Where the Voice of Alejandra Pizarnik Was Queen

Hay, madre, un sitio en el mundo, que se llama París.
Un sitio muy grande y lejano y otra vez grande.

(There is, mother, a place in the world called Paris.
A very big place and far and very big again.)

– César Vallejo

In a diary entry of May 1959, while still living with her parents in Buenos Aires, shortly after the publication of her third poetry collection, the twenty-three-year-old Alejandra Pizarnik wrote:

Je voudrais vivre pour écrire. Non penser à autre chose qu’à écrire. Je ne prétend [sic] pas l’amour ni l’argent. Je ne veux pas penser, ni construire décemment ma vie. Je veux de la paix: lire, étudier, gagner un peu d’argent pour m’independiser [sic] de ma famille, et écrire.

(I would like to live in order to write. Not to think of anything else other than to write. I am not after love nor money. I don’t want to think nor decently build my life. I want peace: to read, to study, to earn some money so that I become independent from my family, and to write.)

Bold and assertive in tone, these words are less of a confession than a daring conviction, a resolution, a literary plan. Circumstantial? Purposely