Mendiga voz

by Alejandra Pizarnik

Y aún me atrevo a amar

el sonido de la luz en una hora muerta,

el color del tiempo en un muro abandonado.

En mi mirada lo he perdido todo.

Es tan lejos pedir. Tan cerca saber que no hay.

from WORKS AND NIGHTS
© by Alejandra Pizarnik, 1965
© Myriam Pizarnik de Nesis, 2000 (Barcelona: Lumen, Random House Mondadori)

A Beggar Voice

by Alejandra Pizarnik

And still I dare to love

the sound of the light in the hours of deadness

the color of time on a ruined wall.

In my eyes I’ve lost everything.

Asking is so far away. And so close, this knowledge of want.

translated from Spanish by Yvette Siegert

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Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) was a leading voice in twentieth-century Latin American poetry. Born in Avellaneda to Russian-Jewish immigrants, Pizarnik studied literature and painting at the University of Buenos Aires and spent most of her life in Argentina. In 1960, she moved to Paris, where she was influenced by the work of the Surrealists and participated in a vibrant expatriate community of writers that included Julio Cortázar and Octavio Paz. Known primarily for her poetry, Pizarnik also wrote experimental fiction, plays, a literary diary, and works of criticism. The poems in this issue are from her collection Los trabajos y las noches (Works and Nights), published in 1965. She died in Buenos Aires, of an apparent drug overdose, at the age of thirty-six.

Yvette Siegert is a poet and literary translator. She has edited for the United Nations and The New Yorker, and currently teaches comparative literature at Baruch College, The City University of New York. Her writing has appeared in Chelsea, Stonecutter, 6×6, Aufgabe, Guernica, St. Petersburg Review and other places, and her translations of Alejandra Pizarnik’s collected works, which received support from the New York State Council on the Arts, are forthcoming from New Directions and Ugly Duckling Presse.

Circumference

Poetry in Translation

Mendiga voz

A Beggar Voice