Pizarnik’s La Muerte y la Muchacha (Schubert)

This poem is part of the miscellaneous verse collected in the "1971-72″ section of Pizarnik's Obras Completas (page 243); though La Muerte y la Muchacha (Schubert) is dated November 1970, a couple of months after I was born. It is interesting that she was working with the concept of music and death as a combined force, a trigger for killing. She writes in a fragment of an ode to Janis Joplin: "you did well in dying/ for that reason I will speak to you,/ for that reason I will trust in a young monster" (page 242). Young monster, indeed.

La Muerte y la Muchacha (Schubert)
Alejandra Pizarnik
Death and the Maiden (Schubert)
translated by ZJC

La muerte y la muchacha
abrazadas en el bosque
devoran el corazón de la música
en el corazón del sinsentido

una muchacha lleva un candelabro de siete brazos
y baila detrás de los tristes músicos
que tañen en violines rotos
en torno a una mujer verdes abrazada a un unicornio y a una
mujer azul abrazada a un gallo

en lo bajo
y en lo triste
hay casitas
que nadie ve
de madera, húmedas
y hundiendose como barcos,
¿era esto, pues, el concepto del espacio?
Criaturas en dulce erección
y la mujer azul
con el ojo de la alegría enfoca directamente
la taumaturga estación de los amores muertos.

Death and the maiden
embrace in the forest
devour the heart of music
in the heart of senselessness

a maiden takes a candelabrum with seven arms
and dances behind the sad musicians
who play on broken violins
around a green woman embracing a unicorn
and a blue woman embracing to a rooster

at the bottom
and in the sad area
are small houses
that nobody sees
made of wood, humid
and sinking like boats,
was this, then, the concept of the space?
Creatures with sweet erections
and the blue woman
with the joyful eye focuses
directly on the sorcerer’s season of dead loves.

Leave a Reply