Alejandra Pizarnik, biography of the last cursed writer

They said about Alejandra Pizarnik that she was born with darkness in her soul. His rebellion, his tragic air and his passion were nourished by his own darkness to weave a unique and unrepeatable poetry. She told us about cages, eyes, very heavy stones and Isabel Bathory, the bloody countess. She navigated like no one else, between madness and the dreamlike, to leave us an exceptional work.

She was that woman who always felt like a foreigner in this world. She spoke Spanish with a European accent. She was eaten away by her complexes, by her weight gains. Her childhood was tinged with disappointments, fears, emptiness (the sky has the color of dead childhood, he once wrote). It is also said that he tried everything in life, journalism, philosophy, painting… but only poetry and amphetamines gave relief to his nervous thoughts.

The last cursed poet

Alejandra Pizarnik She was also that Argentine poet who left her wake in Paris and who impregnated her mind and heart with the final stage of surrealism. She became friends with André Breton, Georges Bataille and Yves Bonnefoy and, above all, with someone who was key in her life and also in her career as a notable poet: Octavio Paz.

No one explored suffering and madness like she did. She was that split woman who claimed to have dead twins inside her: Alejandras past and Alejandras of the present, which she never dared to be. She took her own life at the age of 36. Unfortunately, it was an end foretold, because she spent her entire existence on tiptoe, peering into the abyss into which she would throw herself in 1972. In the end, she managed to free herself from her torments and the darkness of her.

Today Alejandra Pizarnik continues to be called the last cursed poet of America. To read it is to immerse ourselves equally in romanticism, surrealism, the universe of the gothic and also in psychoanalysis. A unique universe that leaves no one indifferent.

Alejandra Pizarnik, a life of genius and darkness

Being born in Avellaneda, a suburb of Buenos Aires, was not easy for Alejandra Pizarnik. Her family was of Russian-Jewish origin and they permanently carried the pain of having left their country of origin, the marks of the Holocaust, the horror and the personal losses experienced during the war.

That shadow must have created an early imprint on her. An inherited wound that was made even worse by a physique that he did not accept, the rejection of a mother who valued her sister more, and for a health in which asthma and stuttering limited much of his childhood. All of this made her, from very early on, perceive herself as different, inserted into a character in which she did not recognize herself.

Literature and philosophy were that safe space in which to shelter since I was a child. That literary background awakened, very soon, his need for writing, and also opened the door to a particular rebellion that would always characterize him. Already in adolescence, she was known for the way she dressed, her short hair, her particular style.

His mind and his art began to bear witness to his poetic charisma before he reached university. Likewise, also around this time, the need grew in her to take refuge in another refuge that had nothing to do with books or writing. Her concern about gaining weight and rejection of her own body led her to use barbiturates and amphetamines.

A life of fruitless searches

In 1954 Alejandra Pizarnik began studying philosophy and literature at the University of Buenos Aires. She doesn’t finish them. She later tried journalism. He doesn’t like her either. Next, she began artistic training with the surrealist painter Batlle Planas. Her country is too small for her and her desire to search for meaning and a channel for self-realization leads her to spend a few years in Paris.

Thus, between 1960 and 1964 he lived a rewarding period in which he began to work producing translations and literary criticism for various magazines. It was during this time that he became friends with two very relevant figures in his life: Julio Cortázar and the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. The latter is the one who writes the prologue to his book of poems Arbol de Diana (1962).

In 1965 and already in Argentina, he continued with his literary work. His work was appreciated by the cultural community of the time and he was awarded 2 scholarships, such as the Guggenheim and the Fulbright.. However, he fails to take advantage of them. His depressive crises, discouragement and search for something that gives meaning to his existence never arrives.

His friends later said that after returning from Paris, he began to isolate himself from others, becoming increasingly immersed in his own melancholy.. After the death of his father came suicide attempts. Her dependence on her sleeping pills became more intense, almost desperate, to the point that in 1972 she had to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital due to an intense depressive episode.

On September 25, taking advantage of the fact that he had been granted leave from the hospital, he managed to take 50 secanal pills. After this there was no turning back: finally, Alejandra Pizarnik left this world. She was 36 years old.

The work of Alejandra Pizarnik

Much of Alejandra Pizarnik’s work orbits around two spheres: her childhood in Buenos Aires and her fascination with death. Likewise, something that we must keep in mind is that, today, we can admire a large part of his work thanks to Julio Cortázar and, above all, his first wife, Aurora Bernárdez.

Alejandra’s family, always puritanical and even disgusted by their daughter’s tastes and literary style, was on the verge of destroying her notebooks and personal writings.. Cultural repression in Argentina also put at risk the preservation of part of his work. So your Diariesfor example, were taken to Paris where the Cortázars guarded them until Columbia University stayed with them.

His lyrical work is included in seven collections of poems: The Most Foreign Land (1955), The Last Innocence (1956), The Lost Adventures (1958), Diana’s Tree (1962), The Works and the Nights (1965), Extraction of the Stone of Madness (1968) and The musical hell (1971).

Later, various publications were made of his latest poems, plays such as Los Poseídos entre lilas and the novel La bucanera de Pernambuco or Hilda la polígrafa. It is also worth highlighting one of his most famous and striking stories: The bloody countess.

The style

Alejandra Pizarnik wrote frenetically since she was 15 years old. He did it devoutly, because that was his only way of salvation in a world of which he never felt part. Her poetry is full of symbols, silences, madness, the shadow of death, delirium… Her poetry, according to herself, was that place where the impossible becomes possible.

She was also the voice of feminism; His words had a subversive beauty in which only truths fit, in which labels and conventions were criticized. The obligation to be part of a social mold was a constant weight in his work. She was that woman incapable of adjusting to any type of expectations placed on her.

From there comes boredom, drowsiness and, above all, that sticky melancholy that overflowed his heart until it fell on his poems. Alejandra Pizarnik was the last cursed poetthat great writer who continues to overwhelm us with her verses, with her distant but always resounding voice.

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