Alejandra Pizarnik

Biography

After her death, three lines were found on the blackboard in her room: “I don’t want to go / nothing more / than to the bottom.” They are the last poems of Alejandra Pizarnik. She was thirty-six.

She was born on 29 April 1936 in Avellaneda, a suburb of Buenos Aires, and was given the name Flora. Her parents, Elías Pizarnik and Rejzla Bromiker, came from Rovno and arrived in Argentina in 1934. At home she was called Bluma, Yiddish for “flower”. Besides an ordinary school she attended a Jewish one, where lessons were taught in Yiddish. Her childhood was hard: her mother constantly compared her with her older sister Myriam, asthma and a stutter got in her way, and the family’s position as immigrants in a foreign country deepened her sense of estrangement. As a young woman she changed her name to Alejandra.

In 1954 Pizarnik entered the philosophy faculty of the University of Buenos Aires, then moved to journalism and to literature, but gave up systematic study. Alongside this she painted in the studio of the Surrealist Juan Batlle Planas. She read Kierkegaard, Joyce, Proust, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Artaud, and translated poems by Éluard. Juan Jacobo Bajarlía, head of the department of modern literature, became her first critic and introduced her to the publisher Arturo Cuadrado. Her first collection, “The Most Foreign Country”, came out in 1955. It was followed by “The Last Innocence” (1956), dedicated to the psychoanalyst León Ostrov, with whom she had been in analysis since 1954, and “The Lost Adventures” (1958). From 1960 to 1964 she lived in Paris. She worked for the magazine Cuadernos and for French publishers, printed poems and critical articles in Argentine newspapers, and translated Artaud, Michaux, Aimé Césaire, Yves Bonnefoy and Marguerite Duras; she also studied the history of religions and French literature at the Sorbonne. There she became friends with Julio Cortázar, Octavio Paz and Rosa Chacel, and met Italo Calvino and André Pieyre de Mandiargues. Cortázar was her friend and correspondent and dedicated several poems to her; the suggestion that she was one of the models for La Maga in “Hopscotch” he himself did not support. Paz wrote the preface to “Diana’s Tree” (1962), published by Sur, the house of Victoria Ocampo. Her lifelong correspondence with Silvina Ocampo began at the same time.

In 1964 she returned to Buenos Aires.

Here appeared the books regarded as her main ones: “Works and Nights” (1965), “Extracting the Stone of Madness” (1968) and “The Musical Hell” (1971). The title of the 1968 collection alludes to the allegorical subject on which paintings by Bosch and Bruegel are built. She wrote the play “Los poseídos entre lilas” (1969) and the prose “The Bloody Countess” (1971), inspired by the figure of Elizabeth Báthory; she interviewed Borges and wrote about Cortázar, Michaux, Artaud and Breton. In Buenos Aires she was close to the circle of writers and artists who gathered at “El Taller”: Enrique Molina, Alberto Girri, Olga Orozco and Raúl Vera Ocampo. In 1965 she exhibited her paintings and drawings together with Manuel Mujica Lainez. The Buenos Aires municipal prize for poetry came to her in the mid-1960s (some sources give 1965, others 1966); in 1969 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1971 a Fulbright Fellowship.

In January 1967 her father died. Her diaries of this period grow darker, and in them she writes that her father’s death made her own death more real. In 1970 she first attempted suicide, and later made a second attempt.

On 25 September 1972 Pizarnik died of an overdose of secobarbital. The farewell took place on 26 September in the new premises of the Argentine Society of Writers. She is buried in the Jewish cemetery in La Tablada.

“Forbidden Zone”, with her drawings (1982), appeared posthumously, followed by collections of her poems and prose, letters and diaries. It seems to me that the diaries are easiest to read as a continuation of the poetry: the same short, broken entries. In Avellaneda, where she spent her childhood, a monument stands to her.