Alejandra Pizarnik: Selected Poems

by Alejandra Pizarnik, Cecilia Rossi (Translator)

Rossi’s new volume includes selections from each of Pizarnik’s six main published volumes, from 1956’s Last Innocence to 1971’s A Musical Hell, as well as from her uncollected poems, even the lines found on her writing-room chalkboard after her untimely death. Rossi’s assured and highly-skilled versions, which have already won awards in both the John Dryden and the Stephen Spender Prizes for translation, now look set to bring Pizarnik’s work to a wider audience, capturing the poems’ otherworldliness and mysticism.

Genres: Poetry

296 pages, Paperback

Published September 30, 2010

About the author

Born in Buenos Aires to Russian parents who had fled Europe and the Nazi Holocaust, Alejandra Pizarnik was destined for literary greatness as well as an early death. She died from an ostensibly self-administered overdose of barbiturates on 25 September 1972. A few words scribbled on a slate that same month, reiterating her desire to go nowhere "but to the bottom," sum up her lifelong aspiration as a human being and as a writer. The compulsion to head for the "bottom" or "abyss" points to her desire to surrender to nothingness in an ultimate experience of ecstasy and poetic fulfillment in which life and art would be fused, albeit at her own risk. "Ojalá pudiera vivir solamente en éxtasis, haciendo el cuerpo del poema con mi cuerpo" (If I could only live in nothing but ecstasy, making the body of the poem with my body).

Reviews

[Sookie · Rating 5 out of 5]

the birds would draw small cages on my eyes

this is from a short poem "Before". i first read this from the collection Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972. i haven't been able to forget this. She became one of my favorite poets right then.

Selected Poems collects quite a unique collection of her poems and notes that give a deeper understanding of the poet. I love this collection as well.

stranger that I was
when neighbour to distant lights
I stored very pure words
to create new silences

it starts with darkness. themes take a biographical turn as she puts herself in her poetry. tender is the rendering of yearning and also of acceptance. its almost sounds like an inevitable, as if someone has journal entry of an eventuality they saw it coming. but it doesn't deter her from seeing life around her in nature and affection among friends. the dark undertone is quietly lonely, like a lone observer of the world.

I write against fear. Against the clawed wind dwelling on my breath.  

of what i have read in these two collections, this line seem to sum her up as a person.

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know about birds,
nor about the history of fire.
But I think my solitude should have wings.
*
Only you make of my memory
a fascinated traveller,
an incessant fire.
*
And thirst, my memory is of thirst, I below, at the bottom, inside the well, I remember I drank.
*
Drunk on myself, on music, on poems, why didn’t I speak of absence’s void.
*
I cannot speak and say nothing. That is why we get lost, I and the poem, in the vain attempt to transcribe ardent relationships.
*
There are words with hands; just written down, they search out my heart.
There are words condemned like lilacs in a storm.

[itselv]

”أبلغ من العمر عشرين عامًا، وكذلك عيناي.
لكنّها خاويةٌ صامتة.
إلهي، لقد استنزفتُ عُمري في لحظةٍ واحدة.
وها قد انتُهِكَت حرمة البراءة
فما عاد لي من عمرٍ، وما كان لي أيّ عمرٍ من الأساس.“

”أرغب في أن أعاين نفسي وهي على قيد الحياة
ولكنّي، لا أرغب في ذكر الموت أو يديه الوحشيتين.“

”لكنّك تربين الخوف والعزلة
كمخلوقين ضعيفين ضائعين في عرض الصحراء..
ها هم قد قدِموا
ليحرقوا سنوات الأحلام
فما حياتكِ إلّا وداعات..“

أليخاندرا بيثارنيك، الشاعرة التي لطالما تمنت الموت، واستعجلته حتى ذهبت إليه في سنٍّ صغيرة بدلًا من أن تنتظر قدومه. كان ما سطّرته في رسالتها الأخيرة، قُبيل انتحارها، هو التالي: ”وما رغبت في الارتحال إلّا إلى الهاوية“. تُريك اشعارها أجزاءً صغيرةً متفرقةً منها، لا تدرك منها إلّا اليأس والهم. تستشعره وإن لم تستطع أن تضع يدك على ما هو بالتحديد مولِّد هذا الشعور.
قرأتها بترجمة سِوار قوجه، ورغم أن ترجمتها غنيّة بالمفردات العذبة، إلّا أن معالم الابيات نفسها غالبًا ما تكون غير واضحة. قد أعود لقراءتها بالأنجليزية مستقبلًا.

[Viji (Bookish endeavors) · Rating 5 out of 5]

She is more myself than I am. Her words would have been the reflection of the dark recesses of my own mind at night. The obsession with anguish, solitude, night and darkness. The constant infatuation with death. The sense of loss and abandonment. The lack of identification with the outside. A constant battle with the darkness that is trying to take over from inside. And writing so as to not lose sanity, and playing with insanity in the words.

Like a child who has lost her way home, she stands with a doll in her hand, and me in my ragged clothes by her side. We look at what we remember as home, and realise we never had one. Orphans! Now the darkness is more clear. We never belonged anywhere. And every word that comes out reeks of longing.

We have fallen in love with darkness, for that is what we identify with, where we can be truly ourselves. With every attempt to bring us back to this world, we protest, for we belong more in the land of Hades. I write, you write, our words are the same. Of pain. Of death. Of darkness.

[Imen Benyoub · Rating 3 out of 5]

Memory
To Jorge Gaitán Durán


Harp of silence
where fear nests.
Moon moans of things
signifying absence.

Space of closed colour.
Someone hammers and builds
a coffin for time,
another coffin for light.

[Hind · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is not solitude with wings,
it is the silence of the prisoner,
it is the muteness of birds and wind,
it is the world angry at my laughter
or the guardians of hell
tearing up my letters.

I have called, I have called.
I have called towards never.

[Rosa Frei · Rating 5 out of 5]

From my Reading Around the World journey.

Argentina - Selected Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik

Alejandra Pizarnik’s Selected Poems is an exploration of solitude, silence, and the delicate tension between existence and oblivion. Her poetry, often distilled to its barest essence, trembles with the weight of unspoken words, revealing a world where silence is as significant as the sound of language itself. Through her unique voice, Pizarnik touches on universal human themes—loneliness, longing, and the act of creation—while remaining profoundly personal and introspective.

Silence is one of the resonant motif throughout her work. For Pizarnik, silence is not merely the absence of sound but a living, breathing entity that coexists with her words. In some of her poems, silence becomes the space where language dissolves, where thoughts hang trembling at the edge of articulation, barely daring to cross into expression.

There is a tangible vulnerability in her lines, as though each poem is an offering from someone who has been touched deeply by life, but who feels the precariousness of that touch.

This book is a real gem for me: I love it, and I will reread it. Highly recommendable.

Pizarnik died in 1972, at the age of 36.

[Jade · Rating 3 out of 5]

im going to give this a 2.5 because the few poems that i enjoyed left an impression on me. with that being said the majority of this didn’t work for me because it was so fragmented and all over the place. the metaphors became overused.

my memorable quotes:

“I have called to the wind,
confided my desire to be.”

“Naked girl sitting in oblivion
while her broken head wanders weeping
in search of a purer body.”

“The only warmth I give myself from my heart that could barely ever beat, I who had always to learn alone how to drink and eat and breathe and who was never taught how to weep and never will be.”

“To return to the body’s memory, I must return to my mourning bones, must understand what my voice says.”

“I call you and you don’t come.
I love you and you don’t come.”

“To have died in who you were and in who you loved.”

[☆ Lia ☆ · Rating 3 out of 5]

2,5
the last 1/3 was so boring idek
redeemable quotes:


So much to do and I undo myself.


I call you and you don't come
I love you and you don't come


Those who come cannot find me.
Those I await do not exist.


I will leave without staying
                   I will leave as someone who leaves


Someone enters the silence and abandons me.
Now solitude is not alone.
You speak like the night.
Announce yourself like thirst.


do not surrender me, 
            saddest midnight,
to white impure midday

[Fay · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I don’t know about birds,
nor about the history of fire.
But I think my solitude should have wings.
 ”

.

[flora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rossi's translation of Pizarnik remains the closest to the spirit of her writing

[Minā · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to sacrifice my days and weeks in the ceremonies of the poem.
"Autumn in the blue of a wall: become a refuge for the dead little ones."

[vickk · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love her so much

[Sameen Shakya · Rating 4 out of 5]

The selected poems of famed Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik was a roller coaster of a reading experience. See, Pizarnik doesn't write poetry like how you and I expect poetry to be written. As many words as there are in her poems, there's as much silence.

In fact, the silence between her lines, even between the words that populate her poems speak volumes. And they are difficult, but trying to find the beauty beneath the madness of the modern world can often be difficult.

For example, when you and I see a flower, we may think about how pretty it is. Some, the most insightful and poetic among us, might even think about the synthesis of water, air, sun and soil that go into creating that flower. But Pizarnik would see something indescribable and then describe it.

That's what reading this book was like.

And you can imagine, I loved it!

[Matt Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Silvina Ocampo. Cervantes. Emily Dickinson. Kafka. I have a theory that most readers can find a poet they like to read, because poetry is more about the feelings the language creates in a reader than anything else. If you like the authors mentioned above (who Piznarnik names drops in her poems or dedications), you’ll find the language of these poems strangely moving. If not, keep searching; I’m confident you’ll find a different poet who works for you.

[Tiyasha Chaudhury · Rating 3 out of 5]

This title is hard to be rated as the poetry is unique, it repeats in layers and fragments of a few verses are scattered throughout. This is a collection of water (her writing) in every form. A handful from a lake, a river, a sea, an ocean and an abandoned well.