VENTI PRODUCCIONES

Under the subtitle "Alejandra Pizarnik's autobiographical discourse", the Venezuelan researcher has done an extensive research on the Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1937-1972), analyzing the whole of her life and work, as well as primarily, the important documents referred by her family to Princeton University, which are a precious material to study and analyze hidden aspects, forgive the word, of a writer with a remarkable own voice and a relevant author to Latin American poetry, of all times. Venti's research method is a set of theoretical applications, very popular in past decades, widely represented in the biography, but the most important thing is to retract, for interpretation, all the literature on autobiography that has been academically generated, the notebooks and diaries, not so used when interpreting other authors published work, even the same biographies.

Since Alejandra Pizarnik's case is quite complex, the review of the Princeton documents, becomes exciting to a diligent researcher, who has spent much of her time study it, in order to clarify herself some or many concepts, so that she can do it for us later.

In my opinion, this is the most serious book ever written, about the Argentinean poet and friend that had so much influence on us. Undoubtedly, the unpublished documents, diaries mainly, have to do with the gestation of Alejandra Pizarnik's own work, starting from "Árbol de Diana" (1962) , that jewel prolonged by Octavio Paz, which was the beginning of a period briefly studied by her critics. As it happens with other authors of her dimension, much emphasis has been done about her personal history, her loves, her woes, and even the most sordid stages of her life, all subtly present in her poetry, but also, and that is the merit of this book, present in her diaries, her notes, her notebooks and other writings, saved and never published, projects of other books, that show the author's affinity with other writers like Sade, Bataille, Breton, that were devoured by the poet, at the time when she lived in Paris.

Well does the scholar by analyzing the meaning of the body, her own and others, in the unpublished work, the readings of the world, of herself, of her related authors, as well as the strength of the mental disorders that progressively harassed her, until her suicide in 1972.

On the extraordinary mentioned drawings, I had the occasion to admire them in Rafael Squirru's office, at the Pan American Union, for a possible exposure there, in 1967. All would not be complete without that graphic display, which was already giving us clues of those multiple Pizarniks, who were living in one of the most tender, lovely and complex persons I have ever known, generous with others, impossible with her own self, within that concept of marginality which was occupying all her labor: woman, lesbian, Jewish, locked in her own worth as a poet, distant from many who were interested in her work, but over which she never showed any interest.

What is clear in this study, is the formation of Flora Alejandra's own voice, as she was called once, that would give birth to an entirely personal poetry, polished, reaching the deepest forms of muffled transgression, which she never made public. In her unpublished papers, so to speak, there is also another writer. A rebel to the limits, a friend of silence, of what is thought but is lived until breakdown. A revealing and deep book, made by a remarkable researcher.