from “The Poet and the Poem”
Poetry is where everything happens. Like love, humor, suicide, and every fundamentally subversive act, poetry ignores everything but its own freedom and its own truth. To say “freedom” and “truth” in reference to the world in which we live (or don’t live) is to tell a lie. It is not a lie when you attribute those words to poetry: the place where everything is possible.
A deeply informed, judiciously selected, and pitch-perfectly rendered collection…
Ammiel Alcalay
Since the publication of her 1955 debut poetry collection, The Most Foreign Country, Alejandra Pizarnik has captivated the imaginations of many of Latin America’s most celebrated twentieth-century writers, from Octavio Paz and Julio Cortázar to Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Zurita. Over the last several years, the majority of Pizarnik’s poetry has been translated into English, garnering enormous acclaim in the U.S. and abroad, yet her extraordinary critical writings—including commentaries on figures such as Artaud, Borges, Breton, Michaux, and Pessoa, as well as intimate accounts of her own working methods—remain almost entirely unknown outside the Spanish-speaking world. A Tradition of Rupture makes these writings available to English-speaking readers for the first time, offering indispensable insight into the range of Pizarnik’s reading and the principle influences on her poetics. The works collected in this volume also provide a rare glimpse of the famously introverted poet in her capacity as public intellectual and critic, revealing a voracious intelligence turned outward toward the world in vital dialogue with the words of others.
Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) was a leading voice in twentieth-century Latin American poetry. Born in the port city of Avellaneda, in the province of Buenos Aires, to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Pizarnik studied literature and painting at the University of Buenos Aires and spent most of her life in Argentina. From 1960-1964 she lived in Paris, where she was influenced by the work of the Surrealists (many of whom she translated into Spanish) and participated in a vibrant community of writers including Simone de Beauvoir and fellow expatriates Julio Cortázar and Octavio Paz. Known primarily for her poetry, Pizarnik also wrote works of criticism and journalism, experimental fiction, plays, and a literary diary. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968 and a Fulbright Scholarship in 1971. Her complete works in Spanish have been published by Editorial Lumen. Six books of her poetry have been translated into English: Diana’s Tree, The Most Foreign Country and The Last Innocence / The Lost Adventures (Ugly Duckling Presse); and A Musical Hell, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972, and The Galloping Hour: French Poems (New Directions). A Tradition of Rupture (UDP), a collection of Pizarnik’s critical prose in English translation, was published in fall 2019. She died in Buenos Aires, of an apparent drug overdose, at the age of 36.
For many years now we have known Alejandra Pizarnik as a poet who explored the mysteries of pain & mental suffering in a mode & at a level like that, say, of Kafka, & still more that of Artaud. What her translator Cole Heinowitz now brings us so forcefully is a sampling of Pizarnik’s poetics & critical writings, as a further & necessary record of what it means to claim a life through poetry. Simultaneously subversive & tragic, hers is a full-blown work that cries for our attention.
Jerome Rothenberg
Too often translations into American English reinforce a certain image that reinstates the generic authenticity of “poet” or “novelist,” while leaving out the much wider ground on which a writer’s work is based. Alejandra Pizarnik is a classic case in point: despite more of her poetry now available in translation, very little gestures beyond the established image of the “tormented” poet to offer what Cole Heinowitz, in her deeply informed, judiciously selected, and pitch-perfectly rendered collection, calls a “complementary yet strikingly distinct view of Pizarnik—that is, of the poet as critic.” Thanks to this work, we can finally see Pizarnik as not just the extraordinary poet she was but as a thinker, constantly creating a poetics to come to terms with her own time, place, circumstance, and unyielding vision.
Ammiel Alcalay
In the Western literary tradition, a large number of poets have written literary and aesthetic essays parallel to poetry: Schiller, Valéry, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Vallejo, Lezama Lima, Octavio Paz, among many others. Few women intervened within such tradition. In the case of Latin America, Gabriela Mistral and Rosario Castellanos are two paradigmatic figures in the twentieth century, as they wrote short pieces that were published in newspapers, outside the main journals or in collected books. In a sense, Pizarnik represents a unique writer for intervening within a male dominated tradition. As essayist she reveals her habits as a poet, offers illuminating analysis (for example on Artaud), and her words are electrifying. Her essays and poetry also demonstrate a coherent, productive and symbiotic relationship. When she says “Poetry is where everything happens,” essays also happen within such a realm. I am wondering, however, if one can also read her essays against such a canonical tradition, paying attention to her nuances and the way she converses with the poetic authorities, opening meaningful spaces to her voice? This volume of Cole Heinowitz's masterful translations of Pizarnik’s writings allows such an electrifying experience and critical consideration.
Rubén Medina
Even if you don’t know any of the authors (mostly poets) whom Alejandra Pizarnik examines in this book, you will want to know her, for we have much to learn about “poetic inquiry” from this rigorous Argentine writer who attempted the unprecedented: to precisely define the practically indefinable tensions that gravitate between words and silence in each movement of a poet’s particular discourse. You will be seduced, I assure you, by the unexpected depth of this (new) gaze that breaks through a surprisingly respectful analysis of what is there, interwoven in the language that has managed to express itself, and whose message is now received by one who was herself a poet, as well as a Jew and a lesbian—that is, a triply-exiled woman who chose to write from the irrevocable position of imperative marginality which is the necessary home of a gaze, such as hers, that asks only to see: “please, let there be no look that does not see.” Her reviews and prologues refuse to “flatter the most facile sentiments” and therefore aid us in the effort of learning to “reread, but now with one’s heart,” that is, to read “openly.” Thanks to Cole Heinowitz, we can now access the critical voice of Alejandra Pizarnik, that voice which meticulously guides us through the kingdom where “the impossible becomes possible.” And, what is more, the reader interested in Pizarnik’s poetry will find testimonies here of her personal writing rituals, rituals that are essential to understanding this alluring figure of Latin American letters.
Claudia Kerik
Cole Heinowitz is a poet, translator, and scholar based in New York. Her books of poetry include The Rubicon (The Rest), Stunning in Muscle Hospital (Detour), and Daily Chimera (Incommunicado). She is the translator of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro’s Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic (Wave Books) and Beauty Is Our Spiritual Guernica (Commune Editions), and the co-translator of The Selected Late Letters of Antonin Artaud (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs). She is the author of the monograph, Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826: Rewriting Conquest (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), and is Associate Professor of Literature and Director of the Literature Program at Bard College. Heinowitz’s translation of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro’s Bleeding From All 5 Senses was awarded the 2019 Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation.
Other UDP titles by Alejandra Pizarnik here
When the Woman Writes the Poem Herself: On Alejandra Pizarnik in Words without Borders
The Unstoppable Myth of Alejandra Pizarnik in Literary Hub
Alejandra Pizarnik reads from Escrito con un nictógrafo by Arturo Carrera
Alejandra, a documentary film on Alejandra Pizarnik by Ernesto Ardito and Virna Molina
ISBN: 978-1-946433-26-8
Trade Paperback
Smyth-sewn. 160 pp, 5 x 8 in
Publication Date: December 01 2019
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)
Series: Lost Literature #26