publications, which provoke questions both
of a critical nature, and also regarding the very status of writing, criticism and
the editorial process. Since these in turn are related to the earlier publication of
Correspondencia Pizarnik (1998) compiled by Ivonne Bordelois, I shall begin
by considering this text.
The publication of Correspondencia Pizarnik had already confronted
Pizarnik’s readers with an issue linked to the aforementioned ‘subversive juridic-
ity’, one which has implications for the production, reception and legitimization
of literary texts, and foregrounds the roles of author, reader and critical editor.
Here it is not a case of the editor choosing not to apply ‘academic criteria’,
which was Becciú’s approach in the Poesía completa (p. 455), and implicitly
also in the Prosa completa. Bordelois’s knowledgeable editorial work is loyal
and respectful towards Pizarnik, and also follows impeccable academic criteria
of contextualization, explanation and justification. Nevertheless, leaving aside
the validity and correctness in principle of Bordelois’s editing, her task forces us
to consider the paradoxes of extreme writing (into which category Pizarnik’s
writing falls) and the related minefield of critical legitimization.
Indeed, faced with the correspondence sent by the poet to Osías Stutman, many
of us would wonder whether they were in fact simply ‘letters’. Our lingering
‘modern’ mentality requires us to establish such ways of classifying texts; thus,
letters are personal communications belonging to the private sphere, and therefore
not ‘officially’ part of Pizarnik’s work, whilst providing valid material for investi-
gating aspects of that work. We can compare, for example, Maurice Blanchot’s
fine studies of Kafka’s diaries and Mallarmé’s correspondence, and the productive
way in which Yves Bonnefoy appropriates the latter to go deeper into Mallarmé’s
poetics.6 Bordelois says, in her introduction to this particular group of ‘missives’:

6 Maurice Blanchot, De Kafka à Kafka (Paris: Gallimard, 1981); Maurice Blanchot, The
Work of Fire (1949), trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995);
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature (1955), trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1982); Yves Bonnefoy, La poética de Mallarmé: Dos ensayos, trans. Cristina
Piña (Córdoba: Ediciones del Copista, 2002).
 THE ‘COMPLETE’ WORKS OF ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK? 151

Como observa Stutman en su excelente nota introductoria [the letters were

published in the Revista Atlántica of Cádiz in 1992], el estilo de estas cartas
coincide con el de La bucanera de Pernambuco y Los poseídos entre lilas . . .
Algunos fragmentos exhiben inclusive concordancias textuales.
(Correspondencia, p. 154)

This overlap generates uncertainty about the status of these ‘letters’, bringing
them closer to texts in a Barthesian sense, or écriture as understood by Blanchot
and Derrida. This is also a characteristic of La bucanera de Pernambuco and Los
poseídos entre lilas, which exceed any generic or discursive classification. We
could of course take the practical approach of following the author’s explicit
desire not to consider them as literary texts, in the sense of texts which are ulti-
mately intended for publication; she simply uses them as letters to communicate
with Stutman. This was Bordelois’s approach and also that of Stutman – who did
publish them, but as letters – and in principle I would agree with their criteria.
But Bordelois’s next phrase opens up a new perspective, since she points out that
‘un estudio sobre estas correspondencias ha sido emprendido por María Negroni
. . . que desarrolla en este momento un concurrido Seminario sobre Pizarnik en
la UBA’ (Correspondencia, p. 154). Although the editor does not give further
details, it is clear that María Negroni, as a scholar and critic of Pizarnik’s work,
is implicitly attributing a literary character to texts which the author did not con-
sider – or at least did not use – as literary texts. I would nevertheless also agree
with this practice, in view of the previously mentioned closeness to the texts of
La bucanera de Pernambuco.
On this point, however, it is fundamental to take two things into account.
First, these letters present a totally different scenario from the correspondence of
Kafka and of Mallarmé, and from Blanchot and Bonnefoy’s approach to them.
Indeed, both critics use the correspondence to look at the respective writers
reflecting on their writing practice, and not as examples of that practice per se.7
Secondly, we have to address this ambivalence on the part of the critic or editor
as regards the nature of a text; attributing literary status and therefore an aes-
thetic function to a piece of writing which was not conceived of as literary by the
person who wrote it, returns us to Derrida’s notion of subversive juridicity. One
possible solution to this issue might be to address it from a socio-institutional
perspective along the lines of Jan Mukarovsky.8
Mukarovsky’s theory allows us to go beyond the fallacy of authorial intention
and a notion of specifying what is artistic, by asserting that it is the collective
receiving public that decides whether or not to construct an aesthetic object from
any given artefact. Such recourse to the receivers of a text clearly functions when

7 I use the term ‘critic’ here in a broad sense, since both Blanchot and Bonnefoy are
philosophers and writers, and Blanchot inaugurates the French tradition of ‘thinking with
literature or with art’, a tradition subsequently adhered to by writers from Gilles Deleuze to
Jacques Derrida.
8 Jan Mukarovsky, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Fact, trans. Mark E.
Suino (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1970).
152 CRISTINA PIÑA

we consider the different readings of a text over time, as they variously accord or
deny it an aesthetic function; the same thing happens if we look at readings by
people from different cultural groups. Nevertheless, the theory cannot resolve
the undecidability of a text which is read by various members of the same collec-
tive social community of receivers (in this case, Bordelois, Stutman and Negroni)
as simultaneously literary and non-literary.
In relation to this, it is useful to go back to Derrida and to his reflections on
the untimeliness of asking ‘What is literature?’, since ‘there is no essence of
literature, no truth of literature, no literary-being or being-literary of literature’
(Derrida, Dissemination, p. 223), but rather it is linked – at least in the Western
world and between the end of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries – with
the history of the law. As a result, texts are considered literary by consensus
and according to apparently self-evident conventions, which in fact relate to a
notion of literature that remains obscure. Such an approach therefore presents
us with two questions regarding legitimization: ‘Who decides, who judges, and
according to what criteria, that this relation [for which, read ‘text’ or any other
synonym] belongs to literature?’ (Derrida, ‘Before the Law’, p. 187). Going
beyond Mukarovsky’s proposition, this approach highlights the always open
space of subversive juridicity which literature has historically occupied, even if
it has only occasionally been subversive with relation to the Law (in the sense
both of natural law and of its own literary law, which it enunciates). In the par-
ticular case of these texts by Pizarnik – and strictly speaking, in all of her texts,
given their character as écriture – this subversive power is forcefully apparent,
since the texts enunciate two contradictory laws simultaneously: read me as a
letter / read me as a literary text. These simultaneously de-authorize and autho-
rize the author and critics/editors as unlawful withholders of their sense and
function, making it possible to bring ‘before the law’ whoever uses them as
literary texts without the authorization of their receiver as letters, and likewise
whoever uses them as literary texts without the authorization of Pizarnik’s liter-
ary executor.
The ambiguous status of these texts becomes even more problematic when we
link it to doubts regarding the editions of the Poesía completa and Prosa com-
pleta. Indeed, the question which gives rise to our disturbing sense of the out-of-
place-ness of these particular texts is this: we as critics have a socially constituted
role as privileged readers and legitimizers, and we have recourse to consensually
valid criteria. Does the fact that we might consider a group of private letters by
Pizarnik to be literary texts imply that they ought to have been incorporated into
the ‘Humour’ section of the Prosa – according to Becciú’s classification – along
with La bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la polígrafa? Or to put it another way,
following what Foucault says about the inexistence of a concept of the ‘work’ in
his article ‘What is an author?’ and following Derrida’s affirmation about the
non-essence of the literary: How far can the current concept of the ‘literary work’
be extended? Can it include private correspondence, personal notes, incidental
annotations or even the proverbial laundry lists? (Foucault, p. 103). And, most
importantly, whose criteria apply? Obviously such questions bring us face to
 THE ‘COMPLETE’ WORKS OF ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK? 153

face with the figures of the author, the critic/editor and the power of the text or
writing simultaneously, referring us in this particular case to the subject of the
editorial decisions made about Pizarnik’s posthumous texts. This applies not
only to the two books I am considering, but also to the Textos de sombra y últi-
mos poemas published in 1982, which Becciú compiled with Olga Orozco; this
was the first book to include previously unpublished material by Pizarnik, mate-
rial which she had not explicitly intended for eventual publication.
The two cases of posthumous publications which pre-date Textos de sombra,
the first of which was the anthology El deseo de la palabra (1975), published in
Spain, are very different. Antonio Beneyto, editor of this anthology and author of
the ‘Epilogue’, explains that it includes published and previously unpublished
poems selected by Pizarnik herself over a period between 1970 and shortly
before her death on 25 September 1972. The anthology was only published post-
humously because of editorial delays. The situation was rather similar in the case
of the pamphlet Zona Prohibida (1982) published by the Universidad Veracruzana
(which I shall consider in more detail below), although there was a much greater
gap between the selection of material to be included and the actual publication.
Pizarnik chose the poems at some point towards the beginning of the 1960s, and
in 1962 Octavio Paz sent it from Paris, with his prologue, to the Mexican pub-
lishing house where it apparently languished in a cupboard until 1982. Unlike
such publications, where the author determined the content, and pure editorial
chance determined its posthumous character, Textos de sombra is the first vol-
ume where decisions were fully out of Pizarnik’s hands since it was put together
after her death. As a result, its significance as a book of poems – configured
through the selection and organization of a sequence of heterogeneous texts into
a single artefact, which nevertheless has a peculiar kind of homogeneity – is
alien to the author.9 Its homogeneity is constructed a posteriori of the production
of individual texts, and therefore relies on the unity of contiguity, exploiting pos-
sible similarities between its textual fragments, and imaginatively creating oth-
ers through paratexts or scansion which hide differences in favour of continuity.
In the writer’s lifetime, this quasi-architectural task of ‘over-writing’ in the
sense of organizing the writing – to which Mallarmé accorded such importance
in his idea of the architectural and premeditated Book, and which can be consid-
ered as equivalent to the process of correction or revision at the level of individ-
ual texts – is done by the author himself or herself, according to his or her own
personal criteria.10 In this way, the author exercises an irrefutable form of con-
trol over his/her production, albeit that on another level – as Blanchot notes – the
text possesses a power which directly annihilates the writer (Blanchot, ‘The
Book to Come’, pp. 226 and 229). Such control inevitably passes into the hands

9 For a discussion of this point, see my article ‘Una estética del deshecho’, in El puente de
las palabras: Homenaje a David Lagmanovich, ed. Inés Azar (Washington: Intramer 50,
1994), pp. 333–40.
10 See Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance. Lettres sur la poésie, ed. Bertrand Marchal
(Paris: Gallimard, 1995), pp. 585–6.
154 CRISTINA PIÑA

of whoever is responsible for posthumous publications, hence the ethical com-

mitment and importance of the task of editing, since on the level that I have just
highlighted, the editor is the ‘over-writer’ of the edited volume. As a result, his or
her decisions – especially when they involve the inclusion of unpublished texts,
making corrections, determining the order of texts and how they are to be homog-
enized, and adding paratexts – go beyond questions of loyalty. They confer a
different meaning on the book, a meaning which over-writes and is superim-
posed upon that of the author. In relation to this, perhaps the most notable aspect
of Correspondencia from an academic point of view is the fact that Bordelois
assumes this authority, clearly demonstrating her consciousness of what it
implies to be the author of the book. From this awareness she takes responsibil-
ity for the book as her own, despite the fact that it largely consists of letters by
Alejandra Pizarnik.
So in relation to the question of authorship, Textos de sombra is, simultane-
ously, a book of ‘des(h)echos’ and of not-Pizarnik; ‘des(h)echos’ because it com-
prises texts un-made from previous books, texts not yet made in that they still
lack the corrective ‘over-writing’ of the author, and texts which join together
both debris from other people’s texts and debris from her own earlier texts, in a
collage where the seams are obvious. Ultimately it is not ‘a book by Pizarnik’
but ‘a book by not-Pizarnik’ (which is very different from saying that it is ‘not a
book by Pizarnik’ or that it is ‘a book by Olga Orozco and Ana Becciú’), because
it is ‘a book made with texts by Pizarnik’ and configured as such via methods of
homogenization and architectural or paratextual ‘over-writing’ established by
the compilers. In over-writing the text, they abide by the usual principles of
ordering anthologies and critical editions: chronological ordering of poetic texts
and short prose pieces, and generic or typological organization of the volume
overall. In view of the level of importance invested in the task of an editor, as I
have outlined above, I feel that I must draw attention to the brevity of the editor’s
note to Textos de sombra. Likewise, the note to the new edition of the Poesía
completa is comparatively short, and it has to double as an introduction to the
Prosa completa, since this has no editorial note. This is particularly significant
since up until the moment of their publication, there had only been one edition of
her ‘complete works’, which had by default become the accepted corpus.11
Making significant modifications (as Becciú’s editions do) to what had become
familiar to readers of Pizarnik, calls for some editorial justification.12
So with respect to the three books under consideration, there are three ques-
tions that have to be asked: What did Orozco and Becciú publish in 1982, and

11 Obras completas: poesía completa y prosa selecta, ed. Cristina Piña (Buenos Aires:
Corregidor, 1993; repr. 1994, 1999). This edition corrected and expanded Silvia Baron
Supervielle’s edition of 1990 (also in Corregidor).
12 Gustavo Zuluaga’s edition of Pizarnik’s Obra completa (Medellín: Árbol de Diana, 2000)
is selective rather than comprehensive, and changes the order of poems within each collection.
It contains fewer of Pizarnik’s critical works, but is unique in including part of her translation
of Éluard and Breton, ‘La inmaculada concepción’ (Pizarnik, Obra completa, p. 261).
 THE ‘COMPLETE’ WORKS OF ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK? 155

what were their criteria? What did Becciú publish in her 2000 and 2002 editions
respectively, and again what were her criteria? And finally, following on from
these questions, what validity do the author’s wishes have with respect to the
publication or non-publication of her texts? To answer the first two questions, I
will begin by transcribing in its entirety the note which precedes the edition of
Textos de sombra y últimos poemas:

Poemas y textos en prosa ordenados y supervisados por Olga Orozco y Ana

Becciú. Para esta edición se han utilizado los manuscritos fechados por A.P. en
1972 y varios textos, algunos hallados dispersos en cuadernos, otros previa-
mente publicados en revistas y que no fueron recogidos por A.P. en sus libros
publicados hasta 1972.

This reference, by not alluding explicitly to any kind of selection on the part of
the compilers, gave the impression that all available material had been included,
or at least everything that was not thought to be a rough draft, considered unfit
for publication by the author in the stage of writing it had reached at the time of
her death. Such an impression is backed up by the fact that all of the material
from the period 1963–68 included in the volume is without exception already
published in magazines. I point this out because it shows an implicit respect, on
the part of the editors, for Pizarnik’s publication criteria. No texts are included
that she had not either published in a magazine or intended for the Spanish
anthology, as is the case for the poem ‘A tiempo y no’, although its inclusion in
the anthology is not pointed out. As regards the material from the last two years
of her life, since there is no clarification vis-à-vis the unpublished poems, there
would be no reason to suppose that it didn’t include all extant material. However,
eighteen years on, the edition of the Poesía completa – on which I will focus,
though in dealing with the topic of corrections I shall also refer to the Prosa
completa – in the hands of one of the authors of Textos de sombra, holds certain
surprises for the attentive reader. In particular, that it should include so many
unpublished poems – approximately equivalent to one and half books, going by
the average number of poems that Pizarnik incorporated in her books – as well as
a significant number of corrections to the 1982 compilation. Both facts, appar-
ently positive in themselves, when we go deeper into the matter once again pres-
ent us with problems not only regarding theoretical issues linked to the author
and the extent of authorial control over manuscripts, but also with respect to
other issues of an ethical/academic nature, linked to the critic/editor and his or
her functions of legitimization and determination of the corpus.
First, let us take the issue of corrections, since it is simplest to deal with. The
editor amends through footnotes a series of errors which apparently found their
way into the 1982 publication, without mentioning her participation as compiler
of said volume until the afterword ‘Acerca de esta edición’ (Poesía, p. 455), and
mis-quoting the title of the book, which figures here as Textos de Sombra y otros
poemas [alterations highlighted in bold]. As an example, I reproduce the note
which accompanies the poem ‘Jardín o tiempo’:
156 CRISTINA PIÑA

Esta versión es la que figura en carpeta bajo ‘ACABADOS’. Por error, en

Textos de Sombra . . ., 1982, la estrofa final fue editada como poema aislado.
Existen otras tres versiones: una manuscrita con el título ‘La sombra de su
imagen’ fechada 15-5-1970, otra a máquina sin fecha, en papel carta, y otra a
lápiz en un cuaderno. (Poesía, p. 441)

The phrase ‘Por error’ seems to me to be characteristic of the way in which Becciú
puts a distance between herself and the numerous – and in some cases substantial
– alterations. On the one hand it is fair enough not to go into minutiae, given the
intervening years and the different circumstances of publication: a different pub-
lishing house in another country and without the presence of the other editor,
Olga Orozco, who had died in 1999. But it is a different matter not to explain the
circumstances of publication in 1982, the nature of the manuscripts, and how it
became possible to correct the errors detected, which suggests access to the mate-
rial. In the article ‘Los avatares de su legado’, included in the special edition of
Clarín Cultura y Nación devoted to Pizarnik 30 years after her death, Becciú does
recount how she came to edit Textos de sombra y últimos poemas at the request of
Alejandra’s mother. However, the piece – besides appearing two years after the
publication of the Poesía completa and various months after that of the Prosa
completa in Spain, and being aimed exclusively at an Argentine readership – gives
little information on the subject of the corrections, despite its length. Indeed, in
view of the detailed account of Pizarnik’s incredible fastidiousness and fore-
thought with regard to her manuscripts and the infinite care taken by the editors,
it remains puzzling why there should be so many and such substantial corrections.
In the case of the Prosa completa these corrections are quite serious; Becciú not
only changes the familiar title of Pizarnik’s only dramatic work – from Los poseí-
dos entre lilas to Los perturbados entre lilas – but she also presents the sections
of La bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la polígrafa in a different order. The only
paragraph of the note which could explain the original exclusion of drafts pub-
lished in the Spanish edition – and I shall discuss these drafts presently – does not
really shed much light on the motives for these modifications and amendments:

Hubo que esperar a las Malvinas y la presidencia de Alfonsín13 para que

Sudamericana publicara Textos de Sombra [sic] y últimos poemas, la recopi-
lación de inéditos de Pizarnik que habíamos preparado diez años antes. Pero
la prisa, el límite de páginas impuesto por la editorial y nuestro miedo a que
ésta cambiara de idea, habían dejado mucho material en el tintero.

Either this edition left a little to be desired or perhaps something happened in the
intervening years which determined subsequent textual variations. In addition to
the significant series of corrections – I refer to pages 411, 423, 426, 435, 452 of

13 The dictatorship ended conclusively on 10 December 1983, when Dr Alfonsín became

president, having been elected on 30 October; the date of printing of the book is the month of
August 1982.
 THE ‘COMPLETE’ WORKS OF ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK? 157

the Poesía completa and to pages 91 and 165 of the Prosa completa – the edito-
rial silence or contradictory information surrounding the circumstances of publi-
cation (in 1982, and again in 2000 and 2002) leaves the three books in an
ambiguous position. Questions arise not only on the subject of corrections and
faithfulness but also on the more delicate issue of the exclusion or inclusion of
texts, in other words, the criteria by which the corpus is delimited.
Before turning to the problem of what has been included and what left out, a
final observation on the question of the amendments as regards the Prosa com-
pleta; as I mentioned, the 2002 publication presents a different order of La
bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la polígrafa from that with which readers had
become familiar, and this re-ordering is not justified by the editor. Indeed, if we
look closely at the introductory note to the section, we find in the first part a
confusing passage, and at the end the following phrase, which also fails to clarify
the situation: ‘Aunque no en este orden, estos textos fueron publicados póstuma-
mente en Textos de Sombra [sic] y últimos poemas, Sudamericana, Buenos Aires,
1982’ (Prosa, p. 91). If I call the first part confusing it is because after reading it
several times I still do not understand whether the two groups of ‘relatos’ to
which it alludes comprise the same ‘relatos’ in a different order or two different
groups of texts, as we can see (I quote the passage in full to illustrate my point):

Carpeta con dos conjuntos de relatos. El primero, abundantemente corregido a

mano; el segundo mecanografiado y con correcciones. En la presente edición
se respeta el orden de los textos según el segundo conjunto incluido en la
segunda parte de la carpeta, seguidos del primero en el orden que figura en la
primera parte de la carpeta. (Prosa, p. 91)

Since the compiler does not clarify which ‘relatos’ appear in each of the groups,
it is not quite clear what she means and what this ‘primero’ in the last sentence
refers to. Does it refer, as the grammar suggests, to the first group of ‘relatos’,
which would therefore be different from the second? Or does it refer to the dif-
ferent order of two identical groups?
The second amendment has to do with the title given to Pizarnik’s only theat-
rical work, known to readers until this edition as Los poseídos entre lilas and
which the editor now entitles Los perturbados entre lilas. If, as she says in the
explanatory note, Pizarnik’s typed sheet has Los perturbados entre lilas as the
title, the change would seem rational, notwithstanding the fact that the author
herself included its final fragment in the Spanish anthology published posthu-
mously under the title Los poseídos entre lilas. The problem arises because in
the 1982 compilation with Orozco, Becciú had opted for the title Los poseídos
entre lilas, presumably because of Pizarnik’s choice in publishing the fragment
under that title. As a consequence, since 1982 the piece has been known, has
circulated, been staged and has been the object of critical studies with that title,
in view of which, changing the title amounts to a major editorial decision. As
such, it would require explicit justification in the introductory note, and whilst in
the note Becciú does refer to the piece’s partial publication in El deseo de la
158 CRISTINA PIÑA

palabra, she does not register its first complete publication in her 1982 volume,
under the opposite title to that subsequently chosen by her in 2002.
Having pointed out the changes to the Prosa, I return now to the problem
regarding the criteria for delimiting the corpus, in view of the alterations I have
indicated. It is impossible not to wonder – despite Becciú’s article in Clarín,
which is itself contradictory – if in preparing the 1982 publication Orozco and
Becciú did not have all the material at their disposal. If, on the other hand, they
did have the material but decided not to publish it, what were their criteria for
including or excluding texts and, consequently, what determined that Becciú
should now publish them eighteen years later? And finally, does what is pre-
sented to us in this edition under the titles of Poesía completa and Prosa com-
pleta really include all of Pizarnik’s extant unpublished material? Or in a few
years time, will we see her corpus change once again as a result of the process of
producing a ‘critical edition’ (the urgency of which has already been pointed out
with regard to the Diarios)?
This is a rhetorical question; of course not all the material is there, as the edi-
tor herself makes plain, saying in the last paragraph of ‘Acerca de esta edición’
that ‘este volumen no es definitivo, en un sentido académico; es sólo una compi-
lación, hecha, eso sí, con lealtad a Alejandra Pizarnik, y devoción a su obra,
única e irrepetible’ (Poesía, p. 456). Taking this into account along with what is
said in the second paragraph of the Afterword about the texts which appeared in
Textos de sombra y últimos poemas and which would then go into the volume
entitled Prosa completa, we can see that the qualification of ‘no definitivo’ could
well refer to the fact that there are texts missing from the Poesía that will appear
in the later volume, the Prosa. For texts where this is not the case, one could
certainly argue that the value of texts omitted from the selection is a matter of
personal opinion; it makes no claim to be an academically definitive volume, and
they are all still accessible to the dedicated scholar of Pizarnik in the Princeton
collection. Nevertheless, to leave out of the ‘complete works’ pieces which the
author herself intended to publish risks appearing disloyal.
I turn now to the poems which only appeared once in published form, in Zona
prohibida. The subsequent offprint published in 1982 by the Universidad
Veracruzana of Mexico contains thirty-one poems, of which twenty appeared
either in identical form or with varying levels of correction in Árbol de Diana,
and four in Los trabajos y las noches (1965) with the titles ‘Comunicaciones’,
‘Silencios’, ‘Mendiga voz’ and ‘Moradas’. It is likely that Becciú had access to
this offprint,14 yet she apparently overlooked the fact that there are six poems
there which were never republished nor rewritten by Pizarnik: ‘Abandonada en

14 I say it is likely because Frank Graziano (from whom I learnt of the existence of this
offprint) points out in the ‘Editor’s Note’ of his book Alejandra Pizarnik: A Profile (Durango,
CO: Logbridge Rhodes, 1987) that before publishing his volume he was in contact with the
following people, and thanks them for their assistance: ‘in Buenos Aires . . . Olga Orozco,
Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, Enrique Pezzoni, Arturo Carrera and Cristina Piña. Ana Becciú
and Aurora Bernárdez in Paris’.
 THE ‘COMPLETE’ WORKS OF ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK? 159

el alba . . .’; ‘Ha muerto la que . . .’; ‘El martirio de beber . . .’; ‘Inolvidada: las
cosas . . .’; ‘Mi pueblo de ángeles . . .’; ‘Lucha feroz entre . . .’. The question then
arises why the editor did not include them in the Poesía completa, above all
when she included drafts from 1956 – a move with which I disagree, but only on
grounds of inconsistency. Indeed, in the section ‘Poemas no recogidos en libros’
the whole group of poems included in the subsection ‘1956–1960’ are drafts of
poems written in those years. It seems to me that to accord them the same status
of legitimacy as those published in magazines or newspapers, and as those which
can be dated more or less between the completion of the manuscript of her last
book published in her lifetime, El infierno musical (1971), and her death, is
rather irregular, since it implies an ignorance or dismissal of the author’s intent
to publish or not to publish. If Pizarnik had considered them worthy of publica-
tion – or simply if she wanted to publish them, aside from any intrinsic textual
‘merit’ – she would have included them in one of her previous books, or in what
became the posthumous anthology published in Spain. The earliest of these
poems, for example, coincide with the publication of her second book, La última
inocencia, after which she would publish a further six books of poetry. To ignore
in this case her desire not to publish them is at odds with the decision not to
include those from Zona prohibida (which Pizarnik did want to publish) and
with the decision to incorporate La tierra más ajena, which the author explicitly
disowned in a letter to Antonio Beneyto, partially reproduced in the ‘Epílogo’ to
the anthology El deseo de la palabra (p. 254).
I write perfectly conscious of the fact that as soon as one broaches this sub-
ject, the inevitable example of Max Brod’s happy infidelity to the last will of
Franz Kafka springs to mind, thanks to which we have been able to enjoy one of
the most significant collections of literary texts of the first half of the twentieth
century. Also, closer to home and in a similar vein to the republication of La
tierra más ajena despite Pizarnik’s repudiation of it, we have the controversy
surrounding the republication by Borges’s widow María Kodama of three early
books which Borges had explicitly excluded from his Obras completas.15 Lastly,
and also bearing comparison with the publication of Pizarnik’s draft poems, we
have the publication of texts by Mallarmé on the part of Doctor Bonniot, Jean
Pierre Richard and Jacques Scherer, who published posthumously Igitur, Pour
un tombeau d’Anatole and Livre respectively.16 Not only was it the poet’s express

15 I am referring to Inquisiciones (1925) (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1993); El tamaño de

mi esperanza (1926) (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1993); and El idioma de los argentinos
(1925) (Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 1994).
16 As Yves Bonnefoy indicates in his edition of Mallarmé’s prose, it was Doctor Bonniot,
Mallarmé’s son-in-law, who in 1925 established the text of Igitur, this ‘cuento metafísico’, for
printing. Stéphane Mallarmé, Igitur, Divagations, Un coup de dés (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
Jean Pierre Richard established the text of Pour un tombeau d’Anatole, which was handed to
Henri Mondor, editor of the Pléiade complete works, as he says in the Foreword to his edition:
Stéphane Mallarmé, Pour un tombeau d’Anatole (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1961). Jacques
Scherer produced the revised and augmented edition of Le ‘Livre’ de Mallarmé (Paris:
Gallimard, 1977).
160 CRISTINA PIÑA

desire that all of his papers should be burned – in this respect he was more
decided than Kafka, as Blanchot observes (‘The Book to Come’, pp. 264–5); the
three texts in question were still in draft state, since Mallarmé had not estab-
lished a text for printing, exactly the same as occurred with Pizarnik and the
poems to which I have alluded. These poems were simply ‘el contenido de una
carpeta con 41 hojas de poemas mecanografiados y corregidos a mano por AP’
(Poesía, p. 299).
At this point I am eager to clarify that, quite apart from my individual position
in the matter – in my 1993 edition I chose not to include Pizarnik’s first book –
my criticism of Becciú for publishing them does not arise from my belief in the
absolutely decisive value of the author’s opinion about his or her own work (I
have already referred to the ‘subversive juridicity’ which Derrida discerns in
writing, and I will presently focus on the power attributed to it by Blanchot);
rather it stems from the apparent inconsistency of invoking loyalty to the author,
whilst alternately respecting or ignoring her wishes regarding publication. In
such a case, it seems to me that the only real way to prove loyalty is to go for all
or nothing, in the sense of rigorously adopting one of two positions: either pub-
lish everything, because in the absence of a secure theoretical concept of what
constitutes a literary text, where literature just ‘is’, and we cannot define what it
includes and what its limits are (as I pointed out previously using Foucault and
Derrida), it is necessary to publish everything; or take the will of the author as an
absolute guideline, and apply it rigorously, editing exclusively what the author
herself published or prepared for publication and that which, once published, she
did not disown.
In another sense, although we may not like it, getting into the business of
including and excluding material is, in the final analysis, pointless, owing to the
transgressive potential of extreme writing like that of Pizarnik. As a result, what-
ever is excluded will appear, sooner or later, in the same way that whatever is
included will end up being absent. Because, I repeat, writing – which does not
simply exist – has the ability always to be absent, to be lacking. Or to use
Blanchot’s words, it is a power against which the writer is powerless, as he
affirms in the following memorable passage:

I know the rule formulated by Apollinaire: ‘Publish everything.’ It makes a lot

of sense. It attests to the profound tendency of what is hidden to lean toward
the light . . . This is not a rule or a principle. It is the power under the sway of
which whoever sets out to write falls, and falls all the harder if he opposes it
and contests it. The same power confirms the impersonal nature of works of
art. The writer has no right over them, and he is nothing in the face of them,
always already dead and always suppressed. Let his will not be done, then.
Logically, if we judge it suitable to misunderstand the intention of the author
after his death, we should also accept that it is not to be respected during his
life. Yet while he is alive, what happens is apparently the opposite. The writer
wants to publish and the publisher does not want to. But that is only surface
appearance. Think of all the forces – secret, personal, ideological, unexpected
– that are exercised over our will to force us to write and publish what we do
 THE ‘COMPLETE’ WORKS OF ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK? 161

not want to. Visible or invisible, the power is always there, it pays no attention
to us and, to our surprise, hides our papers from us in our very hands. The liv-
ing are indeed weak. (Blanchot, ‘The Book to Come’, p. 265 note 6)

However, since recognizing this does not imply renouncing the critic/editor’s
role of legitimizing and delimiting the corpus, I should like to point out just two
aspects of the Prosa which seem to me to be particularly relevant in the light of
other inconsistencies, such as the contravention of chronology in the ordering of
the section of ‘Relatos’, or the errors in indicating the origin of these texts. I am
referring in general to the persistently subjectivist position adopted by the editor,
resistent to any kind of academic theorizing; this attitude leads her on the one
hand to scorn labels which precisely deal with hybridization or undecidability of
genre (as is the case with the Barthesian concept of text) in her classification of
the material, and on the other hand to fall back on a mythical, inexplicable and
highly exclusive ‘knowledge’, obtained merely by contact with the poet, as to
the difference between prose poems and prose.
Thus without wishing to fall into the stupidity of criticizing Becciú’s edition
for distorting the classification of the material – which would be inexcusably
ingenuous after reading Borges’s ‘El idioma analítico de John Wilkins’ – I con-
sider that to remain faithful to the category of text already used by the editor in
her 1982 volume, albeit with a different sense, she should perhaps have avoided
such polemical decisions as including La condesa sangrienta amongst the
‘Artículos y ensayos’, or ‘Descripción’ and ‘En contra’ amongst the ‘Relatos’.
Regarding the first text, of course if we pay attention to the first three paragraphs,
this in principle presents itself as a commentary on the poetic biography of
Erzsébet Báthory published by Valentine Penrose in 1963, but already by the
fourth paragraph, Pizarnik’s text goes in a different direction, which displaces
her writing from any specific genre, oscillating between narrative, portrait, prose
poem, reflection and poetic essay. In this case, using the Barthesian concept of
text would have been more faithful to the transgressive nature of Pizarnik’s writ-
ing. Putting it in with the essays because, as Becciú says in her previously-cited
Clarín article ‘he podido comprobar que Pizarnik lo escribió como un ensayo:
un ensayo sobre el mal – “algún día habría que escribir otro sobre el bien”, decía,
y señalaba como referencia a Niétoshka Nezvanova, la novela de Dostoievsky’,
risks simultaneously getting tangled up in ‘authorial intention’ (which should be
distinguished from the author’s wishes regarding publication), incorrectly privi-
leging her ‘reading’ of her own text over those of other readers and critics, and
contributing to the mystique of knowledge received by direct contact with the
author, to which I referred earlier.17

17 See also Diarios, p. 392, for reference to Niétoshka Nezvanova, and pp. 397–8 and
415–16, for Pizarnik’s comments on writing La condesa sangrienta, to which she does refer
twice as ‘ensayo’, but also as ‘el artículo’ and implicitly as one of her ‘comentarios
bibliográficos’.
162 CRISTINA PIÑA

Regarding the difference between poems in prose and prose per se, Becciú
says in the Afterword to the Poesía completa: ‘Me dejé guiar por el tratamiento
muy particular del ritmo que Alejandra Pizarnik daba a los textos en prosa’
(p. 455). Likewise in her article in Clarín:

La frecuentación, durante años, de estos manuscritos me ha hecho comprender

algunos aspectos que en aquella primera edición de Sudamericana del año
1983 [sic] no habíamos ceñido bien: la diferencia que Alejandra establecía
entre un texto en prosa y un poema (aunque estuviera aparentemente escrito
como prosa). Los recuerdos del escritor Alberto Manguel han sido muy valio-
sos para ubicar ciertos textos en el volumen de poesía o el de prosa.
Alejandra había empezado a concebir su propia manera de relatar un cuento
y diferenciaba un poema de un relato. La diferencia es siempre sutil, pero
existe.

Strictly speaking, in neither of these passages is this mysterious difference clari-

fied. We are not told what this ‘tratamiento muy particular’ consists of. The same
happens with the second rather hollow phrase: ‘La diferencia es siempre sutil,
pero existe.’ However, these phrases are not hollow from a semantic point of
view; rather they point us towards the value placed on personal access to the
manuscripts above any other means of arriving at this ‘elusive’ knowledge. But
such mythification cannot be sustained as an intellectual basis for the difference
between prose and prose poetry. Indeed, there is no convincing theory about the
prose poem which goes beyond the pioneering but vague reflections of Baudelaire,
who nevertheless undoubtedly knew how to write them. The category of the
prose poem is explored by Pizarnik in her diaries, where she expresses the desire
to ‘copiar, para mi uso, una antología del poema en prosa’ (Diarios, p. 418), but
then immediately counters this with ‘Gran error. Por ahora sería mejor leer
mucho’ (p. 418). It is as if she senses that one cannot easily categorize or delimit
the prose poem, neatly anthologizing it for imitation; it has to be approached
more intuitively, almost as if by reading one could absorb the essence of a prose
poem by osmosis. She does have certain convictions about the prose poem, but
these are more to do with spacing on the page than rhythm per se: ‘Poemas en
prosa: necesidad de los espacios dobles. Al menos, para mi “estilo” ’ (Diarios,
p. 419). So to include, for example, ‘Textos de sombra’ in the poetry volume and
the previously mentioned ‘Descripción’ and ‘En contra’ in the prose volume,
amongst the ‘Relatos’ (in itself an ambiguous category when contrasted with the
more appropriate and established category of text), appears arbitrary, given the
lack of justification.
Through examining these recent editions of Pizarnik I have hoped to show on
the one hand the theoretical and critical difficulties they present us with, and on
the other hand, the need for a declaredly academic critical edition (notwithstand-
ing the irreducibly subversive juridicity of Pizarnik’s writing) which would
explain, in a less subjective and more transparent way, the conditions of editing,
the degree of access to the manuscripts and criteria for inclusion/exclusion of
 THE ‘COMPLETE’ WORKS OF ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK? 163

different texts. Beyond these issues, it has also been my intention to foreground
the potency of Alejandra Pizarnik’s writing, which ends up overwhelming crit-
ics, editors and even the author herself. Her writing has the potential to speak
and be spoken, to be endlessly absent from any place or law and to draw the
reader inexorably to a space of linguistic pleasure reached by very few works.

Bibliography
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Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 56–64
Becciú, Ana, ‘Los avatares de su legado’, Clarín Cultura y Nación, Buenos Aires, 14
September 2002, p. 5
Blanchot, Maurice, The Work of Fire (1949), trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1995)
——, The Space of Literature (1955), trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1982)
——, ‘The Book to Come’, in The Book to Come (1959), trans. Charlotte Mandell
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 224–44 and pp. 263–6
——, De Kafka à Kafka (Paris: Gallimard, 1981)
Bonnefoy, Yves, La poética de Mallarmé: dos ensayos, trans. Cristina Piña (Córdoba:
Ediciones del Copista, 2002)
Catelli, Nora, ‘Invitados al palacio de las citas: los diarios inéditos’, in Clarín Cultura
y Nación, Buenos Aires, 14 September 2002, p. 5
Derrida, Jacques, ‘Before the Law’, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New
York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 161–220
——, Dissemination (1972), trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1981)
Foucault, Michel, ‘What is an Author?’ in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow
(New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 101–20
Graziano, Frank, Alejandra Pizarnik: A Profile (Durango, CO: Logbridge Rhodes,
1987)
——, Alejandra Pizarnik: Semblanza (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
1996)
Mallarmé, Stéphane, Correspondance. Lettres sur la poésie, ed. Bertrand Marchal
(Paris: Gallimard, 1995)
——, Igitur, Divagations, Un coup de dés (Paris: Gallimard, 1976)
——, Pour un tombeau d’Anatole, intro. Jean-Pierre Richard (Paris: Éditions du
Seuil, 1961)
——, Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1914) (Paris: Gallimard, 1998)
Moix, Ana María, ‘La niña, la muñeca y la muerte: acerca de Prosa completa’, in
Clarín Cultura y Nación, Buenos Aires, 14 September 2002, p. 4
Mukarovsky, Jan, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Fact, trans. Mark E.
Suino (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1970)
Nuño, Ana, ‘Esperando a Alejandra: Diarios’, in La Vanguardia Digital, 31 December
2003 [n.p.]
Piña, Cristina, ‘Una estética del deshecho’, in El puente de las palabras: homenaje a
David Lagmanovich, ed. Inés Azar (Washington: Intramer 50, Serie Cultural,
1994), pp. 333–40
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Piña, Cristina, ‘La desprolijidad y la riqueza’, in Fénix: Poesía, crítica (Córdoba), 12

(2002), 133–7 [Review of Alejandra Pizarnik, Prosa completa, ed. Ana Becciú
(Barcelona: Lumen, 2002)]
——, ‘Las transformaciones de un corpus poético’, in Fénix: Poesía, crítica
(Córdoba), 10 (2001), 131–5 [Review of Alejandra Pizarnik, Poesía completa
(1955–1972), ed. Ana Becciú (Barcelona: Lumen, 2000)]
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Mar, 1955)
——, El deseo de la palabra (Barcelona: Ocnos, 1975)
——, Textos de sombra y últimos poemas, ed. Olga Orozco and Ana Becciú (Buenos
Aires: Sudamericana, 1982)
——, Obras completas: poesía completa y prosa selecta, ed. Cristina Piña (Buenos
Aires: Corregidor, 1993; repr. 1994, 1999)
——, Obra completa, ed. Gustavo Zuluaga (Medellín: Árbol de Diana, 2000)
Scherer, Jacques, Le ‘Livre’ de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1977)
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26 (2004) [n.p.] www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero26/diariosp.html
 AFTERWORD

Owing to the wealth of material newly available, Pizarnik scholarship is now in

a position to examine the poet’s working methods in greater detail. As this vol-
ume shows, Pizarnik’s intense activity as a reader – in particular as revealed
through the notebooks of the ‘palais du vocabulaire’ and her critical essays –
underpins all of her poetry, which is constantly entering into dialogue with the
authors she read and reread, but which also cites itself repeatedly. As is also
shown here, the diaries – both those published in 2003 and those in the Princeton
archives not included in that selection – provide many useful insights into
Pizarnik’s reflections on her creative processes and on the relationships – literary
or otherwise – which influenced her work. These diary entries have also enabled
us to learn more about her ‘Borges y yo’ double, the mythologized ‘personaje
alejandrino’. The essays in this volume have sought to offer a broader perspec-
tive on Pizarnik’s many voices through readings focused on gender, humour,
translation and philosophy. Ultimately, however, Árbol de Alejandra: Pizarnik
Reassessed reflects the poet’s growing stature within the canon of Latin American
poetry; in so doing, it highlights the fact that the time is ripe for a full scholarly
critical edition of her fascinating works.

Fiona J. Mackintosh and Karl Posso

 SUBJECT INDEX

Absurd 4, 8, 17 n.13, 37, 38, 40–41, 43 Borges, Jorge Luis 7, 26, 37, 49, 54, 60, 73,
Aira, César 5, 23 n.22, 44 n.17, 77–8, 79, 78, 81, 83, 84, 102, 104 n.28, 112, 120,
81, 83, 133 159, 161
Alberti, Rafael 126 Borinsky, Alicia 5 n.10, 53–4
Aldana, Francisco de 116 Bosch, Hieronymus 1, 79, 85–7, 89
Alexandrian, Sarane 85 Bosquet, Alain 104
Alfonsín, Raúl 156 and n.13 Brecht, Bertolt 116
Andersen, Hans Christian 116–17 Breton, André 7, 8, 10, 26, 37 and n.4, 41,
Apollinaire, Guillaume 160 78, 79, 80–4, 86, 87–8, 111, 112, 120
Artaud, Antonin 1, 7, 10, 20–21, 41, 47, 78, Breughel, Pieter the Elder 95, 97
79, 81, 84, 91 n.2, 94, 107 Brod, Max 159
Buddha 47
Bajarlía, Juan Jacobo 51, 54 n.36, 85 n.22 Byron, Lord 118
Barnes, Djuna 116
Baron Supervielle, Silvia 154 n.11 Cadalso, José 92 n.4
Barrenechea, Ana María 39, 100 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 42, 127 n.22
Barthes, Roland 6, 161 Calvino, Italo 82
Bassnett, Susan 5 n.11 Carrera, Arturo 158 n.14
Bataille, Georges 18 n.14, 46 n.23, 61, 72, Carroll, Lewis 42–3
79, 86 Carter, Angela 61
Báthory, Erzsébet 4, 15, 24–5, 27, 28–9 and Catelli, Nora 113
n.29, 60–6 n.17, 68–73, 81, 112, 161 Caulfield, Carlota 93 n.9
Batlle Planas, Juan 87 Cernuda, Luis 95, 105, 106
Baudelaire, Charles 1, 7, 81, 112, 120, 162 Cervantes, Miguel de 114
Baudrillard, Jean 60 Chagall, Marc 1, 52
Beauvoir, Simone de 82 Char, René 10, 115
Becciú, Ana 17, 60 n.3, 148, 149, 152–8, Chávez Silverman, Susana 6, 8, 9, 21 n.17,
161–62 64 n.15, 115 n.10, 133 n.8
Beckett, Samuel 17 n.13, 40, 44, 68 n.22, Claudel, Paul 112
119 Cobo Borda, Juan Gustavo 158
Béguin, Albert 104 Coloma, Padre Luis 40
Beneyto, Antonio 93 n.9, 153, 159 Corboz, André 124
Benjamin, Walter 126 Cortázar, Julio 1, 2, 7, 26, 27, 37, 43, 46
Bergson, Henri 71 n.22, 54, 61, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 93
Bernárdez, Aurora 149, 158 n.14 n.7, 99–103, 119, 120, 121
Bible, the 43, 53 n.31 cummings, e.e. 91 n.2
Bioy Casares, Adolfo 37, 54, 102
Blanchot, Maurice 110, 120, 121, 126, 148, Dadaism 44
150–1, 153, 160–1 Dalmaroni, Miguel 113
Bonnefoy, Yves 88, 107, 150–1, 158 n.16 Darío, Rubén 5, 105, 121, 140
Bordelois, Ivonne 7, 19, 23 n.23, 51, 77, Daumal, René 81
79, 91 n.2, 93 and n.8, 94, 98, 99, 150–2, Deleuze, Gilles 10, 60, 62–3, 66, 69, 70,
154 71, 72
168 SUBJECT INDEX

Depetris, Carolina 8, 71 n.25, 77 n.5 Heine, Heinrich 54

Derrida, Jacques 148–52, 160 Herrera, Ricardo 88
Descartes, René 87 Hita, Arcipreste de 84
Di Giorgio, Marosa 41 n.12 Hölderlin, Friedrich 104
Dickinson, Emily 128 n.24, 133 Hugo, Victor 112
Dobry, Edgardo 77 Huidobro, Vicente 118
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 161 Husserl, Edmund 131
Ducasse, Isidore see Lautréamont
Duchamp, Marcel 44 Ionesco, Eugène 40

Eliot, T.S. 1, 5 n.8, 80, 81, 84, 102, 112, Jarry, Alfred 40
119 Jensen, Wilhelm 123
Eluard, Paul 91 n.2 Jesus Christ 70
Erasmus, Desiderius 47 Jitrik, Noé 101
Espina, Concha 48 Jouve, Pierre Jean 81
Joyce, James 126
Fernández, Macedonio 7 Juan de la Cruz, San 3 n.4, 10, 126
Fishburn, Evelyn 8, 15 n.6, 49 n.25, 103 Juana la Loca 121–22
n.25, 117 n.13 Jung, Carl 111
Fitts, Alexandra 71 n.25
Flaubert, Gustave 116 Kafka, Franz 1, 10, 52–54, 56, 60, 67–72,
Ford, Aníbal 101 150, 151, 159, 160
Foster, David William 68 n.23 Kamenszain, Tamara 132
Foucault, Michel 67, 148, 152, 160 Kant, Immanuel 66, 70
Fourier, Charles 80 Kavafis, Konstantin 123
Freud, Sigmund 37, 42, 43, 48–9, 55, 62 Keats, John 16, 42, 118
n.9, 69, 71, 72 n.30, 126 King, John 97
Klee, Paul 1, 117
Galtier, Lysandro 79 Klossowski, Pierre 63–64, 65
Garcés, J. 124 Kodama, María 159
García-Serrano, María Victoria 63 n.12 Koestler, Arthur 43, 56 n.38
Garcilaso de la Vega 91 n.2, 96 Koremblit, Bernardo Ezequiel 77
Garro, Elena 78 Kristal, Efraín 7
Gauthier, Xavière 82 Kristeva, Julia 16–17, 131–2, 134
Girri, Alberto 95, 96, 97, 99, 106, 107
Glass, Alain 82 Lambert, Jean Clarence 78
God 47–8, 86 Lautréamont, Comte de 84, 85, 93 n.7, 102,
Goldberg, Florinda 7, 37, 51 n.28, 57, 80, 105, 117, 121, 131, 144
84 n.20, 104 n.30, 107, 110 n.1, Lebel, Robert 119
133 n.7 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 56
Golden Age 1, 3 Lichtenberg, Georg Cristoph 7, 118, 119
Gombrowicz, Witold 81 Liscano, Juan 29 n.29, 79, 97 n.12
Góngora, Luis de 3 n.4, 7, 10 Lispector, Clarice 1
Gorriti, Juana Manuela 47 López Velarde, Ramón 105, 106 n.31
Goya, Francisco de 1, 44 López, Arías 39
Graziano, Frank 71, 113 n.5, 158 n.14
grotesco criollo 41 Mackintosh, Fiona J. 10, 22 n.21, 38 n.5,
Guilboa, Amir 116 43 n.16, 101 n.21, 136 n.13
Gundermann, Christian 124 MacLeish, Archibald 16
Mayakovsky, Vladimir 118
Hardy, Thomas 142 Mallarmé, Stéphane 7, 16, 40, 87, 112,
Haydu, Susana 5 n.11, 71 n.25 113, 131, 141, 148, 150, 151, 153,
Heaney, Seamus 144 n.19 159–60
Heidegger, Martin 104 Malraux, André 124
 SUBJECT INDEX 169

Mandiargues, André Pieyre de 2, 78, 82, Picabia, Francis 44

94, 96, 107 Piglia, Ricardo 81
Marx, Karl 87 Piña, Cristina 3 n.5, 4 n.6, 6, 7, 8, 15 n.6,
Mateo del Pino, Ángeles 61 n.7 16 n.11, 36, 42, 46, 52, 54, 57, 64, 77,
Michaux, Henri 7, 37, 54, 78, 79, 80, 84, 78, 122, 134, 135, 138 n.14, 141 n.17,
87, 88, 93, 95 153 n.9, 154 n.11, 158 n.14
Millán, Eduardo 79 Pirandello, Luigi 39
Milosz, Oscar 81 Pichon Rivière, Enrique 85
Minotaur 15, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, Pessoa, Fernando 104, 105, 106
65 Pizarnik, Alejandra
Modernism 20, 114, 119 and visual art 1, 44, 85, 87, 89, 95, 117,
modernismo 5, 105 139
Moia, Martha I. 98–99, 136 and Jewishness 1, 8, 50–7, 70, 114,
Moix, Ana María 40, 111 n.3 115
Molière 44–46 and sexuality 8–9, 13–20, 23–34, 38,
Molina, Elsa 61 n.7 41–9, 64, 87, 88, 149
Molinari, Ricardo 96, 107 and madness 21 n.17, 84–7, 120
Molloy, Sylvia 8–9, 15 n.6, 19 n.15, 36, and plagiarism 60, 72, 84, 102, 119
64 n.15 and intertextuality 5–7, 16, 21, 27, 43–5,
Mondragón, Sergio 79 47, 113, 154
Mukarovsky, Jan 151–2 and music 139
Murdoch, Iris 66 n.18 Pizarnik, Alejandra – Works
Murena, Héctor A. 96, 98–9, 107 ‘A tiempo y no’ 155
Muschietti, Delfina 6, 118 ‘A un poema acerca del agua, de Silvina
Ocampo’ 16–19
Negroni, María 13–14, 16–17 and n.13, 44, ‘Abandonada en el alba. . .’ 158–9
47 n.24, 71 n.25, 110 n.1, 119, 126–7, ‘Alguien cae en su primera caída’ 104
151, 152 ‘Amantes’ 18–19
neobarroco/neobarroso 41 ‘Anillos de ceniza’ 123
neogrotesco 41 ‘Aproximaciones’ 114, 122, 130–1
Nerval, Gérard de 26, 120, 122 Árbol de Diana 1, 2, 6, 18, 23, 28, 82,
Nicholson, Melanie 72 n.31 103 n.26, 116, 117, 122, 130 n.1,
Nietzsche, Friedrich 67 n.20 133–4, 135, 139–42, 145, 158
Nuño, Ana 148–50 ‘Balada de la piedra que llora’ 133
‘Caminos del espejo’ 3
Ocampo, Silvina 9 and n.23, 16–20, 31, 37, ‘Cantora nocturna’ 127
38, 54, 103, 107 ‘Casa de citas’ 127
Oedipus 55, 131 ‘Casa de la mente’ 114
Orozco, Olga 80, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158 ‘Cenizas’ 2, 138
Ostriker, Alicia 20 ‘Comunicaciones’ 158
Ostrov, León 24 n.24 Correspondencia 1, 9, 18 n.14, 19, 23
n.23, 29 n.29, 37, 38, 42–3, 51 n.29,
Parra, Jaime D. 139 n.15, 141 n.16 55, 56, 79, 80, 81, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97
Paris 2, 7, 56, 77–82, 84, 85, 100, 103 n.26, n.12, 103, 150–1, 154
158 n.14 ‘Cuadro’ 141–2
Paz, Octavio 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16 n.8, 17, 20, ‘cuidado con las palabras. . .’ 121, 126
21–2, 26, 78, 79, 80, 81–2, 84, 88, 92, ‘[. . .] Del silencio’ 121, 131, 146
94–5, 98, 103–7, 111, 113, 125, 153 ‘Desconfianza’ 50
Parker, Charlie 84 ‘Descripción’ 22, 23, 161, 162
Pellegrini, Aldo 13 ‘Desfundación’ 121
Pellettieri, Osvaldo 41 n.12 ‘Diana de Lesbos’ 9
Penrose, Valentine 4, 17 n.13, 60–2, 63, 65, Diarios 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 16 n.10, 18 n.14,
72, 73, 81, 92, 119, 161 20, 21, 22 n.21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
Pezzoni, Enrique 94, 103, 158 n.14 31, 33–4, 38, 50, 51–2, 53, 54, 60,
170 SUBJECT INDEX

80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 90, 92, 93 n.5, 94, ‘La noche’ 2
106, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, ‘La oscura’ 142
119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, ‘La palabra del deseo’ 122
127, 132, 133, 139, 148–9, 158, 161 La tierra más ajena 1, 23 n.22, 130,
n.17, 162 159
‘Donde circunda lo ávido’ 144–5 La última inocencia 2, 132, 135–6,
‘Duración’ 143 159
El deseo de la palabra 153, 157, 159 ‘La última inocencia’ 2, 5
‘El deseo de la palabra’ 122, 132, 134 ‘La única herida’ 31
‘El despertar’ 24 n.24 ‘La verdad del bosque’ 117
‘El entendimiento’ 144 Las aventuras perdidas 2, 135, 136,
‘El escorial’ 27 138, 145
‘El hombre del antifaz azul’ 21 n.18 ‘Linterna sorda’ 3, 127
El infierno musical 3–4, 15, 28, 104, ‘L’obscurité des eaux’ 130
130, 135, 159 ‘Los muertos y la lluvia’ 50, 52
‘El martirio de beber. . .’ 159 ‘Los pequeños cantos’ 118, 141
‘El ojo de la alegría’ 52 Los perturbados entre lilas 4 n.6, 8, 15,
‘El poeta y su poema’ 134 36, 40, 41–6, 117 n.13, 118, 119,
‘El sueño de la muerte o el lugar de los 156–7 see also ‘Los poseídos entre
cuerpos poéticos’ 3, 122, 125–6, lilas’
146 ‘Los poseídos entre lilas’ 4 n.6, 17 n.13,
‘En contra’ 123, 161, 162 40 and n.8, 151, 156–7 see also Los
‘En esta noche, en este mundo’ 4, 105, perturbados entre lilas
115 Los trabajos y las noches 2, 18, 23 n.22,
‘En un lugar para huirse’ 145 130 n.1, 135, 139, 142–5, 158
‘Endechas’ 121 ‘Los trabajos y las noches’ 2, 18
‘entrar entrando. . .’ 146 ‘Lucha feroz entre. . .’ 159
‘Escrito cuando sombra’ 144 ‘Mendiga voz’ 158
Extracción de la piedra de locura 2–3, ‘Mi pueblo de ángeles. . .’ 159
15, 28, 31, 71, 77, 78, 82, 85, 89, ‘Moradas’ 158
134, 135, 146 ‘Mucho más allá’ 50, 145
‘Extracción de la piedra de locura’ 3, ‘Niña entre azucenas’124
31–3, 77, 84–9, 122, 130, 134–5, ‘no, la verdad no es la música’ 104
137 ‘Noche compartida en el recuerdo de una
‘Fragmentos para dominar el silencio’ 3, huida’ 117, 122
124 ‘Noche’ 2, 136
‘Fronteras inútiles’ 2 ‘Ojos primitivos’ 51, 127
‘Ha muerto la que. . .’ 159 ‘Origen’ 136, 137
‘Harta del principio femenino’ 9 ‘Piedra fundamental’ 3, 51, 115–16,
‘Hija del viento’ 138 123
‘Inolvidada: las cosas. . .’ 159 ‘Poema para el padre’ 52
‘Jardín o tiempo’ 155–6 ‘Poema para Emily Dickinson’ 133
La bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la Poesía completa 6, 16, 19, 118 n.14,
polígrafa 4, 5, 8, 10, 15, 29, 37, 130, 148–63
47–9, 54–5, 91, 102, 151, 152, 156, Prosa completa 6, 36, 40 n.8, 52, 60,
157 79, 84, 91, 92, 96, 103 n.27, 111 n.3,
La condesa sangrienta 4, 10, 14, 15, 17 148–63
n.13, 24, 28–9, 30, 31, 60–73, 80 ‘Puerto adelante’ 1, 2
n.10, 91, 92, 127, 161 ‘¿Quién es yo?’ 114, 135
‘La de los ojos abiertos’ 137 ‘Recuerdos de la pequeña casa del
‘La enamorada’ 137–8 canto’ 114
‘La luz caída de la noche’ 2 ‘Relectura de Nadja de André Bre-
‘La máscara y el poema’ 117 ton’ 82–4
‘La mesa verde’ 105 ‘Reloj’ 28
 SUBJECT INDEX 171

‘Revelaciones’ 133 Saavedra, Carlos Castro 79

‘Sala de psicopatología’ 52, 126 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 63
‘Salvación’ 136 Sade, Marquis de 61, 63, 64, 65, 68, 70–2,
‘Sentido de su ausencia’ 143 81
‘Silencios’ 158 Sánchez Robayna, Andrés 79
‘Sobre un poema de Rubén Darío’ 140 Sand, George 118
‘Solamente las noches’ 147 Sartre, Jean-Paul 78, 81
‘Sólo un nombre’ 2, 50, 104, 132–3, Sayers, Dorothy L. 81
136, 138 Scarafia, Silvia 61 n.7
‘Sous la nuit’ 146 Schehadé, Georges 7, 125
‘Textos de sombra’ 162 Schor, Naomi 25, 115 n.10
Textos de sombra y últimos poemas 104, Schubert, Franz 52
153–8 Schulz, Bruno 80
‘Tu voz’ 143 Schulze, Alfred Otto Wolfgang see
‘Un boleto objetivo’ 1 Wols
‘Una traición mística’ 123, 125 Scobie, James R. 51 n.27
‘Vagar en lo opaco’ 2 Seabra Ferreira, M. A. 61 n.6
‘Violario’ 30–1 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 79, 91 n.1, 106,
‘Yo soy’ 2 107
Zona prohibida 153, 158–9 Senkman, Leonardo 8 n.21, 51, 57
Pizarnik de Nessis, Myriam 149, 150 Sergio, Jorge 92
Plath, Sylvia 127 n.20 Shaw, George Bernard 48
Plato 66, 70, 71 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 42, 118
Poe, Edgar Allan 83 Shultz de Mantovani, Frida 56
poètes maudits 1, 5, 21, 51 Sierra, Marta 71 n.25
Porchia, Antonio 7 Singer, Ester 82
Porrúa, Francisco 99, 100 n.17 Soncini, Anna 111 n.2
Posso, Karl 10, 15 n.6, 80 n.10, 81 n.14 Starobinski, Jean 119, 127
Pound, Ezra 119, 144 Stevens, Wallace 114
Princeton 3 n.4, 4, 5, 6 and n.12, 7 n.16, 9 Storni, Alfonsina 5
and n.23–24, 52, 53 n.33, 79, 81 n.15, Stutman, Osías 39, 55, 57, 150–1, 152
110–28, 141 n.17, 149, 158 Surrealism 1, 5, 7, 10, 20, 21, 30, 36, 38,
Proust, Marcel 54, 120 40 and n.9, 44, 77–82, 84–5, 87–9, 98
n.13, 102, 111, 125, 127
Quevedo, Francisco de 3 n.4, 7, 10, 110, Symbolists 20
112, 116, 125
Quincey, Thomas de 119 Talmud, the 52 and n.30, 54, 115
Quinquela Martín, Benito 1 tango 42, 117 and n.13
Quixote, Don 84, 89 Tanning, Dorothea 85
Telaak, Anastasia 53, 54, 57
Redon, Odilon 1
Rich, Adrienne 13 Unamuno, Miguel de 39, 122
Rimbaud, Arthur 1, 42, 78, 81, 83, 84, 86, Ungaretti, Giuseppe 10
88–9, 112, 118, 120, 134
Rodríguez-Francia, Ana María 45 n.21, 82 Valente, José Ángel 79
n.18, 141 n.18 Valesio, Paolo 15–16, 20, 32
Rossi, Cecilia 9 Valéry, Paul 112, 148
Roth, Philip 54 Vallejo, César 37, 118
Rulfo, Juan 26 Varela, Blanca 78–9
Running, Thorpe 4, 81 Valle-Inclán, Ramón del 113
Rodríguez-Monegal, Emir 79, 101 Verlaine, Paul 112
Romanticism 17, 21, 78 n.5, 105, 111 Venti, Patricia 114, 149–50
Ruysbroeck, Jan van 85–6 Vigée, Claude 104
Rosenbaum, Alfredo 116 Vlad the Impaler 61
172 SUBJECT INDEX

Weiss, Jason 7
Wilson, Jason 7, 8, 37, 79 n.9, 95, 118
Wols 1, 142
Woolf, Virginia 149–50

Xirau, Ramón 79

Zeppelin, Count Ferdinand von 47

Zuluaga, Gustavo 6, 154 n.12