Alejandra Pizarnik

Flora Alejandra Pizarnik (29 April 1936 – 25 September 1972) was an Argentine poet. Her idiosyncratic and thematically introspective poetry has been considered "one of the most unusual bodies of work in Latin American literature", and has been recognized and celebrated for its fixation on "the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, the nature of intimacy, madness, [and] death".

Pizarnik studied philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires and worked as a writer and a literary critic for several publishers and magazines. She lived in Paris between 1960 and 1964, where she translated authors such as Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, Aimé Césaire and Yves Bonnefoy. She also studied history of religion and French literature at the Sorbonne. Back in Buenos Aires, Pizarnik published three of her major works: Works and Nights, Extracting the Stone of Madness, and The Musical Hell as well as a prose work titled The Bloody Countess. In 1969 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and later, in 1971, a Fulbright Fellowship.

On 25 September 1972, she died by suicide after ingesting an overdose of secobarbital. Her work has influenced generations of authors in Latin America.

Biography

Early life

Flora Pizarnik was born on 29 April 1936, in Avellaneda in the Greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area of Argentina, to Jewish immigrant parents from Rovno in the Russian Empire (now Rivne, Ukraine), Elías Pizarnik (Pozharnik) and Rejzla Bromiker. Her parents arrived in 1934, the same year in which her older sister, Myriam, was born. She had a difficult childhood, struggling with acne and self-esteem issues, as well as having a stutter. She adopted the name Alejandra as a teenager. As an adult, she had a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia.