2018
First Published
4.16
Average Rating
96
Number of Pages
A beautifully produced and exquisitely translated edition of French poems by “the best exponent of the poetry of introversion and metaphorical delirium” (Italo Calvino) The Galloping French Poems ―never before rendered in English and unpublished during her lifetime―gathers for the first time all the poems that Alejandra Pizarnik (revered by Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolano) wrote in French. Conceived during her Paris sojourn (1960–1964) and in Buenos Aires (1970–1971) near the end of her tragically short life, these poems explore many of Pizarnik’s deepest the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, sex, and the nature of intimacy. Drawing from personal life experiences and echoing readings of some of her beloved/accursed French authors―Charles Baudelaire, Germain Nouveau, Arthur Rimbaud, and Antonin Artaud―this collection includes prose poems that Pizarnik would later translate into Spanish. Pizarnik’s work led Raúl Zurita to “Her poetry―with a clarity that becomes piercing―illuminates the abysses of emotional sensitivity, desire, and absence. It presses against our lives and touches the most exposed, fragile, and numb parts of humanity.”
Avg Rating
4.16
Number of Ratings
327
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3 STARS
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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).
