Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert

Like Benjamin Péret, Alejandra Pizarnik was a Surrealist, albeit in a very different context. She was born in Argentina to Jewish immigrant parents from Rovno (in what was once Poland, and in today’s Ukraine). Her parents were from the same city that Zuzanna Ginczanka, the poet I am currently translating, grew up in. These women are nearly sisters in my mind, although they didn’t know each other, and although Pizarnik derives depth from darkness’s folds, rather than from fervent saturation as does Ginczanka. In Siegert’s deft translation, Pizarnik envelops us in deceptively simple turns of phrase. Every phrase voluptuously gorges on its previous self: “the center / of a poem / is another poem / the center of the center / is absence” (from The Short Cantos).
—Alex Braslavsky

Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert. Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972. New York: New Directions, 2016.