Alejandra Pizarnik

Alejandra Pizarnik (April 29, 1936 – September 25, 1972) was an Argentine poet.

Alejandra Pizarnik was born on April 29, 1936, in Avellaneda, a city in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, to Jewish immigrant parents of Russian and Slovak descent. She had a difficult childhood, struggling with a marked European accent to her Spanish, a stutter, acne and self-esteem issues. She also had a marked habit of gaining weight. These contingencies seriously undermined her self-esteem. Because of her negative body image and her continual comparisons to her sister, Alejandra's life became even more complicated. For this same reason, it is possible that she began to take amphetamines --the same drugs that she became strongly addicted to--, which caused long periods of sleeping disorders such as euphoria and insomnia.

A year after entering the department of Philosophy and Letters at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Pizarnik published her first book of poetry, La tierra más ajena (1955). She took courses in literature, journalism, and philosophy at the university, but never received her degree. Soon after, she studied painting with Juan Batlle Planas. Pizarnik followed her debut work with two more volumes of poems, La última inocencia (1956) and Las aventuras perdidas (1958).

She was a profound reader of many dignified authors during her lifetime. From the novels read she delved into more literature with similar topics to learn from different points of view. Doing this sparked an interest early on for literature and also for the unconscious, which in turn gave her interest in psychoanalysis.

Pizzarnik was firmly uninvolved with politics, instead her lyricism was influenced by Antonio Porchia, French symbolists--especially Arthur Rimbaud and Stephanie Mallarme--, the spirit of romanticism and for the surrealists. She wrote poetic books of notary sensitivity and formal restfulness for insinuating imagery. The topics of her books focused on loneliness, childhood, pain, and more than anything, death.

Between 1960 and 1964 Pizarnik lived in Paris, where she worked for the magazine Cuadernos and other French editorials. She published poems and criticism in many newspapers, translated for Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, Aimé Césaire, Yves Bonnefoy and Marguerite Duras. She also studied the French religious history and literature in the Sorbonne. There she became friends with Julio Cortázar, Rosa Chacel and Octavio Paz. Paz even wrote the prologue for her fourth poetry book, Árbol de Diana (1962), which showed how much she had matured in Europe as an author. She returned to Buenos Aires in 1964, and published her most well-known books of poetry: Los trabajos y las noches (1965), Extracción de la piedra de la locura (1968) and El infierno musical (1971).

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