Alejandra Pizarnik was an Argentine poet. As most of her career coincided with military regimes, her poetry carries a clandestine dimension.
Early life
Alejandra Pizarnik was born on April 29, 1936, in Avellaneda, a city within the Greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area, Argentina, to Jewish immigrant parents from Rowno. She had a difficult childhood, struggling with acne and self-esteem issues, as well as having a stutter. 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. This may have been why she began to take amphetamines, to which she became strongly addicted, causing long periods of sleeping disorders such as euphoria and insomnia.
Career
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. She took courses in literature, journalism, and philosophy at the university of Buenos Aires, but dropped out in order to pursue painting withJuan Batlle Planas. Pizarnik followed her debut work with two more volumes of poems, La última inocencia and Las aventuras perdidas. She was an avid reader of fiction and poetry. Beginning with novels, she delved into more literature with similar topics to learn from different points of view. This sparked an interest early on for literature and also for the unconscious, which in turn gave rise to her interest in psychoanalysis. Her lyricism was influenced by Antonio Porchia, French symbolists—especially Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé—, the spirit of romanticism and by the surrealists. She prose poems, in the spirit of Octavio Paz, but from a woman's perspective on issues ranging from loneliness, childhood, and 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 French religious history and literature at the Sorbonne. There she became friends with Julio Cortázar, Rosa Chacel, Silvina Ocampo and Octavio Paz. Paz even wrote the prologue for her fourth poetry book, The Tree of Diana. A famous sequence on Diana reads: "I jumped from myself to dawn/I left my body next to the light/and sang the sadness of being born." She returned to Buenos Aires in 1964, and published her best-known books of poetry: Los trabajos y las noches, Extracción de la piedra de la locura and El infierno musical. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968, and in 1971 a Fulbright Scholarship. Pizarnik's poetry claims a clandestine and iconic dimension because the majority of her mature output coincides with the military regimes in Argentine.
