Exchanging Lives

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 Exc [...]
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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.