Few poets in Argentina have been as widely read and loved as Alexandra Pizanik. The writer born in Avellaneda on April 29, 1936 with the name Flora and tragically died of an overdose on November 25, 1972, at age 36is until today a symbol of poetry and writing as a painful reflection of intimacy.
“Almost everything that is written about (Alejandra Pizarnik) is full of ‘little castaway’, ‘lost girl’, ‘uninhabited statue of herself’, and the like. (…) It reduces a poet to a kind of decorative bibelot on the shelf of literature”, he complained. Cesar Airafriend and biographer of Pizarnik, in a book that bears his name and was published in 1998.
However, although this confessional character of her poetry hides the rational work of the writer on the matter of her creation; It is also the engine that has made her work so important as an inspiration for young people of several generations, who began to write under her influence.´
the languages
His work also had the originality of crossing writing with visual arts. Pizarnik had an artistic training that he recognizes as the first formal teacher to Juan Batlle Planasalthough later it was nurtured by the influence of dozens of classic and modern creators, from El Bosco to De Chirico.
His writings are intervened by his drawings and his drawings by his poems, in a work that is always spatially designed. Colored pencils, notebooks and paper merge into collages, the genre that best fits the model of his creation. “I am bewitched and bewitched by buying pens, markers (I have 83) and everything that exists in those palaces called stationery stores,” Pizarnik said about that obsession that was part of his creative process. He used to write verses on a blackboard with colored chalk, to observe them and give them a definitive form.
His literary education began in Faculty of Philosophy and Letters and it was completed in Paris, where he lived for 4 years, studying, writing and translating. In addition, she won the Guggenheim and Fulbright scholarships (although her sister, Myriam Pizarnik, says she spent them on colored pencils and postcards).
His life’s work is summarized in more than a dozen books, including: “The Last Innocence”, “Tree of Diana”, “Extraction of the Stone of Madness”, “The Bloody Countess”, ” Work and nights” and “Little songs”.
Her intense personal and epistolary exchange with many of the great writers of the time (Julio Cortázar, Octavio Paz, César Aira, Arturo Carrera, Italo Calvino, Sylvia Molloy and her great friends, Olga Orozco and Silvina Ocampo, among many others) speaks of a full social life, different from what many imagine from his poetry.
Despite this fact, her acquaintances have also pointed out the weight that her condition as a Jew (her parents were Ukrainian immigrants) had on Alejandra’s life at the time of the Second War in Europe and her condition as a lesbian, a situation that did not it was easy to manage in front of his family. In the years around the ’70s, she suffered frequent depressive crises with repeated hospitalizations and a growing addiction to barbiturates. An overdose of pills ended her life. In her house, on the blackboard where she wrote, her family found the phrase: “I don’t want to go / nothing more / than to the bottom.”
His virtual romanticism and the aura of a cursed poet paid for by his early death, marked the readings of his texts from then on, at a time when the dominant poetry began to pass through more realistic terrain, even close to politics.
Those who want to read his work today can consult the four volumes published by the Lumen label: “New Pizarnik correspondence (1955-1972)”, “Diaries”, “Complete Poetry” and “Complete Prose”. And also the biography of Cristina Piña and Patricia Venti, “Biography of a myth”, edited by the same label.
The exhibition at the National Library
In homage to the 50th anniversary of his death, the Mariano Moreno National Library (BNMM) opened an exhibition with the name “Alejandra Pizarnik. Between the image and the word. The exhibition brings together personal objects, such as her typewriter; manuscripts, volumes from her personal library, drawings, objects and her notebooks.
As the curator of the exhibition, Evelyn Galiazo, points out, in the excellent catalog published by the Library, speaking of “complete works”, in the case of Pizarnik, is very complicated, because his manuscripts and drawings have suffered a true “diaspora” . Some are at Princeton University, others at the National Library of Uruguay and others in France. In Argentina, at the impulse of the former director of the BNMM, Horacio González, in 2007 650 volumes were acquired from the writer’s library, which today are part of the Alejandra Pizarnik Fund. Another 122 texts and manuscripts were added to this Fund as a donation from Myriam Pizarnik. In the exhibition you can also see a collection of portraits and an exhibition of images of artists who had a great influence on her work.
“Reading, underlining, copying, rewriting are the steps of the method that he found to inhabit the sinuous border between reading and writing, his way of dealing with the anguish of influences and with the paralyzing fear of the blank page”, explains the curator .
“Alejandra alejandra/ underneath I am/ alejandra”, sums up the poet about herself.
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