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ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK – INSCRIBED BOOKS, LETTERS,
PHOTOGRAPHS AND PERSONAL PAPERS – AN ARCHIVE

Libreria de Antaño is proud to offer a fine Archive that pertained to a close friend of Argentinean
poetess Alejandra Pizarnik.

The Archive includes several of her rarest publications in first editions, including relevant
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inscriptions, and a copy of her 3 book of poems, La Ultima Inocencia (1956), also inscribed; in addition,
letters received by her from renowned authors, with interesting personal and literary contents,
photographs with manuscripts notes by her, 2 letters sent by her, and personal papers preserved in the
original folders, with manuscript notes in the poetess hand. IN ALL, A VERY ATTRACTIVE SMALL
PERSONAL ARCHIVE OF PERHAPS THE MOST RELEVANT ARGENTINIAN POETESS FROM
th
THE 20 CENTURY. We are not aware of the existence of other personal papers of A. P. in private
hands.

Alejandra Pizarnik was born in Buenos Aires to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. She studied
philosophy and literature at the University of Buenos Aires before dropping out to pursue painting
and her own poetry. In 1960, she moved to Paris, where she befriended writers such as Octavio Paz,
Julio Cortazar, and Silvina Ocampo. Considered one of mid-century Argentina's most powerful and
intense lyric poets, Pizarnik counted among her influences Hölderlin and, as she wrote in “The
Incarnate Word,” an essay from 1965, “the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature
silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont,” and the “unparalleled
intensity” of Artaud's “physical and moral suffering.” Pizarnik's themes were cruelty, childhood,
estrangement, and death. According to Emily Cooke, Pizarnik “was perennially mistrustful of her
medium, seeming sometimes more interested in silence than in language, and the poetic style she
cultivated was terse and intentionally unbeautiful.” Her work has continually attracted new readers
since her suicide at age 36.

Pizarnik published several books of poetry during her lifetime, including: La tierra más ajena (1955), La
última inocencia (1956), Las aventuras perdidas (1958), Árbol de Diana (1960), Extracción de la piedra de locura
(1968), and El infierno musical (1971). She also published the prose essay La condesa sangrienta (1971), a
meditation on a 16th-century Hungarian countess allegedly responsible for the torture and murder of
more than 600 girls. Pizarnik's work has been translated into English in the collections Alejandra
Pizarnik: Selected Poems (translated by Cecilia Rossi, 2010) and Extracting the Stone of Madness
(translated by Yvette Siegert, 2016). (poetryfoundation.org).

Alejandra Pizarnik - An Archive