A Tradition of Rupture collects the critical writings of an Argentine poet (1936-1972) whose life and work have come to the attention of English-speaking readers in the past decade. Not unlike the Roberto Bolaño craze of the aughts, new translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry have appeared almost every year, selling well among anglophones eager for the voice of one of the most vital poets of “The Latin American Boom” of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The revival began with A Musical Hell (New Directions, 2013), her final collection from 1971, and was followed by Diana’s Tree (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 (New Directions, 2016), The Most Foreign Country (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), and The Galloping Hour: French Poems (New Directions, 2018). A Tradition of Rupture, translated by the recently deceased poet and scholar Cole Heinowitz, completes the cycle, with a selection of Pizarnik’s statements on her own poetics, along with reviews of contemporaries and other writers who influenced her.
The first section, comprising only the first 34 pages of the book, combines prologues, notes, and interviews. Heinowitz offers an extensive bibliography of where each piece appeared. Most were written for long-gone cultural magazines like Sur 326, a major outlet for Argentine and European writers. The rest didn’t see publication until Pizarnik’s Prosa Completa [Complete Prose] (Barcelona, 2012).
With “Prologues for an Anthology of Young Argentine Poets” (1962 and 1967), the leadoff piece in the collection, Heinowitz steps back to let Pizarnik introduce herself. Pizarnik speaks plainly, her words drilling into us with a mixture of self-assurance and swagger:
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.
Here is not the early flame-out and suicide at 36. Here is a thoughtful artist and wised-up person of the world whose humor flecks into colorful syllables when we try to touch it. Like Didion a few years later in The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pizarnik is in the middle of social issues while never forgetting her outsider status as a woman, a Jew, an immigrant, and a bisexual. When asked in an interview if she thought sexual education was necessary, she deadpans, “Of course—sex is difficult.”
While in our current moment the borders between an artist’s life and work have been hyperlinked, Pizarnik lived and wrote at a time when “truth” was not transitive, nor a meme awaiting viral endorsement. Poetry was first—and last—a value unto itself, offering only its upturned wrists:
Although being a woman doesn’t impede my writing, I believe it is worthwhile to proceed from an exasperated clarity. In this way, I assert that it is a curse to be born a woman, just as it is to be a Jew, to be poor, black, gay, a poet, Argentine, etc. What matters, of course, is what we do with our curses.
Pizarnik did a lot with hers. In the second half of the book, Heinowitz etches an informal chronicle of her life as a reviewer and translator, beginning with her move to Paris in 1960, where she connected with major French writers like Marguerite Duras and Aimé Césaire, along with major contemporaries like Julio Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo, and Octavio Paz.
Pizarnik’s complexity comes through in the variety of pieces. Heinowitz’s selection includes a review of Cortázar’s Cronopios and Famas; a re-reading of Breton’s Nadja; a tough-but-fair review of an anthology of Ricardo Molinari, who, Pizarnik tells us, earned his status as Argentina’s most celebrated poetry in his early work, but in more recent work, “has outlived his time and tries to imitate himself.”
Her honest appraisals of major literary figures show the sensibility of the first section in action. Pizarnik frames her judgements on poetry as an ever-new and ever-emergent phenomenon. We work, we write, but the results are never assured.
Pizarnik is an exacting, perceptive critic who reminds readers and writers that poetry “isn’t a career; it’s one’s fate.” Her view isn’t a binary, nor is it a spectrum. It draws from the poetics of Baudelaire, Hölderlin, Nerval, Rimbaud, and Artaud. In “The Incarnate Word (1965), published the same year as Works and Nights, her breakthrough collection, Pizarnik situates the work of Artaud’s “white period” and his “black periods” as different phases of artistic incarnation—the first desiring, the second suffering its mark.
For Pizarnik, anyone willing to sacrifice it all for the “dangerous business” (Hölderlin) of poetry earns her highest regard. It is a desperation she brings to her own work, so when she praises it in others, she shows us the sharp edge of a poetics she can never escape:
Yes. The WORD was made flesh. And also, and above all in Artaud, the body was made word …. Just as Van Gogh restores to nature its forgotten nobility, and to manmade things their maximum dignity, thanks to those sunflowers, those old shoes, that chair, those ravens … so too, with identical purity and identical intensity, the word of Artaud, that is to say Artaud himself, rescues ‘humanity’s abhorrent misery’ by incarnating it.
In “A Tradition of Rupture” (1966), the final piece in the collection and the one from which Heinowitz’s draws its title, Pizarnik reviews Cuardrivo, an anthology by Octavio Paz of Rubén Darío, Fernando Pessoa, Ramón López Velarde, and Luis Cernuda. These are four distinct poets, from different places and with different styles and sensibilities. Pizarnik reminds us they nonetheless share a common trait: “their construction of a tradition of rupture which is precisely the tradition of modern poetry.” (The italics are Pizarnik’s.)
The poetic act is an exorcism, at best a healing of this “fundamental wound.” How we come to the moment and how we leave it depends on the skill and the luck of the artist to incarnate the experience. For Pizarnik, there are no comfortable metaphors, no cleverness, no ironic distance.
As a poet of mirrored surfaces, she draws closest to the countless heteronyms of Pessoa. At the same time, she embraces Cernuda as “the poet of love” and Rubén Darío as a tenacious advocate for modernismo, which Pizarnik interpreted as the desire to insert oneself “in living history, in the now.”
For anyone seeking guidance on how to engage poetry, this collection offers a strong reminder that just as there should be no distance between the poet and poem, there should be no distance between the reader and the poem. Our only hope is at that eternal moment in which, like Pizarnik, we find ourselves by losing everything else.
A Tradition of Rupture, by Alejandra Pizarnik. Translated by Cole Heinowitz. Brooklyn, New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, December 2019. 160 pages. $18.00, paper.
William Lessard is the author of the chapbook instrument for distributed empathy monetization (KERNPUNKT Press) His writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, FENCE, Jacket2, and the Seneca Review. He is an editor at Heavy Feather Review. More info: williamlessardwrites.net.
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