2010
First Published
4.10
Average Rating
296
Number of Pages
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.
Avg Rating
4.10
Number of Ratings
78
5 STARS
36%
4 STARS
44%
3 STARS
15%
2 STARS
5%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads
Author
Alejandra Pizarnik
Author · 23 books
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).
