Árbol de Diana - Alejandra Pizarnik

Rating: ★★★★

01/07/14

A voice in the dark, crying for life. For love. For your acknowledgement. Perhaps, not even for your acceptance. But for you to notice she is there.

That is what I see among the desperate lines of one intense poet. Her exceptionally evocative poetry left me in awe, once more. Her words are always yearning for something, fighting against isolation until there is nothing else to feel.

Pizarnik, or the hunger for passion.

5
por un minuto de vida breve
única de ojos abiertos
por un minuto de ver
en el cerebro flores pequeñas
danzando como palabras en la
boca de un mudo
~
for a minute of this brief life
open eyes
for a minute to see
in the mind tiny flowers
dancing like words in the mouth of a mute

Passion for somebody's arrival. Passion for her own existence. To feel something. Anything.

To find someone that would make her company as she grows old in this strange yet beautiful world. That would help her understand.

15
Extraño desacostumbrarme
de la hora en que nací.
Extraño no ejercer más
oficio de recién llegada.
~
It is strange to be unfamiliar
with the time I was born.
It is strange not to be
a new arrival anymore.

Understand. There is nothing to understand. Nothing to analyze. There is not much time. You either live or analyze. Love or analyze. Breathe or analyze. And yet, we are made of thoughts. We cannot stop it. Roquentin could never stop it. Pizarnik could not stop it.

She tried to put the mind on hold.

For a minute, silence those thoughts.

23
...la rebelión consiste en mirar una
rosa
hasta pulverizarse los ojos
~
...rebellion is to look at a
rose
until your eyes pulverize

Thoughts can be dangerous when they are alone. They try to disguise themselves to be somebody else. They hide and they deceive. They reject their own nature to be accepted. They end up hating themselves. And each other.

38
Este canto arrepentido, vigía
detrás de mis poemas:
este canto me desmiente, me
amordaza.
~
This regretful song, an observer
behind my poems:
this song belies me, it
silences me.

Each other.
Somebody smiling back.

* Photo credit: Alejandra Pizarnik via Biblio Letras
** Note: Some are anonymous translations; others, the poorer ones, are mine.