The Search for Alejandra Pizarnik

Vida, mi vida, déjate doler, mi vida, déjate enlazar de fuego, de silencio ingenuo, de piedras verdes en la casa de la noche, déjate caer y doler, mi vida.

• • • • • •
Life, life of mine, let yourself fall, let yourself suffer, life of mine, let yourself be bound with fire, with simple silence, with green stones in the house of the night, let yourself fall and suffer, life of mine.

from Tree of Diana by Alejandra Pizarnik, trans. Susan Bassnett


Left, an illustration of a common scrap that litters my surfaces: a Library of Congress call number scrawled on an old At-A-Glance calendar sheet. In this case, the call number leads to the book Exchanging Lives, in which English poet Susan Bassnett translates the work of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik and offers us some collaboration poems, although Pizarnik died in 1972 and, I assume, Bassnett wrote her poems in the 90s and early 00s.

This thin tome came into my life in 2008 during the MFA in Writing course Poetry Internationale: my uncle had just died, I had turned 25 the day of the funeral, and I was trying to find the balance between the library life and the literary life while reaping the benefit of tuition remission. After the previous semester of "challenging" American Modern Poetry like Moore and Stevens and Pound, I thought: finally, a poet who frickin' gets that poetry is about the pain and intensity of life, not about sleight of hand and feats of reference virtuosity.

El poema que no digo,
el que no merezco.
Mierdo de ser dos
camino del espejo:
alguien en mí dormido
me come y me bebe.

• • • • • •

The poem I do not write,
the one I do not deserve.
Fear of being two
pathway in a mirror:
someone sleeping within me
eats me and drinks me.

I thought, Alejandra Pizarnik, where have you and your mental illness and your poetics been all my life! And even more important, why is Bassnett's excuse for translation the only coherent English offering we have?

The "library life" eclipsed the "literary life" then intersected: I ran relentless searches in Ignacio then Link+, first with Pizarnik as author, then keyword, then subject; I gathered all English translations I could find, then I gathered select originals. (Bibliography via RefWorks coming soon.) For my final project in Poetry Internationale, I translated 4 of her poems from Spanish to English, then I made a run of 10 books containing the translations.

Three years later Alejandra remained in my heart: 2011's National Poetry Month and Gleeson's trial of the EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) prompted me to again run relentless searches of Pizarnik as author, as keyword, as subject. I renewed my interest in her poetry and the (English) scholarship on her, all while testing out the prowess of EDS. For Poem in Your Pocket Day I carried around the one immediately above. I relished reading it to my mom that evening, even though its bizarreness shocked her (just a little bit).

Natuurlijk you can look up her history: a woman between two worlds, like many Porteños from what I understand: her parents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants that raised their daughter in a suburb of Buenos Aires; she went to Paris for four seminal years; the one living within her finally ate her dead of barbiturates.

I am sure this was all percolating in my mind that morning I woke up determined to go to Buenos Aires and ride a freighter ship away from the Southern hemisphere, but a close friend was the one who made the connection; before he pointed it out, I just said "I always wanted to go there," when asked how I picked Buenos Aires as my starting point. So yes, Alejandra I am coming to your birthplace to find some trace of you, or to recognize some influence your environment had on you. But, here's the thing: the holy grail of research is not at Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Universidad de Buenos Aires) or even The Sorbonne in Paris. Her papers and manuscripts are at Princeton's Firestone Library in New Jersey, U.S.A.

The thing that confuses me and will be the subject of future blog posts is why Princeton University houses her papers and manuscripts. As far as I know, she never visited the U.S. or had any connection with Princeton. This occurs to me--a library professional--as a microcosm of American privilege and imperialism. Luckily for my sense of injustice and for my interests, I am going through New York on my way to Buenos Aires so I can make a day trip to Princeton. Stay tuned for more musings on library/archives control of information, and what I hope to get out of the search for Alejandra.