Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

I remember walking the streets in Buenos Aires several years ago and noticing the neoclassical buildings in certain areas, and the brutalist buildings in other areas. Buenos Aires is a city of contrasts. The contrast between the stately 19th century buildings like the Casa Rosada and the small brightly colored buildings of La Boca — which is one of the areas where Tango was first invented — will make your brain spin with possibilities.

Like many famed places with layers of history, it is both a city of noise and a city of silence. A city of both music and protests and of brooding intellectual intensity. When I think of the literary history of Buenos Aires, it’s easy to first think of the famed short story writer Borges, but for me, I also think of Argentinian writer Alejandra Pizarnik.

Like the city where she spent her life, she was a poet of contrasts. She was obsessed with not just language, but with silence. How silence was as much of a force in the poem as the words themselves. I remember going to the iconic Café Tortoni on the Avenida de Mayo and sipping a cidre and watching people stroll in for tango lessons in the backroom. Buenos Aires seemed to me like a city where the arts are alive, valued, and celebrated.

For me, the best way to get to know the history of any place is to explore the poetry of that place. When I read Alejandra Pizarnik now, I think of her at Cafe Tortoni, or at home, writing her darkly layered lyrical poems. And I also think of the note she received from the famous Mexican poet Octavio Paz who wrote: “I am in love with your poems: I’d like you to make lots of them and for them to spread love and terror everywhere.”

In today’s poem, Alejandra Pizarnik shows us the speaker struggling with both language and silence and how the poem can both become a way in and a way out.

Fragments for Subduing The Silence
by Alejandra Pizarnik

Translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert

I.
     The powers of language are the solitary ladies who sing, desolate, with this voice of mine 
that I hear from a distance. And far away, in the black sand, lies a girl heavy with ancestral 
music. Where is death itself? I have wanted clarity in light of my lack of light. Branches die in
the memory. The girl lying in the sand nestles into me with her wolf mask. The one she
couldn’t stand anymore and that begged for flames and that we set on fire.

II.
     When the roof tiles blow away from the house of language, and words no longer keep—that
is when I speak.
     The ladies in red have lost themselves in their masks. Though they will return to sob among
the flowers.
     Death is no mute. I hear the song of the mourners sealing the clefts of silence. I listen and
the sweetness of your crying brings life to my grey silence.

III.
     Death has restored to silence its own bewitching charm. And I will not say my poem and I 
will say it. Even if (here, now) the poem has no feeling, no future. 

‘’Fragments for Subduing the Silence’’ by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert, from EXTRACTING THE STONE OF MADNESS, copyright © 2000 by Miriam Pizarnik. Translation copyright © 2016 by Yvette Siegert. Use by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.