Across language(s): translation, multilingualism, and visuality in the poetics of Alejandra Pizarnik and Susana Thénon

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By expanding their poetic practice beyond the textual to include other art forms, Argentine writers Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972) and Susana Thénon (1935-1991) challenge stable ideas of language, and instead create complex, multilingual networks of meaning. They reject that expression should be limited by verbal language, instead redefining their creative sphere to encompass multiple media and multilingualism, thereby exposing new modes of poetry.Pizarnik and Thénon encapsulate what Richard Andrews (2018) characterises as a multimodal approach to poetics. Primarily poets, both also engaged in translation, knew several languages, and practised the visual arts. This project will situate these practices as vital elements of their poetic practice that enrich their work and open up new readings of the text, as well as challenging the boundaries of the 'text' itself.This research project will examine the nuances of the following questions: What are the limits of language as traced in Pizarnik and Thénon's poetry? What similarities are found at the juncture of the visual and linguistic in their work? How do these practices challenge and disrupt existing conceptions of language and the 'text'?In an Anglophone context, Jahan Ramazani (2009) examines the unique ways in which poetry interacts with a world where cultures increasingly intertwine. This project will expand the sphere of conversation to Latin American poetry and translation, drawing on Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson's description (2012) of translation as 'a wound that makes impossible connections between languages, unsettling stable ideas of language, productive ideas of literature'.Árbol de Alejandra: Pizarnik Reassessed (2007) was a pivotal moment in Pizarnik studies, but her paintings and translations remain relatively under-explored. I will expand upon Fiona Mackintosh's research into Pizarnik's translations (2010) by focusing on her self-translation or 'transcreation' practices, which deviate from what a third-party translator may have written. Carlota Caulfield's anthology of Pizarnik's letters on the visual (2003) makes a compelling case for further investigation into the ekphrastic elements of Pizarnik's poetry, and the textual elements of her drawings.Thénon was Pizarnik's contemporary, and while her poetry explores similar themes, it has received less critical attention. As Pizarnik grows more popular, the unique nature of this comparison will elevate the status of Thénon as an underrepresented writer. Paola Cortés Rocca (2013) has analysed Thénon's photography, and this project will go further by analysing the fusion of poetry, translation, and photography in Thénon's exhibition of her translations of Rainer Maria Rilke alongside her imagery, which she described as 'an enthralling challenge: to synthesise in one image what the poet develops in time'. This fusion will be a key focus of the project. This analysis would be particularly fruitful for Latin American studies, as many of Latin America's most notable 20th-century writers lived abroad, wrote in several languages, and wove together disparate cultural references. The history of Latin America is necessarily transnational and I hope, by placing poetry in dialogue with other creative practices, to encourage other scholars to adopt an interdisciplinary and internationalist approach, whereby individual disciplines and genres are not seen as hermetic but instead as being perpetually in dialogue with other artists, national imaginaries, and forms.My primary methods will be discourse analysis and textual analysis, focusing on close reading of the materials available to elaborate both writers' poetics. This will be supported by archival work, examining their manuscripts and visual works to find supporting evidence. My interdisciplinary approach, drawing on literary theory, translation theory, and art criticism, will allow me to address the question of the bounds of the t