Arbol de Alejandra: Pizarnik Reassessed (Monografías A)

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 ambiguous 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 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2007 by Tamesis, Woodbridge ISBN 978-1-85566-153-0

Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Mizpah Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

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

60

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 ‘cuerpo poético’

110

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 critical 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:

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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 publication 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 permission 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 tortured worlds of Artaud and Kafka. The result was an accentuation of her latent feelings of estrangement, both from her immediate social environment and ultimately 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 ventanilla tranviaria’ (Poesía, p. 29) or to the ‘puerto de colores impresionistas’ (p. 32). The latter phrase calls to mind Benito Quinquela Martín’s popular paintings 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.

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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 reiterated, 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 writers, 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 thirtyeight 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 intimacy. 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 childhood, 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 epigrammatic single-line poems which seem in their elliptical nature to be tending towards silence, and the other veering towards the excessive and obsessive language 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 shortcomings through repetition: alguien me vio llorando en el sueño y yo expliqué (dentro de lo posible), mediante 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 reappeared 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.

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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 posthumously), 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 linguistic distortion and double entendres as characters with identifiable traits. Absurd situations which revolve obsessively around sex, lavatorial humour and psychoanalysis 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 primarily interested in her poetry. Its fascination lies not only in Pizarnik’s choice of subject – the notorious sixteenth-century Hungarian Countess Báthory who tortured 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 ultimately 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 language 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 language, 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.

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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 influence. 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 incomunicable. 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.

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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 ‘overdeterminedly “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 completa in 2002 (including substantial sections devoted to her critical articles, prologues 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 oeuvre. 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 problems 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 dealing 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 crystallization’ 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 edition of Obras completas: poesía completa y prosa selecta, takes on greater significance 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

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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 preferences had already been apparent through intertextuality in the poetry, but others (such as Góngora and Quevedo, many of whose sonnets she copies into her notebooks) 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 ‘palais 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, mirrors, 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 configuration 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.

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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 identificatory 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 sporadic 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 antilyrical way. Carolina Depetris had already underlined the importance of the late prose, reading it as ‘el indicio fundamental de una nueva dirección poética tendiente 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 linguistic 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 notably and surprisingly underdeveloped by her, that is, the Jewish dimension. Critics have frequently invoked Pizarnik’s own rootlessness and sense of nonbelonging, 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 semantic 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

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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 sexuality in Pizarnik’s work at a critical distance from her own earlier exposés, exploring 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.

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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 personal 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 alternately trapped and protected. Imagery of walls, tombs and asphyxiation is countered 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, comparative perspective through Karl Posso’s essay ‘The Tormenting Beauty of Ideals: A Deleuzian Interpretation of Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta 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 absolute negation’. This collection of essays therefore explores Pizarnik’s work from new angles: it examines her serious and detailed activity as a literary critic, revealing 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.

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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)

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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/msslist/maindex.htm Senkman, Leonardo, ‘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 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, hieratic, disciplined, asexual lyric voice (for years the overdeterminedly ‘Pizarnikian’ voice par excellence) versus the transgressive, humoristic, mainly hypersexualized 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 unauthorized 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.

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la transgresión no era simplemente profanar, parodiar, agobiar la intertextualidad, 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 posthumously.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 lesbigay readings of homosexuality.4 In the present essay, I do not necessarly privilege lesbianism in my reading of signs of gendered and sexual alterity in Pizarnik’s writing. And yet, I am fascinated with Valerie Rohy’s conceptualization 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 powerlessness, 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).

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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 during her lifetime or occasionally published in small magazines and reviews (but not collected in book form), particularly in the scathingly humorous, deconstructive, 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, emblematized 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 gendered 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 rigorous 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.

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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 overdetermined 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 tradition, 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 representing 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 narcisista 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.

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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 dedicated 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 uncollected 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 textual 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 (parenthetically 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 postRomantic ‘lila’), and in the use of the colloquial Argentine second-person singular 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 primavera’. However, any tendency toward sentimentality is tempered by the oxymoron ‘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).

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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 sensual, 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 – counterpoint. 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 readily 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 somewhat 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 openness), 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 syntactically 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 speaker’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).

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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 supplementarity 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 erotismo 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 rápidamente 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 calentura . . . 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 during 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

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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 several 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 substituting, erasing the poet’s work. Pizarnik’s positive attitude toward silence (silence as textual ideal, or plenitude) 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 represented 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.

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as a void, an emptiness – and of the (alienated) body. This desired/asserted doubling with Artaud on the one hand positions Pizarnik as heiress to the post-Romantic 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 algunos 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 occasional temper tantrum or the oxymoronic ‘fit’ of impotence. In the prose poem ‘Descripción’, from 1964, silence is more an active, menacing 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 positive–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, combaten, 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.

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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-person 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

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

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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, particularly 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 spectrum 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.

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throughout Pizarnik’s poetry and private writing). The poem sets up two distinct (and opposing) semantic and structural fields, which mainly function horizontally; 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 grammar: 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 negative 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 positive by no means unequivocally connote a confident, or life-affirming subjectivity, 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, posthumously 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, amniotic) ‘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).

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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 sexualized 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 selfdeprecating 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 prescient ability to ‘head off at the pass’ later detractors, who would disparage the fixity and limited repertoire of her imagery, is truly remarkable. She acknowledges this frozen (‘dehydrated’) quality in her poems, linking it to her alreadyestablished 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).

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insecurity about being able to undertake the grand(iose) aesthetic gesture. The binary gender dynamic, wherein the small and modest (feminine) mode is cultivated 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 ontological 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 purposes 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 predominates, the diaries include instances of concrete images which signify in this negative 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 monstruo 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 repugnante 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)’

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(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 perceived 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 strategy with which to negotiate her fear of/attraction toward lesbianism) overlaps intratextually with a number of poems, and leads us directly into the consideration 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 permanently 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, particularly – though not exclusively – in moments of being drawn to and then disavowing 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, transformative 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.

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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 spectrum 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 soledad. (Diarios, p. 397)

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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 sangrienta’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 forward (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 possibility 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 damage 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 taking 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.

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the non-literal sense, Pizarnik prized – as had the Surrealists before her. In contrast to this state of alterity are the moments before the chalkboard, where she feels wholeness (self-gathering). However, although she recognizes the self-affirming 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 estremecimientos’ (again, the representation of the woman’s lesbian desire is suppressed; we must infer it by contrast to the speaker’s growing horror). The inappropriateness 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 holding 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 reaction – 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.

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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/vulnerability, ‘extranjería’, Jewishness, exile, and so on) is well known. Here the wound is associated with the presence of a vampiric ‘beast’ inside her bloodstream: having 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 eponymous 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, dispassionate, 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?

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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 respirar’, 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 cottage, forest and children reference the miniaturizing, infantilizing fairytale quality we have seen at the negative end of the spectrum. The image of the cottage, in particular, also serves as a visual and metaphoric space of (comforting) containment for a speaking subject who represents herself, increasingly, as fractured. 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, colloquiallyinflected phrase – nothing more quintessentially Argentine than the expression ‘qué sé yo’, in spite of herself – links the desired silence/cottage to the necessary (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 contemplation of a framed scene of beauty and pleasure; it appears to be a painting depicting 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 terrify, 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)

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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), concrete 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 movement 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 naufragio 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 imagery (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

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exorcismo, inteligible o no, y la detenida, asfixiante, esteticista que consiste en un pequeño poema mil veces corregido . . . Mi forma auténtica es el automatismo 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)

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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’ followed by the complete version of her only play, Los perturbados entre lilas. The late texts, published posthumously, were often ignored or all but dismissed 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 eliminates ‘la parte cómica, soez, pornográfica, como si eso fuera inferior’.2 My contention 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

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tionship to Jewishness and look at the presence (or absence) of a Jewish dimension 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: echoing 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 impenetrability 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 convincing or coherent sense in what is being said. The text’s resistance to any interpretation 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 analytical 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 excellent 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).

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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 interesting 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 language is full of sexual and lavatorial innuendo, such as in the neologism ‘articuloncio’, the absurdly phrased ‘le clavé muy hondo mi culo azul’, the onomatopoeic wordplay ‘¿titíla, tía Atila?’, and hundreds more examples. Her punning pyrotechnics 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, conflating 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).

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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 difficulties 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 mundial. 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 problem, 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 distortions 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).

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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 aristocracy 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 (henceforth 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, mocking 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 fragmented 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.

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always linked to the baffling dialogues of the main body of the play, thereby underlining and enacting the theme of fragmentation and lack of communication. No stable interpretation is possible, or even desirable. The play’s rebellion against realist aesthetics or anything approximating the logic of causality lashes out with a relentlessly 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 metaphysical theatre, the use of violent physical images to crush and hypnotize the sensibility 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 movement 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 liberal 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 predominantly 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.

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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 conflates (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 layers of association: Freud’s seminal discussion of childhood sexuality is also indirectly 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 figures 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 gender 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 interrupts 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’

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(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 collision between two different codes or systems’.14 This collision, he argues, is artistically 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 nursery 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 triciclos 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 tastelessness 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 péndulo’; ‘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 adding an element of perversion: ‘Lo de que fifa es, por ahora, una hipótesis de trabajo. 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 nonsense humour of these works and the morbid, corrosive laughter in Perturbados will have become apparent from what has been said so far.16 14 15

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Dell, 1967), pp. 35–40. 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.

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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 reference to what is presumably a drawing by Goya, whose ‘cinturón para castidad para labios’ cleverly links sexual with verbal (political?) repression in a description 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 indirectly 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 disruption, 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 grieving 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 transgressiveness. (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.

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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 en ville, de province en province, de royaume en royaume, pour chercher d’illustres 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 de m’amuser à ce menu fatras de maladies ordinaires, à ces bagatelles de rhumatismes et de fluxions, à ces fièvrottes, à ces vapeurs, et à ces migraines . . . Je veux de maladies d’importance, de bonnes fièvres pouprées, de bonnes pestes, des bonnes hydropisies formées, de bonnes pleurisies, avec des inflammations de poitrine pouprées:

Yo voy de ciudad en ciudad y de provincia en provincia para encontrar enfermos dignos de ocuparme.

Desdeño entretenerme con enfermedades ordinarias, tales como reumatismo, prurito anal, dolores de cabeza y estreñimiento.

c’est là que je me plaie, c’est là que je triomphe; et je voudrais, monsieur, . . . que vous fussiez abandoné de tous les médecins, désespéré, à l’agonie, pour vous montrer l’excellence de mes remèdes . . .

Lo que yo quiero son enfermedades de importancia, buenas calenturas con delirio, satiriosis, fulgor ulterino, hidropesía, priapismo, cabecitas de alfiler, talidomídicos, centauros, talon de Aquiles, Monte de Venus, Chacra de júpiter, Estancia de Atenea; en fin, en eso es donde yo gozo, en eso es donde yo triunfo. Desearía, señora, que estuviese Vd. abandonada de todos los médicos, desahuciada, en la agonía, para mostrar a Vd. la excelencia de mis remedios.

Je vous suis obligé, monsieur, des bontés que vous avez pour moi.

Le agradezco, caballero, las bondades que tiene para mí.

Donnez-moi votre pouls. Allons donc, . . . Qui est votre médecin?

Déme el pulso. Vamos, lo hallo natural. 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.

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(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 marriage, 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 crescendo 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 inflammation in women), and changing tack again, almost imperceptibly slips in the sickest 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, crooning ‘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).

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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 occupies 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 allusive 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 writers of erotica, and to many others whose names are exploited for the playful sexual potential of their sound. Heraclitus becomes ‘heraclítoris’, in ‘En alabama 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’, ‘pajericultos 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 association: ‘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.

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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 transposed 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 inventive. For instance, his play Pygmalion (1913) is lavatorially and sonically distorted 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 nonsense: 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 explanation 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 propagator 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 erudite language the two very different usages of this ‘technical’ term: ‘Estas

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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 unsayable, 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 happily 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 clearest 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 association 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.

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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 attitude 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-Holocaust 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 bisabuelo? (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’; elsewhere 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 letter 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

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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: ‘desconocida 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 metaphor 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 important to weigh Pizarnik’s lamentations of ‘not belonging’ against her strong attraction 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 bilingual 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 doubtful ‘certainties’. Hence, she felt the need to create a purer, more authentic expression, 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.

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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 lluvia’, alludes obliquely to the chanting at a Jewish burial, and ends with a quotation 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; however, 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 ‘stiffnecked 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

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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 discusses the many points of contact between them, and makes important observations 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.

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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 general 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 penetrating essays on humour in Cortázar, Borges and Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo and Michaux. While Kafka figures a few times in La bucanera, most prominently 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 multicultural and multilingual references which permeate La bucanera seems particularly 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 pornographic 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 beginning, in a mock-index which lists the titles of some pseudo ‘prosas’, each accompanied 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 allusion 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 accompanies the term also in English). The ‘idishe Mame’ is a not improbable reference 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

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mother would be her ‘author’, or creator, and Pizarnik would be referring to herself 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 concepts 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 LévyStrauss 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.

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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’ people, 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 mispronunciation 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 LevyStrauss’ 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 intimacy 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 Russiansounding 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.

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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 sensitivity 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 controversial aspect of Pizarnik’s sense of Jewishness to the overall picture.

Bibliography Aira, César, Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 1998) Artaud, Antonin, The Theatre and its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958) Bajarlía, Juan Jacobo, Alejandra Pizarnik: anatomía de un recuerdo (Buenos Aires: Almagesto, 1998) Bataille, Georges, 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) Beckett, Samuel, Endgame (London: Faber & Faber, 1958) Borinsky, Alicia, ‘Memoria del vacío: una nota personal en torno a la escritura y las raíces judías’, in Revista Iberoamericana, 66:191 (2000), 409–12

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Breton, André, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) Fishburn, Evelyn, ‘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 Freud, Sigmund, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Harmondsworth: Penguin Freud Library, 1991), vol. 6. Gay, Peter, Freud: A Life for our Time (London: Dent, 1988) Glendinning, Nigel, Goya: la década de ‘Los caprichos’. Retratos 1792–1804 (Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Francisco, 1992) Goldberg, Florinda, Alejandra Pizarnik: ‘Este espacio que somos’ (Gaithersburg, Maryland: Hispamérica, 1994) Kaiser-Lenoir, Eva Claudia, ‘La particularidad de lo cómico en el grotesco criollo’, Latin American Theatre Review, 12:1 (1978), 21–32 Koestler, Arthur, The Act of Creation (New York: Dell, 1967) Lewin, Boleslao, Como fue la inmigración judía a la argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Plus Ultra, 1971) Mackintosh, Fiona J., Childhood in the Works of Silvina Ocampo and Alejandra Pizarnik (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2003) Minelli, María Alejandra, ‘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]; http://www.proceedings.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=msc000000 0012002000300038&lng=en&nrm=iso Moix, Ana María, ‘Prosa de una belleza mágica’, Babelia, 6 April 2002, p. 10 Molière, Le Malade imaginaire (Paris: Classiques Larousse, 1933) Molloy, Sylvia, ‘Memoria de una juventud en Olivos’, in Suplemento Clarín, 26 July 2003; http://www.clarin.com/suplementos/cultura/2003/07/26/index.html Negroni, María, El testigo lúcido: la obra de sombra de Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2003) O’Neill, Patrick, The Comedy of Entropy: Humour, Narrative, Reading (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990) Pellettieri, Osvaldo, Una historia interrumpida: teatro argentino moderno (1949– 1976) (Buenos Aires: Galerna, 1997) 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) Pirandello, Luigi, L’umorismo: Saggio (Lanciano: Carabba, 1908) Pizarnik, Alejandra, Poesía completa y prosa selecta, ed. Cristina Piña (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1994) Rodríguez Francia, Ana María, La disolución en la obra de Alejandra Pizarnik: ensombrecimiento de la existencia y ocultamiento del ser (Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2003) Scobie, James R., Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb, 1870–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974) Senkman, Leonardo, ‘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 Talmud, http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/t04/taa06.htm

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Telaak, Anastasia, Körper, Sprache, Tradition: jüdische Topographien im Werk zeitgenössischer Autorinnen und Autoren aus Argentinien (Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2003) Yriart, Martín F., ‘César Aira o la estética anarquista de la literatura’, http://www. 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 sangrienta, which, contrary to what is stated in the recently published Prosa completa, 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 history therein narrated. What we have here is effectively the second most celebrated and oddly absolved case of plagiarism in Argentinian literature after the works of Borges’s Pierre Menard. But it is perhaps this unconventional gestation, 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).

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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 WereWolves (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] existence, there is not the slightest doubt that he would have felt the fiercest exaltation; [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 sinister 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 BaringGould, 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.

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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 introduced thus: ‘Sentada en su trono, la condesa mira torturar y oye gritar’ (Prosa, pp. 282–3). Penrose dramatizes: ‘Erzsébet lowered her eyes . . . above the bracelets, 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 narrative’s sustained awe for the ‘belleza convulsiva’ (Prosa, p. 282) of the eponymous ‘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 disjunction 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 destruction 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 masochistic 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).

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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 simply do not communicate: they repel each other both structurally and philosophically. His intricate cleaving of the sadomasochistic composite offers a useful analytical scalpel with which to dissect Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta. 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 affiliation 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 victims 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 negation: ‘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).

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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 punctuated 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 generally 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 impotence, that is, of Lacanian specularity;14 others, in the context of the text’s seeming 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.

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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, hubiese sido, también, el Minotauro; matarlo, entonces, habría exigido matarse’ (Prosa, p. 290). The pleasure of apathy, in which the ego and the other are simultaneously abolished, is a pleasure which breaks away from the act of destruction itself; as Klossowski states, in this dissociation ‘the Sadean conscience reproduces 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 repetitive 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 repetitive description of torture, violence and eroticism – to the extent that the tale–essay contains passages such as this, less than half-way through: ‘Resumo: el castillo medieval; la sala de torturas; las tiernas muchachas; las viejas y horrendas 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 regarding the Countess’s activities obliged the Hungarian palatine, Thurzó, to investigate; 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 execution), 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.’

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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 narrative’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 principle, ‘the Good’, then lawful behaviour is ‘the best’ in that it brings us into closest 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 infinitely 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 selfgrounded; 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 sixteenthcentury 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).

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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 shackled 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 experiences 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) community – it is the excessive manifestation or spectacle of punishment which produces the transcendence of the law.20 However, in this case, when the foreign 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 dilapidated apparatus then malfunctions, so instead of achieving death through corporeal enlightenment, the officer suffers the indignity of a summary crucifixion 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 commandant, 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.

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story has been read as an allegory of post-colonialism;21 as a reflection of the collapse 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 condemnation 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 prisoner, 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 individuals and components of the social/judicial machine. Kafka’s immanent law remains unspecified, it only makes itself known in the characters’ desire for (transcendent) 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 superego 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 PostColonial 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.

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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 constitutes the power of thought in the superego. Freud maintains that the desexualization 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 creation 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 nefariously erotic: a machine which stiffens and protractedly penetrates the criminal’s body in an ‘unmistakable travesty of copulation’ in order to offer orgasmic illumination.24 Similarly, Báthory is reduced by Pizarnik to a superego who exercises 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).

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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 expelling 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 progressively 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 sovereignty of ‘the Good’ and replaces it with a law of inverted Platonism: a law identified with the (impersonal) primary nature of absolute negation, which is in every way opposed to the (personal/egotistical) demands and the rules of secondary 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 ironically tortuous false laws or ideals of secondary nature – love, charity, compassion – 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 – perhaps 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

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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 celebrated 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 commitment 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 wanting 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 unfolding 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 contemplation 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 similarly, 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.

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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 macabre 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 repetition 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 disavowal of the preceding celebration of the Countess’s cold and unremitting demonstration 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 pronounces 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 tearing 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 vindicate 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.

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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 sovereignty of absolute negation.

Bibliography Adelman, Gary, ‘Fearful Symmetry: Beckett’s The Lost Ones’, Journal of Modern Literature, 26:2 (2002–3), 165–70 Baldick, Chris, ed., The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) Baring-Gould, Sabine, The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of Terrible Superstition (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1865) Bataille, Georges, The History of Eroticism, in The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Urzone Books, 1988), II and III ——, Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988) ——, The Tears of Eros (1961), trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1989) Baudrillard, Jean, The Intelligence of Evil or The Lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005) Bersani, Leo, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (London: Marion Boyars, 1978) Boa, Elizabeth, Kafka: Gender, Class, Race in the Letters and Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) Carter, Angela, ‘The Lady of the House of Love’ (1979), in The Bloody Chamber (London: Vintage, 1995), pp. 93–108 Chávez Silverman, Suzanne, ‘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 Codrescu, Andrei, The Blood Countess (London: Quartet Books, 1996) Corngold, Stanley, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988)

32 Stanley Corngold, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 245.

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Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone, 1999), pp. 15–138 ——, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (London: Athlone, 1990) Depetris, Carolina, Aporética de la muerte: estudio crítico sobre Alejandra Pizarnik (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2004) Fitts, Alexandra, ‘Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta and the Lure of the Absolute’, Letras Femeninas, XXIV, 1:2 (1998), 23–35 Foster, David William, ‘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) Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991) Freud, Sigmund, 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 ——, ‘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 García-Serrano, María Victoria, ‘Perversión y lesbianismo en “Acerca de la condesa sangrienta” de Alejandra Pizarnik’, Torre de Papel, 2 (1994), 5–17 Gelder, Ken, Reading the Vampire (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) Graziano, Frank, Alejandra Pizarnik: A Profile (Durango, CO: Logbridge-Rhodes, 1987) Haydu, Susana H., Alejandra Pizarnik: evolución de un lenguaje poético (Washington: Interamer, 1996) Hernández, Ana María, ‘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 Holland, Nancy J., ‘What Deleuze Has to Say to Battered Women’, Philosophy and Literature, 17:1 (1993), 16–25 Kafka, Franz, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1913, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph Kresh (London: Secker & Warburg, 1948) ——, ‘In the Penal Colony’, in Franz Kafka, Stories 1904–1924, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Abacus, 1995), pp. 147–78 Klossowski, Pierre, ‘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 Koelb, Clayton, ‘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 Leatherdale, Clive, The Origins of Dracula: The Background to Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece (Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex: Desert Island Books, 1998) Macartney, C. A., Hungary: A Short History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1962)

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MacHardy, Karin J., ‘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 Mateo del Pino, Ángeles, ‘El territorio de la memoria: mujeres malditas, La condesa sangrienta de Alejandra Pizarnik’, Rassegna Iberistica, 71 (2001), 15–31 Molloy, Sylvia, ‘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 Murdoch, Iris, ‘The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts’, in Virtue Ethics, ed. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 99–117 Negroni, María, El testigo lúcido: la obra de sombra de Alejandra Pizarnik (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2003) Nicholson, Melanie, Evil, Madness, and the Occult in Argentine Poetry (Florida: University Press of Florida, 2002) Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘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) Pan, David, ‘Kafka as Populist: Re-reading ‘In the Penal Colony’, Telos, 101 (1994), 3–40 Penrose, Valentine, The Bloody Countess, trans. Alexander Trocchi (London: Calder and Boyars, 1970) Périsset, Maurice, La Comtesse de sang (Paris: Éditions Pygmalion/Gérard Watelet, 1975) Piña, Cristina, ‘La palabra obscena’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 5 (1990), 17–38 ——, Poesía y experiencia del límite: leer a Alejandra Pizarnik (Buenos Aires: Botella al Mar, 1999) Piper, Karen, ‘The Language of the Machine: A Post-Colonial Reading of Kafka’, Journal of the Kafka Society of America, 20:1–2 (1996), 42–54 Pizarnik, Alejandra, Extracción de la piedra de locura (1968), in Poesía completa, ed. Ana Becciú (Barcelona: Lumen, 2003), pp. 213–58 ——, ‘La libertad absoluta y el horror’, Diálogos, 1:5 (1965), 46–51 Ronay, Gabriel, The Truth About Dracula (New York: Stein and Day, 1970) Sasdy, Peter, dir. Countess Dracula, Rank Organization (Hammer Productions), 1971 Scarafia, Silvia, 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 Seabra Ferreira, M. A., ‘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 Sierra, Marta, ‘De caníbales, bucaneros y polígrafas: escritura, obscenidad y mutilación en Alejandra Pizarnik’, Latin American Literary Review, 33:66 (2005), 77–94 Sinor, Denis, History of Hungary (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959) Thorne, Tony, Countess Dracula: The Life and Times of the Blood Countess, Elisabeth Báthory (London: Bloomsbury, 1997)

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Twitchell, James B., The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981) Wisker, Gina, ‘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

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 ‘delatora 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 authentic 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 situating Alejandra Pizarnik in the ‘estela’ of surrealism. Surrealism for him was primarily ‘un sistema de lecturas, el más rico y productivo de los tiempos modernos’, 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 automatic 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

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explanations for this. The most important explanation emerges from Aira’s notion of ‘estela’. Alejandra Pizarnik arrived in Paris well after surrealism’s heyday, 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 otherwise 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 reinterpretation 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 fourteen 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.

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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 anthology 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 published 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.

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(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 identify 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 critical 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’ bedazzlement: ‘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 consequence, 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.

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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 ‘ficción’. 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 second 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).

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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 rejection 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 overlapped, 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 existence.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 justicia’ (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.

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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 idiosyncratic 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 encircling a wood that you cannot enter, ‘un lugar vedado’ (Prosa, p. 267). Nadja herself 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 deslumbramiento 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.

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remains Alejandra Pizarnik. In her diary she notes her debt to Breton as ‘inenarrable’ 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 student 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 precaution, 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 identifies with him and with this tradition of metaphysical humour, telling her readers, 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 soulsickness. He has penned ‘la mejor poesía de nuestro siglo’, like Rimbaud or Lautréamont (surrealism’s great models). She reckons that his work is an exorcism, 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 maravilloso, 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 madness (and especially the work and life of Antonin Artaud). Her fears about 20 21

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

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madness tie in with psychoanalysis and her different therapists, ending with the eminent Enrique Pichon Rivière, himself a researcher into Isidore Ducasse, otherwise 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 surrealist heritage, since Bosch had become by the 1960s, in Sarane Alexandrian’s words, ‘the most important pre-surrealist visionary’, on whose example the surrealists ‘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 impossible; 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.

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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 transformation, 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 epigraph, as she did with Breton, and focuses on herself. Her task is now to exorcise, 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.

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‘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 imagination); 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 darkness. 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 traducirse 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 surrealist 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.

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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 optimistically: ‘si dos se besan/ el mundo cambia’).28 But Pizarnik denied this revolutionary 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 ausencia’ (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 minute 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-analysis, her reading of key surrealist writers like Rimbaud and Michaux, had eliminated the traditional lyrical strengths of letting the words sing. Pizarnik’s posthumous work, in its punning and jokes and obscenities, would simply continue 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, ‘posséder 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 further wound that when all the literary work is removed from her mind, what 28 29

Octavio Paz, Poemas (1935–1975) (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1979), p. 271. 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.

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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)

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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 literary works, whether classic, contemporary, canonical or marginal. Many ‘informal’ 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 cuadernos 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).

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ha dejado y que no han sido aún reunidos ni citados en su totalidad. (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 published 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 comments 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 correspondences 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 involvement 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 relationship 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.

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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 extraordinary 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 prodigioso – para hacer una reseña se enfrascaba días y días con un libro hasta extraerle 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 (including the inevitable disruption to her own writing).9 They also reveal her sometimes 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.

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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 contradictory 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:

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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 comprehensively through such ‘external’ informal commentary on the reviewing process, 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 assertions 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.

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¿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 metalinguistic 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 outside 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 argentino’ (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 acknowledges 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 dismisses 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 sentimientos más fáciles. (Prosa, p. 229)

10

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

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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 ambivalence 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 ‘perfectamente 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 importante 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 quiere decir lo dice el poema,’ and she feels the lack of any kind of ‘halo . . ., subyacencia’ (p. 220). For her, poetry must communicate suggestively and allusively beyond the direct referential meanings of the words; poetry should always gesture 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 deliberately 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.

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opposition, perhaps ironic, between poets who are either ‘inspirados o extremadamente 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 mentions 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 critical 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 detachment, 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 paragraph praises the poem ‘Trabajo central’, which ‘poetiza [. . .] un instante privilegiado’ (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.

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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 entiendes, / 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 cronopios 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 compterendu 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.

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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 perceived 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.

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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 assessment, ‘[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 confeccionar 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 22 23

Mackintosh, Childhood, p. 129. Aníbal Ford, ‘Los últimos cuentos de Cortázar’, Mundo Nuevo, 5 (1966), 81–4. 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.

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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 calculador. (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 continues with her discrepancies and her ironic yet serious tone: ‘Julio C. hace referencia 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 rereading 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 juegos 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

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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 abandonar 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 writings 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 modern 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.

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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 ‘anteriores 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, symbolized 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 innocent, leads Paz to construct through his poetry a ‘puente entre los temibles contrarios’ (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 problematic 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.

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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 language 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 ultimately 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 – following Paz – as ‘una tradición de la ruptura que es, precisamente, la tradición de nuestra 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 proportion 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 religious and revelatory power of poetry, a certain erotic mysticism and his fascinating 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 critical 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

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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 comment 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 centrales 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 movimiento de total entrega al poema y, simultáneamente, de reflexión acerca de lo expresado’ (p. 244). Once again she responds positively to writing which combines the creative with a process of reflection on that creation. In drawing attention 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 characterized 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 contemporáneos 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.

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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 meaning, 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 theatrical space, characterized by two clearly delimited sub-spaces, that of the person 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 maintains 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 question, 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 33

Goldberg, Alejandra Pizarnik, p. 16. Goldberg, ‘Los espacios peligrosos’, pp. 78–9; Goldberg, ‘Un cuento olvidado’.

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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 marginales 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]

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‘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 [republished 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 examination 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 pattern 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 internal–external dialectic provides a strong interpretive strategy. The occasional sterility 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.

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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 “espacio 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.].

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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 associate 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 externally 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 building blocks for creating her own literary edifice. Pizarnik’s diaries clearly demonstrate 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 oneself. 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 epístolas 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 horror 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)

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Mallarmé: ‘Para Mallarmé . . . el caso del poeta en una sociedad que no le permite 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 powers 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, quoting Federico Bleifarben (Princeton, box 4, folder 5, p. 90). She plans tasks such as reading certain authors or certain topics (for example, ancient Mexican civilization), and also devotes notebooks and index cards to her linguistic development (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 indicating 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.].

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deslumbrar, turbar, encantar’; ‘atraer: absorber, aspirar, hechizar, arrebatar, seducir, perturbar’ (Princeton, box 8, folder 13).8 These words become recognizable building blocks of Pizarnik’s poems. The autodidacticism coupled with a continual sense of inadequacy is reiterated in the diaries; at the same time, in both poetry and notes, Pizarnik repeatedly expresses (or copies out quotations which express) a sense of dislocation, orphanhood, ‘extranjería’ and not-belonging, which has been attributed by critics 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 needing 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 9

These and all subsequent underlinings are the author’s own, unless otherwise indicated. 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

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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 dwellingplaces. 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 actually become solid objects. In the same way that she asks, rhetorically and desperately, ‘si digo pan, ¿comeré?’ (Poesía, p. 399), she writes despairingly – though as if contradicting it through erasure – ‘escribo palabras/ quisiera escribir piedras’ (Princeton, box 5, folder 4; Pizarnik’s crossing-out). Pizarnik thus repeatedly 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 unsuccessful 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.

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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 (traditionally 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 trasciende, 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 interiority, 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 tableau, 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 building 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 carried 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).

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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 castles, 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 threatening, and in recognition of the ephemeral nature of the childhood paradise. There is frequently a more positive charge on dwelling-places associated with childhood, 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 becoming 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 unexpected 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: ‘coleccionar 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 example, 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 sardonically 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 13

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

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Humour is not absent from this idea of language as clothing; since – traditionally – the diary is a space for more intimate, confessional revelations, Pizarnik amusingly refers to her diary as undergarments: ‘En esa época [1955] me levantaba 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 satirized; 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 – borrowing 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 constructing 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 cuadernillos indigestos que vagan junto a los prostitutos del arte a comprar una aprobación’ (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

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separates, to continue the clothing metaphor?) of two quotations she copied out previously into her notebooks and PV: triste músico entona un aire nuevo para hacer algo nuevo para ver algo nuevo

Poesía oriental; copied out Princeton, box 4, folder 9, p. 68) ,, (Lichtenberg; copied out box 4, folder 9, p. 62; PV) ,,

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).

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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 chapters 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 (seductively ever-present in Pizarnik) is experienced as a sensation of lack of distinction 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 argentino. ¿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 quisiera 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 anxiety 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

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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, enclosing 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 cerrado. 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.

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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 fundamental’, 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 diaries 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 nightmarish 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 language 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.

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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 amurallada. (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 foundation stone on which the whole poetic edifice is constructed is one which contains 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 garganta. 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 amontonados 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

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otra cosa que la estrecha prisión de su jaula, pero albergaba sin embargo el sentimiento 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 elements 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 esperan la forma vehemente de tu voz. Más allá, está el espesor; más acá, la transparencia. 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 impaciente 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 mismos 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 metamorphoses 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).

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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, confessing 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 unattributed 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-toexternal 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

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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 llamamiento. (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 obstacles, 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, profundo, 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 healing the resultant wound (Poesía, p. 415). Indeed, the whole textual body has become what María Negroni characterizes, paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, as

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‘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 writings 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 favourite 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 sangrienta’, 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 transit? 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).

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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).

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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 Hispanoamericanos: 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 published 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.

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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 explorations 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 symbolic 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 positing 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.

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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 immigrants 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 alejandra’ 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 understanding 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.

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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 7

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

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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 identification 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 fragmentation, 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 exploration of one’s subjectivity.9 The brevity of these poems has been discussed by Cristina Piña; Pizarnik herself commented on this in 1968: ‘Cada día son más breves mis poemas: pequeños 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 unifying 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 written 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.

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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 subject, 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 followed by another question: ‘¿Solamente un reclamo de huérfana?’ which highlights the theme of orphanhood, very much present throughout Pizarnik’s works.13 12 13

Piña, Poesía y experiencia del límite, p. 112. 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.

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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, precisamente, 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 fundamental ‘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

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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 difficulty 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 version reads thus: ‘my body opened to the knowledge/ of my confused and diffused 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 translation 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 difference. 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

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mirror). It is interesting to note that at this stage Pizarnik needs to claim ownership of her name, challenging the irony posited by the phrase ‘nombre propio’ (proper noun, but literally meaning ‘own name’), since our own name is probably 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 subjectivity, 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.

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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, volverse 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 collection 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 adjective-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.

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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 personal 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 gendermarked: ‘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 considerable 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)

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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 typical 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 hendecasyllable 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 versification 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 hendecasyllable 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.

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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 chosen ‘the woman of’ for ‘la de los tormentos’. Something different happens with ‘en los cabellos de la solitaria’, since the prepositional phrase indicating possession 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

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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 ambiguities 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 collection 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

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

(Poesía, p. 172)

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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 subjectivities 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 possessive 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 indeterminacy 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 circunda 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-referentially, 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).

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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 language 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 version 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 desangrarme,/ 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 repetition 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 alliteration elsewhere. This sentence is immediately followed by ‘nido de hilos rígidos 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 phoneme /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 concluding 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.

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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 apparent, 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 sentence, making more changes on the syntactic level than the lexical. But undoubtedly, 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-syllable 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 subjectivity that her poetic language plays such discordant notes. It moves inexorably

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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 arising 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’, encompassing 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 theoretical implications are far-reaching. Indeed, shortly after the long-awaited publication 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 shortcomings 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.].

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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 information 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 publicarlas 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 unresolved theoretical issues and critical inconsistencies, which I propose to investigate 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 problem 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 reassuring’, 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

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power of linguistic performativity to sidestep existing laws from which, however, 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 relation to the Derrida quoted above, such an edition would still not solve the problem 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 juridicity’, 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 investigating 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).

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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 ultimately 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 consider – 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 aesthetic 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).

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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 collective 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 particular 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 authorize 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 literary 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 completa. Indeed, the question which gives rise to our disturbing sense of the out-ofplace-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

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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 últimos poemas published in 1982, which Becciú compiled with Olga Orozco; this was the first book to include previously unpublished material by Pizarnik, material 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 posthumously 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 publishing 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 volume 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 possible similarities between its textual fragments, and imaginatively creating others 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 considered as equivalent to the process of correction or revision at the level of individual 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 control 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.

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of whoever is responsible for posthumous publications, hence the ethical commitment 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 homogenized, and adding paratexts – go beyond questions of loyalty. They confer a different meaning on the book, a meaning which over-writes and is superimposed 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 responsibility 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, simultaneously, a book of ‘des(h)echos’ and of not-Pizarnik; ‘des(h)echos’ because it comprises 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 questions 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).

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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 previamente 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, apparently positive in themselves, when we go deeper into the matter once again present 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’:

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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 publishing 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 material. 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 forethought 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 poseídos 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 published 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 recopilación 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.

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the Poesía completa and to pages 91 and 165 of the Prosa completa – the editorial silence or contradictory information surrounding the circumstances of publication (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 completa; 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 póstumamente 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 different order of two identical groups? The second amendment has to do with the title given to Pizarnik’s only theatrical 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 posthumously 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

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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 presented to us in this edition under the titles of Poesía completa and Prosa completa 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 editor 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 compilación, 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’.

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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 publication – 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 subject, 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).

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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 established 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 publish 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, whatever 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

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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 living 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 consider 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 writing. 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 privileging 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’.

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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 valiosos 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 clarified. 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 (notwithstanding 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

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different texts. Beyond these issues, it has also been my intention to foreground the potency of Alejandra Pizarnik’s writing, which ends up overwhelming critics, 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 Barthes, Roland, ‘From Work to Text’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard 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)] Pizarnik, Alejandra [Flora Alejandra], La tierra más ajena (Buenos Aires: Botella al 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) Venti, Patricia, ‘Los diarios de Alejandra Pizarnik: censura y traición’, in Espéculo, 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 volume 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 perspective 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 Aira, César 5, 23 n.22, 44 n.17, 77–8, 79, 81, 83, 133 Alberti, Rafael 126 Aldana, Francisco de 116 Alexandrian, Sarane 85 Alfonsín, Raúl 156 and n.13 Andersen, Hans Christian 116–17 Apollinaire, Guillaume 160 Artaud, Antonin 1, 7, 10, 20–21, 41, 47, 78, 79, 81, 84, 91 n.2, 94, 107 Bajarlía, Juan Jacobo 51, 54 n.36, 85 n.22 Barnes, Djuna 116 Baron Supervielle, Silvia 154 n.11 Barrenechea, Ana María 39, 100 Barthes, Roland 6, 161 Bassnett, Susan 5 n.11 Bataille, Georges 18 n.14, 46 n.23, 61, 72, 79, 86 Báthory, Erzsébet 4, 15, 24–5, 27, 28–9 and n.29, 60–6 n.17, 68–73, 81, 112, 161 Batlle Planas, Juan 87 Baudelaire, Charles 1, 7, 81, 112, 120, 162 Baudrillard, Jean 60 Beauvoir, Simone de 82 Becciú, Ana 17, 60 n.3, 148, 149, 152–8, 161–62 Beckett, Samuel 17 n.13, 40, 44, 68 n.22, 119 Béguin, Albert 104 Beneyto, Antonio 93 n.9, 153, 159 Benjamin, Walter 126 Bergson, Henri 71 Bernárdez, Aurora 149, 158 n.14 Bible, the 43, 53 n.31 Bioy Casares, Adolfo 37, 54, 102 Blanchot, Maurice 110, 120, 121, 126, 148, 150–1, 153, 160–1 Bonnefoy, Yves 88, 107, 150–1, 158 n.16 Bordelois, Ivonne 7, 19, 23 n.23, 51, 77, 79, 91 n.2, 93 and n.8, 94, 98, 99, 150–2, 154

Borges, Jorge Luis 7, 26, 37, 49, 54, 60, 73, 78, 81, 83, 84, 102, 104 n.28, 112, 120, 159, 161 Borinsky, Alicia 5 n.10, 53–4 Bosch, Hieronymus 1, 79, 85–7, 89 Bosquet, Alain 104 Brecht, Bertolt 116 Breton, André 7, 8, 10, 26, 37 and n.4, 41, 78, 79, 80–4, 86, 87–8, 111, 112, 120 Breughel, Pieter the Elder 95, 97 Brod, Max 159 Buddha 47 Byron, Lord 118 Cadalso, José 92 n.4 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 42, 127 n.22 Calvino, Italo 82 Carrera, Arturo 158 n.14 Carroll, Lewis 42–3 Carter, Angela 61 Catelli, Nora 113 Caulfield, Carlota 93 n.9 Cernuda, Luis 95, 105, 106 Cervantes, Miguel de 114 Chagall, Marc 1, 52 Char, René 10, 115 Chávez Silverman, Susana 6, 8, 9, 21 n.17, 64 n.15, 115 n.10, 133 n.8 Claudel, Paul 112 Cobo Borda, Juan Gustavo 158 Coloma, Padre Luis 40 Corboz, André 124 Cortázar, Julio 1, 2, 7, 26, 27, 37, 43, 46 n.22, 54, 61, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 93 n.7, 99–103, 119, 120, 121 cummings, e.e. 91 n.2 Dadaism 44 Dalmaroni, Miguel 113 Darío, Rubén 5, 105, 121, 140 Daumal, René 81 Deleuze, Gilles 10, 60, 62–3, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72

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Depetris, Carolina 8, 71 n.25, 77 n.5 Derrida, Jacques 148–52, 160 Descartes, René 87 Di Giorgio, Marosa 41 n.12 Dickinson, Emily 128 n.24, 133 Dobry, Edgardo 77 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 161 Ducasse, Isidore see Lautréamont Duchamp, Marcel 44

Heine, Heinrich 54 Herrera, Ricardo 88 Hita, Arcipreste de 84 Hölderlin, Friedrich 104 Hugo, Victor 112 Huidobro, Vicente 118 Husserl, Edmund 131

Eliot, T.S. 1, 5 n.8, 80, 81, 84, 102, 112, 119 Eluard, Paul 91 n.2 Erasmus, Desiderius 47 Espina, Concha 48

Jarry, Alfred 40 Jensen, Wilhelm 123 Jesus Christ 70 Jitrik, Noé 101 Jouve, Pierre Jean 81 Joyce, James 126 Juan de la Cruz, San 3 n.4, 10, 126 Juana la Loca 121–22 Jung, Carl 111

Fernández, Macedonio 7 Fishburn, Evelyn 8, 15 n.6, 49 n.25, 103 n.25, 117 n.13 Fitts, Alexandra 71 n.25 Flaubert, Gustave 116 Ford, Aníbal 101 Foster, David William 68 n.23 Foucault, Michel 67, 148, 152, 160 Fourier, Charles 80 Freud, Sigmund 37, 42, 43, 48–9, 55, 62 n.9, 69, 71, 72 n.30, 126 Galtier, Lysandro 79 Garcés, J. 124 García-Serrano, María Victoria 63 n.12 Garcilaso de la Vega 91 n.2, 96 Garro, Elena 78 Gauthier, Xavière 82 Girri, Alberto 95, 96, 97, 99, 106, 107 Glass, Alain 82 God 47–8, 86 Goldberg, Florinda 7, 37, 51 n.28, 57, 80, 84 n.20, 104 n.30, 107, 110 n.1, 133 n.7 Golden Age 1, 3 Gombrowicz, Witold 81 Góngora, Luis de 3 n.4, 7, 10 Gorriti, Juana Manuela 47 Goya, Francisco de 1, 44 Graziano, Frank 71, 113 n.5, 158 n.14 grotesco criollo 41 Guilboa, Amir 116 Gundermann, Christian 124 Hardy, Thomas 142 Haydu, Susana 5 n.11, 71 n.25 Heaney, Seamus 144 n.19 Heidegger, Martin 104

Ionesco, Eugène 40

Kafka, Franz 1, 10, 52–54, 56, 60, 67–72, 150, 151, 159, 160 Kamenszain, Tamara 132 Kant, Immanuel 66, 70 Kavafis, Konstantin 123 Keats, John 16, 42, 118 King, John 97 Klee, Paul 1, 117 Klossowski, Pierre 63–64, 65 Kodama, María 159 Koestler, Arthur 43, 56 n.38 Koremblit, Bernardo Ezequiel 77 Kristal, Efraín 7 Kristeva, Julia 16–17, 131–2, 134 Lambert, Jean Clarence 78 Lautréamont, Comte de 84, 85, 93 n.7, 102, 105, 117, 121, 131, 144 Lebel, Robert 119 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 56 Lichtenberg, Georg Cristoph 7, 118, 119 Liscano, Juan 29 n.29, 79, 97 n.12 Lispector, Clarice 1 López Velarde, Ramón 105, 106 n.31 López, Arías 39 Mackintosh, Fiona J. 10, 22 n.21, 38 n.5, 43 n.16, 101 n.21, 136 n.13 MacLeish, Archibald 16 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 118 Mallarmé, Stéphane 7, 16, 40, 87, 112, 113, 131, 141, 148, 150, 151, 153, 159–60 Malraux, André 124

SUBJECT INDEX

Mandiargues, André Pieyre de 2, 78, 82, 94, 96, 107 Marx, Karl 87 Mateo del Pino, Ángeles 61 n.7 Michaux, Henri 7, 37, 54, 78, 79, 80, 84, 87, 88, 93, 95 Millán, Eduardo 79 Milosz, Oscar 81 Minotaur 15, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 65 Modernism 20, 114, 119 modernismo 5, 105 Moia, Martha I. 98–99, 136 Moix, Ana María 40, 111 n.3 Molière 44–46 Molina, Elsa 61 n.7 Molinari, Ricardo 96, 107 Molloy, Sylvia 8–9, 15 n.6, 19 n.15, 36, 64 n.15 Mondragón, Sergio 79 Mukarovsky, Jan 151–2 Murdoch, Iris 66 n.18 Murena, Héctor A. 96, 98–9, 107 Muschietti, Delfina 6, 118 Negroni, María 13–14, 16–17 and n.13, 44, 47 n.24, 71 n.25, 110 n.1, 119, 126–7, 151, 152 neobarroco/neobarroso 41 neogrotesco 41 Nerval, Gérard de 26, 120, 122 Nicholson, Melanie 72 n.31 Nietzsche, Friedrich 67 n.20 Nuño, Ana 148–50 Ocampo, Silvina 9 and n.23, 16–20, 31, 37, 38, 54, 103, 107 Oedipus 55, 131 Orozco, Olga 80, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158 Ostriker, Alicia 20 Ostrov, León 24 n.24 Parra, Jaime D. 139 n.15, 141 n.16 Paris 2, 7, 56, 77–82, 84, 85, 100, 103 n.26, 158 n.14 Paz, Octavio 2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16 n.8, 17, 20, 21–2, 26, 78, 79, 80, 81–2, 84, 88, 92, 94–5, 98, 103–7, 111, 113, 125, 153 Parker, Charlie 84 Pellegrini, Aldo 13 Pellettieri, Osvaldo 41 n.12 Penrose, Valentine 4, 17 n.13, 60–2, 63, 65, 72, 73, 81, 92, 119, 161 Pezzoni, Enrique 94, 103, 158 n.14

169

Picabia, Francis 44 Piglia, Ricardo 81 Piña, Cristina 3 n.5, 4 n.6, 6, 7, 8, 15 n.6, 16 n.11, 36, 42, 46, 52, 54, 57, 64, 77, 78, 122, 134, 135, 138 n.14, 141 n.17, 153 n.9, 154 n.11, 158 n.14 Pirandello, Luigi 39 Pichon Rivière, Enrique 85 Pessoa, Fernando 104, 105, 106 Pizarnik, Alejandra and visual art 1, 44, 85, 87, 89, 95, 117, 139 and Jewishness 1, 8, 50–7, 70, 114, 115 and sexuality 8–9, 13–20, 23–34, 38, 41–9, 64, 87, 88, 149 and madness 21 n.17, 84–7, 120 and plagiarism 60, 72, 84, 102, 119 and intertextuality 5–7, 16, 21, 27, 43–5, 47, 113, 154 and music 139 Pizarnik, Alejandra – Works ‘A tiempo y no’ 155 ‘A un poema acerca del agua, de Silvina Ocampo’ 16–19 ‘Abandonada en el alba. . .’ 158–9 ‘Alguien cae en su primera caída’ 104 ‘Amantes’ 18–19 ‘Anillos de ceniza’ 123 ‘Aproximaciones’ 114, 122, 130–1 Árbol de Diana 1, 2, 6, 18, 23, 28, 82, 103 n.26, 116, 117, 122, 130 n.1, 133–4, 135, 139–42, 145, 158 ‘Balada de la piedra que llora’ 133 ‘Caminos del espejo’ 3 ‘Cantora nocturna’ 127 ‘Casa de citas’ 127 ‘Casa de la mente’ 114 ‘Cenizas’ 2, 138 ‘Comunicaciones’ 158 Correspondencia 1, 9, 18 n.14, 19, 23 n.23, 29 n.29, 37, 38, 42–3, 51 n.29, 55, 56, 79, 80, 81, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97 n.12, 103, 150–1, 154 ‘Cuadro’ 141–2 ‘cuidado con las palabras. . .’ 121, 126 ‘[. . .] Del silencio’ 121, 131, 146 ‘Desconfianza’ 50 ‘Descripción’ 22, 23, 161, 162 ‘Desfundación’ 121 ‘Diana de Lesbos’ 9 Diarios 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 16 n.10, 18 n.14, 20, 21, 22 n.21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 33–4, 38, 50, 51–2, 53, 54, 60,

170

SUBJECT INDEX

80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 90, 92, 93 n.5, 94, 106, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 132, 133, 139, 148–9, 158, 161 n.17, 162 ‘Donde circunda lo ávido’ 144–5 ‘Duración’ 143 El deseo de la palabra 153, 157, 159 ‘El deseo de la palabra’ 122, 132, 134 ‘El despertar’ 24 n.24 ‘El entendimiento’ 144 ‘El escorial’ 27 ‘El hombre del antifaz azul’ 21 n.18 El infierno musical 3–4, 15, 28, 104, 130, 135, 159 ‘El martirio de beber. . .’ 159 ‘El ojo de la alegría’ 52 ‘El poeta y su poema’ 134 ‘El sueño de la muerte o el lugar de los cuerpos poéticos’ 3, 122, 125–6, 146 ‘En contra’ 123, 161, 162 ‘En esta noche, en este mundo’ 4, 105, 115 ‘En un lugar para huirse’ 145 ‘Endechas’ 121 ‘entrar entrando. . .’ 146 ‘Escrito cuando sombra’ 144 Extracción de la piedra de locura 2–3, 15, 28, 31, 71, 77, 78, 82, 85, 89, 134, 135, 146 ‘Extracción de la piedra de locura’ 3, 31–3, 77, 84–9, 122, 130, 134–5, 137 ‘Fragmentos para dominar el silencio’ 3, 124 ‘Fronteras inútiles’ 2 ‘Ha muerto la que. . .’ 159 ‘Harta del principio femenino’ 9 ‘Hija del viento’ 138 ‘Inolvidada: las cosas. . .’ 159 ‘Jardín o tiempo’ 155–6 La bucanera de Pernambuco o Hilda la polígrafa 4, 5, 8, 10, 15, 29, 37, 47–9, 54–5, 91, 102, 151, 152, 156, 157 La condesa sangrienta 4, 10, 14, 15, 17 n.13, 24, 28–9, 30, 31, 60–73, 80 n.10, 91, 92, 127, 161 ‘La de los ojos abiertos’ 137 ‘La enamorada’ 137–8 ‘La luz caída de la noche’ 2 ‘La máscara y el poema’ 117 ‘La mesa verde’ 105

‘La noche’ 2 ‘La oscura’ 142 ‘La palabra del deseo’ 122 La tierra más ajena 1, 23 n.22, 130, 159 La última inocencia 2, 132, 135–6, 159 ‘La última inocencia’ 2, 5 ‘La única herida’ 31 ‘La verdad del bosque’ 117 Las aventuras perdidas 2, 135, 136, 138, 145 ‘Linterna sorda’ 3, 127 ‘L’obscurité des eaux’ 130 ‘Los muertos y la lluvia’ 50, 52 ‘Los pequeños cantos’ 118, 141 Los perturbados entre lilas 4 n.6, 8, 15, 36, 40, 41–6, 117 n.13, 118, 119, 156–7 see also ‘Los poseídos entre lilas’ ‘Los poseídos entre lilas’ 4 n.6, 17 n.13, 40 and n.8, 151, 156–7 see also Los perturbados entre lilas Los trabajos y las noches 2, 18, 23 n.22, 130 n.1, 135, 139, 142–5, 158 ‘Los trabajos y las noches’ 2, 18 ‘Lucha feroz entre. . .’ 159 ‘Mendiga voz’ 158 ‘Mi pueblo de ángeles. . .’ 159 ‘Moradas’ 158 ‘Mucho más allá’ 50, 145 ‘Niña entre azucenas’124 ‘no, la verdad no es la música’ 104 ‘Noche compartida en el recuerdo de una huida’ 117, 122 ‘Noche’ 2, 136 ‘Ojos primitivos’ 51, 127 ‘Origen’ 136, 137 ‘Piedra fundamental’ 3, 51, 115–16, 123 ‘Poema para el padre’ 52 ‘Poema para Emily Dickinson’ 133 Poesía completa 6, 16, 19, 118 n.14, 130, 148–63 Prosa completa 6, 36, 40 n.8, 52, 60, 79, 84, 91, 92, 96, 103 n.27, 111 n.3, 148–63 ‘Puerto adelante’ 1, 2 ‘¿Quién es yo?’ 114, 135 ‘Recuerdos de la pequeña casa del canto’ 114 ‘Relectura de Nadja de André Breton’ 82–4 ‘Reloj’ 28

SUBJECT INDEX

‘Revelaciones’ 133 ‘Sala de psicopatología’ 52, 126 ‘Salvación’ 136 ‘Sentido de su ausencia’ 143 ‘Silencios’ 158 ‘Sobre un poema de Rubén Darío’ 140 ‘Solamente las noches’ 147 ‘Sólo un nombre’ 2, 50, 104, 132–3, 136, 138 ‘Sous la nuit’ 146 ‘Textos de sombra’ 162 Textos de sombra y últimos poemas 104, 153–8 ‘Tu voz’ 143 ‘Un boleto objetivo’ 1 ‘Una traición mística’ 123, 125 ‘Vagar en lo opaco’ 2 ‘Violario’ 30–1 ‘Yo soy’ 2 Zona prohibida 153, 158–9 Pizarnik de Nessis, Myriam 149, 150 Plath, Sylvia 127 n.20 Plato 66, 70, 71 Poe, Edgar Allan 83 poètes maudits 1, 5, 21, 51 Porchia, Antonio 7 Porrúa, Francisco 99, 100 n.17 Posso, Karl 10, 15 n.6, 80 n.10, 81 n.14 Pound, Ezra 119, 144 Princeton 3 n.4, 4, 5, 6 and n.12, 7 n.16, 9 and n.23–24, 52, 53 n.33, 79, 81 n.15, 110–28, 141 n.17, 149, 158 Proust, Marcel 54, 120 Quevedo, Francisco de 3 n.4, 7, 10, 110, 112, 116, 125 Quincey, Thomas de 119 Quinquela Martín, Benito 1 Quixote, Don 84, 89 Redon, Odilon 1 Rich, Adrienne 13 Rimbaud, Arthur 1, 42, 78, 81, 83, 84, 86, 88–9, 112, 118, 120, 134 Rodríguez-Francia, Ana María 45 n.21, 82 n.18, 141 n.18 Rossi, Cecilia 9 Roth, Philip 54 Rulfo, Juan 26 Running, Thorpe 4, 81 Rodríguez-Monegal, Emir 79, 101 Romanticism 17, 21, 78 n.5, 105, 111 Ruysbroeck, Jan van 85–6 Rosenbaum, Alfredo 116

171

Saavedra, Carlos Castro 79 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 63 Sade, Marquis de 61, 63, 64, 65, 68, 70–2, 81 Sánchez Robayna, Andrés 79 Sand, George 118 Sartre, Jean-Paul 78, 81 Sayers, Dorothy L. 81 Scarafia, Silvia 61 n.7 Schehadé, Georges 7, 125 Schor, Naomi 25, 115 n.10 Schubert, Franz 52 Schulz, Bruno 80 Schulze, Alfred Otto Wolfgang see Wols Scobie, James R. 51 n.27 Seabra Ferreira, M. A. 61 n.6 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 79, 91 n.1, 106, 107 Senkman, Leonardo 8 n.21, 51, 57 Sergio, Jorge 92 Shaw, George Bernard 48 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 42, 118 Shultz de Mantovani, Frida 56 Sierra, Marta 71 n.25 Singer, Ester 82 Soncini, Anna 111 n.2 Starobinski, Jean 119, 127 Stevens, Wallace 114 Storni, Alfonsina 5 Stutman, Osías 39, 55, 57, 150–1, 152 Surrealism 1, 5, 7, 10, 20, 21, 30, 36, 38, 40 and n.9, 44, 77–82, 84–5, 87–9, 98 n.13, 102, 111, 125, 127 Symbolists 20 Talmud, the 52 and n.30, 54, 115 tango 42, 117 and n.13 Tanning, Dorothea 85 Telaak, Anastasia 53, 54, 57 Unamuno, Miguel de 39, 122 Ungaretti, Giuseppe 10 Valente, José Ángel 79 Valesio, Paolo 15–16, 20, 32 Valéry, Paul 112, 148 Vallejo, César 37, 118 Varela, Blanca 78–9 Valle-Inclán, Ramón del 113 Verlaine, Paul 112 Venti, Patricia 114, 149–50 Vigée, Claude 104 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