Description
Literary Nonfiction. Essays. Latinx Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. Translated from the Spanish by Cole Heinowitz. Since the publication of her 1955 debut poetry collection, La tierra más ajena (THE MOST FOREIGN COUNTRY), Alejandra Pizarnik has captivated the imaginations of many of Latin America's most celebrated twentieth-century writers, from Octavio Paz and Julio Cortázar to Roberto Bolaño and Raúl Zurita. Over the last several years, the majority of Pizarnik's poetry has been translated into English, garnering enormous acclaim in the U.S. and abroad, yet her extraordinary critical writings—including commentaries on figures such as Artaud, Borges, Breton, Michaux, and Pessoa, as well as intimate accounts of her own working methods—remain almost entirely unknown outside the Spanish-speaking world. A TRADITION OF RUPTURE makes these writings available to English-speaking readers for the first time, offering indispensable insight into the range of Pizarnik's reading and the principle influences on her poetics. The works collected in this volume also provide a rare glimpse of the famously introverted poet in her capacity as public intellectual and critic, revealing a voracious intelligence turned outward toward the world in vital dialogue with the words of others.
"For many years now we have known Alejandra Pizarnik as a poet who explored the mysteries of pain & mental suffering in a mode & at a level like that, say, of Kafka, & still more that of Artaud. What her translator Cole Heinowitz now brings us so forcefully is a sampling of Pizarnik's poetics & critical writings, as a further & necessary record of what it means to claim a life through poetry. Simultaneously subversive & tragic, hers is a full-blown work that cries for our attention."—Jerome Rothenberg
Author Bio
Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) was a leading voice in twentieth-century Latin American poetry. Born in the port city of Avellaneda, in the province of Buenos Aires, to Russian- Jewish immigrants, Pizarnik studied literature and painting at the University of Buenos Aires and spent most of her life in Argentina. From 1960-1964 she lived in Paris, where she was influenced by the work of the Surrealists (many of whom she translated into Spanish) and participated in a vibrant community of writers including Simone de Beauvoir and fellow expatriates Julio Cortázar and Octavio Paz. Known primarily for her poetry, Pizarnik also wrote works of criticism and journalism, experimental fiction, plays, and a literary diary. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1968 and a Fulbright Scholarship in 1971. Her complete works in Spanish have been published by Editorial Lumen. A book of her critical writings, A TRADITION OF RUPTURE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), was translated into English by Cole Heinowitz. Five books of her poetry have been translated into English: THE LAST INNOCENCE / THE LOST ADVENTURES (Ugly Duckling Presse 2019), THE MOST FOREIGN COUNTRY (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), DIANA'S TREE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2014), A Musical Hell and Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 (New Directions, 2016) and The Galloping Hour: French Poems (New Directions, 2018). She died in Buenos Aires, of an apparent drug overdose, at the age of 36.
Author City: BUENOS AIRES ARG
Cole Heinowitz is a poet, translator, and scholar based in New York. Her books of poetry include The Rubicon (The Rest), Stunning in Muscle Hospital (Detour), and Daily Chimera (Incommunicado). She is the translator of Alejandra Pizarnik's A TRADITION OF RUPTURE (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Mario Santiago Papasquiaro's ADVICE FROM 1 DISCIPLE OF MARX TO 1 HEIDEGGER FANATIC (Wave Books, 2013), and Beauty Is Our Spiritual Guernica (Commune Editions). She is the co-translator of The Selected Late Letters of Antonin Artaud (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs). She is the author of the monograph Spanish America and British Romanticism, 1777-1826: Rewriting Conquest (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), and is Associate Professor of Literature and Director of the Literature Program at Bard College. Heinowitz's translation of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro's Bleeding From All 5 Senses was awarded the 2019 Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation.
Author City: ANNANDALE ON HUDSON, NY USA