Selected Poems
1997
First Published
4.16
Average Rating
105
Number of Pages
Alejandra Pizarnik is a hugely significant literary figure, an iconoclastic poet who carved her own sparse language of paradox and despair from the collective unconscious of Western mythology and the dreamscapes of her own multiple selves. Her work probes the legacy of major writers from Kafka to Rimbaud, Lautréamont and other poets maudits, and in its own passionate complexity resonates with the great twentieth-century artistic and intellectual movements of Surrealism, feminism, and psychoanalysis. To date, however, though relatively well-known in the English-speaking world, her poetry has not been translated comprehensively into English. This substantial volume of her Selected Poems, translated by the award- winning Cecilia Rossi, rectifies, at last, this unconscionable lack.
Avg Rating
4.16
Number of Ratings
174
5 STARS
41%
4 STARS
40%
3 STARS
16%
2 STARS
2%
1 STARS
2%
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Author
Alejandra Pizarnik
Author · 15 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).
