Exchanging Lives: Poems and Translations

by Susan Bassnett, Alejandra Pizarnik

Exchanging Lives makes available for the first time in English the work of an outstanding Latin American poet, the Argentinian Alejandra Pizarnik. Pizarnik's work has been celebrated in feminist criticism for its subversive use of violent myth (comparable to the later work of Angela Carter). But Exchanging Lives is not a conventional translation, because the translator, Susan Bassnett, herself a published poet, enters into a personal dialogue with Pizarnik's poems. The dialogue is about finding womanist concerns that poet and translator share, but also about differences. Pizarnik, who described herself as "a silent woman/ . . . who sometimes flows with language," speaks of social isolation and not belonging, whereas Bassnett finds herself fighting for personal writing space. The effect of the dialogue in the book is to bring the person of Pizarnik, as well as her poems, into closer focus.

Author Biography: Alejandra Pizarnik was born in Buenos Aires in 1936. Her work is confessional, oblique, dense. Her fantasies were dark, of blood and knives. She wrote of being "a few steps away from the eternity of silence" and took her own life in 1972. Susan Bassnett is professor of comparative literary studies at the University of Warwick. Her fantasies 'were of secret sexual encounters and having the strength to break through bars.' Her poems have appeared in Babel, Start, Sheaf, Writing Women, Signs, Literary Review, and the Virago Book of Love Poetry. She is the author of over 25 books including Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America, Feminist Experiences: The Women's Movement in Four Cultures, and Translation Studies.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2002

About the author

Susan Bassnett is Professor of Comparative Literature in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_B...

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 1 out of 5]

Atrocious translation of Pizarnik paramount to literary treason.

[Inken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let me just say upfront that I’m very bad at analyzing poetry. I know the emotions it creates in me, I know what I think and feel when I read it, but when it comes to writing that down, language fails me. Or maybe I fail it. Anyway.

Alejandra Pizarnik is a woefully unknown poet who died far too young nearly 45 years ago when she took an overdose of sleeping pills. Her poetry is dark and full of violent imagery, stemming from the isolated and difficult childhood she endured as the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Argentina.

“Exchanging Lives” is a collection by Susan Bassnett, currently a professor of comparative literature at the University of Warwick, UK. Bassnett is also a “translation theorist”, author of several scholarly books on literary criticism, a translator and a poet. Her own poems appear in “Exchanging Lives” intermingled with Pizarnik’s, which are published in the Spanish original and in Bassnett’s English translation. The book is divided into three sections: a selection Pizarnik’s own poems from her book “Diana’s Tree” with translation, Pizarnik’s and Bassnett’s poems and finally Bassnett’s own work.

The second part is a dialogue between the two women as Pizarnik writes of loneliness, loss and death; Bassnett of sexual encounters, motherhood and family discord. Both write about identity: lack of it, searching for it, defining it based on others’ thoughts and actions. Pizarnik’s poems consist of a few lines and yet in less than 25 words she conveys her pain and yearning with searing exactitude. Bassnett’s responses are much longer with sweeping imagery and metaphors.

In Pizarnik’s work there is a desire for connection conjoined with a sense of impending tragedy; as though she knows what she wants will never be hers. In Bassnett’s there is a need to be seen as something other than mother, lover or wife and to escape the condemnation of not being perfect in those roles.

The third section, “Asia of my Imaginings,” is entirely Bassnett’s work and there you can see the influence Pizarnik has had on her. The poems become shorter, almost haikus, and the language is sparse and precise as they become like a song. A tale of a woman caught up in the epic of Genghis Khan, the story has echoes of an epic poem from Old English. Bassnett admits she could not have written these poems without translating Pizarnik’s first, an experience that freed her to experiment and take greater risks with her own writing.

(Whilst my Spanish is far too rusty to comment on the translations I will say some are a bit clumsy and some appear to be extremely good. Translation is, after all, a subjective science and I’m sure no two translators ever agree on identical interpretations.)

[Zack]

i liked this book. i liked alejandra's poems a lot and want to translate them. they are very personal and dark and surreal and have hella (very) economical language. it was interesting the way susan framed her poems around them.