The working methods of Alejandra Pizarnik as reviser, self-censor and translator: a detailed examination of her unpublished manuscripts.

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This research will further knowledge in the field of Argentinian literary studies in the mid-20th century. Alejandra Pizarnik is a key figure in this period of Argentinian poetry, but one who since her death by overdose has been much mythologized. This project aims to ground our understanding of her work much more solidly in full analysis of all available manuscript material, avoiding reductive and retrospective readings of her life in the light of her death. Having devoted several articles and half of my first book to Pizarnik's work, and having recently edited (with Karl Posso) another volume of essays on this poet, I am in a strong position to carry out original research on the Princeton manuscripts of her work.'Árbol de Alejandra: Pizarnik Reassessed', (Támesis October 2007, ed. Mackintosh with Posso) addresses Pizarnik from previously unexplored angles, for example Jason Wilson and Florinda Goldberg's essays on Pizarnik as reader and critic (particularly of surrealism), Cecilia Rossi's discussion of translating Pizarnik's work into English, or my own chapter on Pizarnik's notebooks of quotations from other authors which she referred to as her 'palais du vocabulaire'. In this chapter my interest was in how Pizarnik's working methods as a poet involved extensive citation and borrowing from other authors, which places her in a Modernist framework. In the current project I will build on and develop the insights of that chapter, seeing how translation has an impact on her creation, and also looking beyond the source of her texts to the ways in which they are revised, and censored by her. In the absence of any scholarly critical edition of Pizarnik's works, the unpublished manuscript materials assume great importance, hence the urgency of this proposal. Although some of her imagery is markedly surrealist, she did not utilize surrealism's technique of automatic writing, and indeed obsessively revised her work before publication. This is particularly true in the case of the extended humorous prose work, 'La bucanera de Pernambuco', for which Princeton has five sets of revisions. This text would therefore be used as a focus for the study of Pizarnik's process of revision; closer examination of the changes made to the successive versions may also shed light on some of the more obscure or obscene puns and cultural allusions made in this dense and difficult text.In looking at Pizarnik's working methods, another aspect of her revisions which will receive further attention in this project is the issue of self-censorship. 'La bucanera' (which the critic María Negroni analyses in terms of a 'volcanvelorio del lenguaje', using Pizarnik's own phrase) gives little impression of any kind of censorship, insistently foregrounding sexuality and lavatorial or Absurd humour, yet the Princeton manuscripts show another side to Pizarnik. They reveal the existence of other unpublished texts whose focus on sexuality, particularly lesbian sexuality, appears to have influenced Pizarnik's decisions about publication. In her later works, Pizarnik was not only experimenting with more overt expression of sexuality in her poetry; she was also actively exploring expressing herself in genres other than the lyrical poetry with which critics persistently associated her. This project will therefore look in detail at her unpublished prose works, which appear to take and develop a variety of literary models such as Baudelaire's prose poems, the French form of the 'récit' or Cortázar's 'Manual de Instrucciones' from his 'Historias de Cronopios y de Famas' (1962).French literature also played its part in shaping Pizarnik's work through her activities as a translator from French, and this aspect of her output will also be examined by this project. Recent research has revealed the important impact of Pizarnik's work as a reader and reviewer; examining her work as a translator will thus complete the overall picture of Pizarnik's working methods.