Alejandra Pizarnik's Paris Years

Today at the Paris Review, Patricio Ferrari, editor and co-translator of Alejandra Pizarnik's French poems The Galloping Hour (New Directions, 2018), provides readers with useful biographical and literary-historical context for Pizarnik's works in French. Ferrari begins by reminding us:

The younger of two daughters to Jewish immigrants who settled in Argentina during the thirties, Flora Alejandra Pizarnik was born on April 29, 1936, in Avellaneda—a port city located within the greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area. Her parents, Ela Pizarnik and Rejzla Bromiker de Pizarnik, had left Równe, then part of Poland, two years earlier to flee the rising wave of anti-Semitism across Eastern Europe. The family spoke Yiddish and Spanish at home, and the two sisters, Myriam and Alejandra, attended a progressive Jewish school. Alejandra grew up among these two languages, along with the accepted Latin American notion of French—of France—as inseparable from high culture, especially for those with fine-art or literary aspirations.

Ferrari proceeds by describing Paris in the early 1960s when Pizarnik arrived in the city. More about Pizarnik's time in Paris:

In the first few months, however, Pizarnik lived on the margins of the dreamed city. She arrived in the western suburbs, initially lodging in Châtenay-Malabry with one of her paternal uncles; then in Neuilly-sur-Seine with another one of her father’s brothers. Both were Jewish immigrants who had been forced to escape their native Poland three decades prior. Disappointed and dissatisfied, Alejandra knew she hadn’t come to Paris just to duplicate her ordinary life in Buenos Aires.

Despite this situation, Pizarnik was not deterred. A poetic vision sustained her, and rapidly, through a kaleidoscope of literary references and landmarks, Alejandra embraced a quotidian existence inextricable from literature: under the iron footbridge where La Maga, muse of Cortázar’s best-known novel, Hopscotch, and the author himself kept running into each other a decade earlier; at the cafés on the boulevards Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Saint-Michel; or by the Seine where booksellers of used and antiquarian books plied their trade. She walked the streets, seeing and hearing them, loving what she witnessed. Here, during the next four years, she met surrealist figures (Georges Bataille, Jean Arp, Max Ernst), befriended and translated some of the most notable French writers of her day (André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Henri Michaux, Yves Bonnefoy), wrote, and, most significantly, read and reread (in Spanish and French) a wide range of authors across genres and traditions.

Pain, late night perambulations, and poverty—Pizarnik believed these were the roots of lasting art. She gambled her health and well-being against her poetry and the mysteries of language. Yet she longed for family and friends in Buenos Aires. Her native Buenos Aires represented her immature self—as Pizarnik relates in a diary entry on January 11, 1961. This weighed on her; however, she chose not to retreat, despite financial constraints, self-doubt, periods of debilitating mental health, and a fear of going mad.

Head to the Paris Review to read this one from head to toe!