Pizarnik’s Piedra fundamental
My brother Eli, his wife Mary and Baby Ivan have just left for the Detroit Airport. It is raining. I have left Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juilet Overture-Fantasy on endless CD playback. I love that music right now. It is dramatic, brassy, cocky, alive while so much of our 21st Century art tries to mute those emotions, to be demure, to be fragmented, to find so little joy in the song. Where does this writing lead us? Alejandra Pizarnik asks the reader. She answers: To blackness, to the sterile, to the fragmented.
But am I being fair? Fragments and sequences, however, are all around us. It mght be said when this life is all over I was much more a formalist in my tastes than anything else, perhaps. It is too early to know. I do not mind a rough ride, per se, but I do mind those who have nothing to say but say it extraordinarily taking up my time. Fragments, I suspect, have the tendancy to allow such brillance. I have stood corrected before, though. The wonderful Ruth Ellen Kocher writes in her introduction to Natural Bridge:
The concept of parts is a writer’s concept. We are all about piecing. And as much as we piece, and assemble, and put together, and weave, we dissect, we disassemble, we destroy, and obliterate. We cannot write without everything going to pieces and then, again, becoming whole. There is, at some point, a stasis, perhaps the type Frost referred to, maybe more than a ‘stay against confusion,’ an actual stasis within it, when we simply halt our process of building and tearing down, fragmenting and making whole, fraying to bits and reassembling—and at this moment of stasis, we find at least a moment of pause, of culmination, of finishing. Without some process of fragmentation, we cannot write or complete anything.
And here I am transalting Pizarnik, her Fundamental Stone, which is both fragmented and part of her larger Infernal Music (1971), written a year before she comitted suicide, would seem to prove me wrong. Elizabeth Zeiss-Banks, writing in Images of Melancholy and Mourning states:
Another image that arises in … Pizarnik’s compositions is that of a hostile object or person inhabiting the subject, a situation, which, as we will see below, is symptomatic of melancholy … These objects, (the melody, the wind), physically invade the subject’s body. The most dramatic example of this phenomenon appears in Piedra fundamental, where the poetic voice says: y he sabido dónde se aposenta aquello tan otro que es yo, que espera que me calle para tomar posesión de mí y drenar y barrenar los cimientos, los fundamentos….
Which I translated as: and I have known where that other which is me rests, which longs that I will be still so as to take custody of me and drain and drill my groundwork, my foundation, all that is hostile from within me, all that conspires to take custody of my wasteland … So how do I stand on all this? While I personally might hunger for poetry that is dramatic, brassy, cocky; at some level I am surprised the Language School of Poetics has not championed Pizarnik more. Her broken style, her obsession with where language in itself could take her, her humor, her poetic mania, all rival much that is being written today.
| Piedra fundamental Alejandra Pizarnik |
Fundamental Stone translated by ZJC |
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No puedo hablar con mi voz sino con mis voces. Sus ojos eran la entrada del templo, para mí, que soy errante, que amo y muero. Y hubiese cantado hasta hacerme una con la noche, hasta deshacerme desnuda en la entrada del tiempo. Un canto que atravieso como un túnel. Presencias inquietantes, gestos de figuras que se aparecen vivientes por obra de un lenguaje activo que las alude, signos que insinúan terrores insolubles. Una vibración de los cimientos, un trepidar de los fundamentos, drenan y barrenan, y he sabido dónde se aposenta aquello tan otro que es yo, que espera que me calle para tomar posesión de mí y drenar y barrenar los cimientos, los fundamentos, En el silencio mismo (no en el mismo silencio) tragar noche, una noche inmensa inmersa en el sigilo de los pasos perdidos. No puedo hablar para nada decir. Por eso nos perdemos, yo y el poema, en la tentativa inútil de transcribir relaciones ardientes. ¿A dónde la conduce esta escritura? A lo negro, a lo estéril, a lo fragmentado. Las muñecas desventradas por mis antiguas manos de muñeca, la desilusión al encontrar pura estopa (pura estepa tu memoria): el padre, que tuvo que ser Tiresias, flota en el río. Pero tú, ¿por qué te dejaste asesinar escuchando cuentos de álamos nevados? Yo quería que mis dedos de muñeca penetraran en las teclas. Yo no quería rozar, como una araña, el teclado. Yo quería hundirme, clavarme, fijarme, petrificarme. Yo quería entrar en el teclado para entrar adentro de la música para tener una patria. Pero la música se movía, se apresuraba. Sólo cuando un refrán reincidía, alentaba en mí la esperanza de que se estableciera algo parecido a una estación de trenes, quiero decir: un punto de partida firme y seguro; un lugar desde el cual partir, desde el lugar, hacia el lugar, en unión y fusión con el lugar. Pero el refrán era demasiado breve, de modo que yo no podía fundar una estación pues no contaba más que con un tren algo salido de los rieles que se contorsionaba y se distorsionaba. Entonces abandoné la música y sus traiciones porque la música estaba más arriba o más abajo, pero no en el centro, en el lugar de la fusión y del encuentro. (Tú que fuiste mi única patria ¿en dónde buscarte? Tal vez en este poema que voy escribiendo.) Una noche en el circo recobré un lenguaje perdido en el momento que los jinetes con antorchas en la mano galopaban en ronda feroz sobre corceles negros. Ni en mis sueños de dicha existirá un coro de ángeles que suministre algo semejante a los sonidos calientes para mi corazón de los cascos contra las arenas. (Y me dijo: Escribe; porque estas palabras son fieles y verdaderas.) (Es un hombre o una piedra o un árbol el que va a comenzar el canto…) Y era un estremecimiento suavemente trepidante (lo digo para aleccionar a la que extravió en mí su musicalidad y trepida con más disonancia que un caballo azuzado por una antorcha en las arenas de un país extranjero). Estaba abrazada al suelo, diciendo un nombre. Creí que me había muerto y que la muerte era decir un nombre sin cesar. No es esto, tal vez, lo que quiero decir. Este decir y decirse no es grato. No puedo hablar con mi voz sino con mis voces. También este poema es posible que sea una trampa, un escenario más. Cuando el barco alteró su ritmo y vaciló en el agua violenta, me erguí como la amazona que domina solamente con sus ojos azules al caballo que se encabrita (¿o fue con sus ojos azules?). El agua verde en mi cara, he de beber de ti hasta que la noche se abra. Nadie puede salvarme pues soy invisible aun para mí que me llamo con tu voz. ¿En dónde estoy? Estoy en un jardín. Hay un jardín. |
I can’t speak with my tongue, only with my tongues. His eyes, admittance to the temple, for me, a pilgrim who loves and dies. I sung until I became one with the night, until I fell apart naked in the admittance to time. I go through a song like a tunnel. Irksome presence, acknowledgment of bodies that appear alive due to their tireless language that hints about them, symbols that hint at irresolvable horror. An upheaval of groundwork, a shock of foundations, draining and drilling, and I have known where that other which is me rests, which longs that I will be still so as to take custody of me and drain and drill my groundwork, my foundation, all that is hostile from within me, all that conspires to take custody of my wasteland, In the very silence (not the very same silence) that swallows the nighttime, a tremendous nighttime sunk in the stealth of lost steps. I can not speak only to say nothing. That is why we got lost, the poem and I, in the futile attempt to decipher our burning relationships. Where does this writing lead us? To blackness, to the sterile, to the fragmented. The dolls gutted by my ancient doll hands, the failure upon finding pure guts (pure grasslands, your memory): the father, who had to be Tiresias, floating in the stream. But you, why did you let yourself die hearing myths of poplar trees covered with first snow? My doll fingers, I wanted to penetrate the piano keys. I did not want to graze – like a spider – the keyboard. I wanted to plunge myself in, to nail myself, to attach myself, to mineralize myself. I wanted to enter the keyboard in order to enter the interior of the music in order to have a kingdom. But the music was poignant, was hurrying. Only a chorus repeated was my only dream, erected into something the way a railroad station would be established, I mean: a solid and sure point of departure; a place from which to depart, from the location to the location, in junction and fusion with the location. But the chorus was too short, so I could not find a station since I could only count on one locomotive, slightly off the rails, that was twisting and distorting itself. So I deserted music and its treachery because music was higher or lower but not in the center, not on the place of fusion and rendezvous. (You who were my only kingdom, where should I look for you? Perhaps in this poem I am writing.) One night in the circus I recovered a lost language in the moment when riders with burning brands in their hands galloped a brutal ring on black stallions. Not even in my blithe dreams will there exist a refrain of angels that supply my heart with something like the warm sound of all those hooves pounding against the sand. (And he told me: Write; because these words are constant and sincere.) (It is a man or a stone or a tree that will begin And there was a trembling softly shaking (I say it to teach a lesson to she who was lost in me, her musicality and shaking with more chaos than a horse, urged on by a burning brand on the sands of an alien land). I was hugging the earth, crying a name. I thought that I had died, and that death meant to say a name ceaselessly. This is not, conceivably, what I am trying to say. This saying and saying oneself is not agreeable. I can not speak with my tongue but only with my tongues. It is also possible that this poem is an ambush, just another abstraction. When the steamer varied its rhythm and swayed in the violent sea, I straightened up like a rider who, with her blue eyes alone, brought the rearing horse under her control (or was it just with her blue eyes?). Green water fell on my face, I have to drink you up until the nighttime opens. No one can save me because I am veiled even to myself, I who calls me with your tongue: Where am I? I’m in a garden. There is a garden. |