Extracting the stone of madness by Alejandra Pizarnik and translated by Yvette Siegert

This is poetry from Argentina.

Extracting the stone of madness by Alejandra Pizarnik translated by Yvette Siegert is published by New Directions. This is a Book originally written in Spanish. This was published in 2016.0 and has the ISBN of 9.780811223966E12.

Extracting the Stone of Madness, translated by Yvette Siegert, offers one of the clearest English-language entrances into Alejandra Pizarnik’s severe and luminous world. Pizarnik writes from the charged zone between speech and disappearance, where the self is never a stable subject but a voice trying to understand why it has a voice at all. The poems can feel small on the page and enormous in the nervous system. Their subjects are familiar enough: night, silence, childhood, desire, death, language. Yet Pizarnik makes them feel newly dangerous. Siegert’s translations preserve the clipped intensity and the uncanny calm of the work. I would recommend this to readers who want poetry that does not console so much as accompany the question. Pizarnik’s great gift is not clarity. It is the permission to remain inside the mystery of being oneself.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.