Books: Alejandra Pizarnik, the myth returns | Culture

Can a writer change his skin half a century after his death? Alejandra Pizarnik, yes. After the publication of Diana tree, his fourth book, prefaced by Octavio Paz, Pizarnik (Avellaneda, 1936 – Buenos Aires, 1972) became an essential name in the poetry of the twentieth century. The legend of this cult poet, encouraged by a tragic death at the age of 36 on a night when barbiturates were too numerous, has continued to grow with the successive appearance since 2000 of her poetry, prose and diaries, in the care of the poet Ana Becciu, executor of the writer’s will. But unpublished records kept at Princeton University underscore the feeling that his identikit (robot sketch) Creative still has surprises in store.

Some will be revealed by Alejandra Pizarnik. Biography of a myth, by Cristina Piña and Patricia Venti, which Lumen announces for January 2022, prelude to the commemorations of the 50th anniversary of their deaths (it will be published earlier, in July, in Argentina). Meanwhile, the validity of the poet in Spain explains Alejandra Pizarnik and her multiple voices (Huso), a tribute book edited by Mayda Bustamante, which this April 29 celebrates the 85th anniversary of the birth of the author of Musical hell with the gaze of 85 writers from 15 different countries, who report on its expansive wave over different generations. There are few testimonies (that of his sister Miriam, among them) and valuable critical contributions to understand how the image of whom César Aira, the brand new winner of the Formentor Prize, has changed and enriched during these decades of Argentinian literature. “.

Choose your own Alejandra

“When she died on September 25, 1972, Alejandra was considered, essentially, as a dazzling poet”, tells from Buenos Aires Cristina Piña, her biographer, and one of the authors who participates in Alejandra Pizarnik and her multiple voices. “Today we know that she was much more: a fascinating columnist, a shrewd literary critic and, also, the author of deeply transgressive narrative texts which began to be known from 1982.

Pizarnik encrypted his style with brevity, logical distortion (learned in the voices by Antonio Porchia) and in a visual power that is both contained and brutal which still has an impact: “I took the leap of myself at dawn. / I left my body next to the light / and I sang the sadness of what was born “, written in the first poem of Diana tree (1962). “You choose the place of the wound / where we speak / our silence. / You make my life / this ceremony too pure”, said in another of Works and Nights (1965), incandescent passion in five lines.

The question is no longer to know who Pizarnik was as when the mystery around his face was thunderous (the combo of emotional fragility, bisexuality, imposed suicide of silences that only the passage of time allowed us to deal with), but that Pizarnik prefers to reader. The transgressor who flirts with obscenity in The buccaneer of Pernambuco or the poet sublimates “words like precious stones” learned in the French tradition?

The seductress with proverbial vitality and dazzling conversation, who rubbed shoulders in Paris with Cortázar and in Buenos Aires with the surrealist group and that of the magazine Sure or the eternal adolescent who after kissing the writer Ricardo Zelarayán, author of The great saline, alleged that it was “a doctor’s prescription kiss” to exorcise lesbian desires?

The “castaway girl” whipped by her inability to function in the world or the deliberate librettist of the “Alexandrian character” and her own myth that Aira painted in the Omega Literary Lives collection?

The brilliant, self-exacting artist who spoke precisely a foreign samurai language at home (her parents were Russian immigrants of Jewish descent) and who worked until 2 p.m. to intervene and comment on her readings as documented by the Pizarnik Fund (772 books and working papers found today in the National Library of Argentina) or anyone who doubted “the importance of” earning a living “yourself?

A diamond has many faces.

Pizarnik for laughs

Pizarnik’s prose texts began to be studied from Shadow texts and last poems (1982). This anthology prepared with unpublished material by poets Olga Orozco and Ana Becciu, her friends, was the key. It included the prose writer and the playwright of The possessed among the lilacs Yes The buccaneer of Pernambuco or Hilda the polygraph. This book unveiled hilarious pages, with a record that goes from the absurd to glossollic games with language and also a return to the sexual theme – which Pizarnik had addressed The Bloody Countess– but now mixed with humor, popular and rude. These tones caused the rejection of the poetic references of the previous generation, but they frankly admired the young authors.

“With the correspondence, which Ivonne Bordelois began to publish in 1998, another novelty appears: an unknown affective register, which nuances the obscurity and the anguish of the Agendas “, holds pineapple. “The letters dismantle the idea of ​​a Pizarnik who only cares about herself. She is affectionate and generous with her friends, as evidenced by those she directs to Antonio Beneyto ”, underlines the researcher. The role of Beneyto, a surrealist artist who died in October 2020 from covid, is key to understanding Pizarnik’s journey in Spain, which is touched on in an interesting essay by Fanny Rubio, included in Huso’s choral book.

Magnetic, Pizarnik can be dangerous, recognizes Piña: “When you develop your writing, it permeates a lot. But he cannot be imitated, just as Rimbaud and Lautrémont cannot be imitated: they were cursed in the sense that they united life and literature. Her too. For Pizarnik, life and poetry are the same thing. “