Señor
La jaula se ha vuelto pájaro
y se ha volado
y mi corazón está loco
porque aúlla a la muerte
y sonríe detrás del viento
a mis delirios
Qué haré con el miedo
Qué haré con el miedo
Alejandra (1939-1972) was born in Buenos Aires into a family of Russian Jews who immigrated to Argentina. In 1954 she attended the University of Buenos Aires where she studied philosophy and from 1955 to 1957, literature. She also studied painting under the tutelage of surrealist painter Juan Battle Planas. In 1960 she left for France where she lived for the next four years and worked as a freelance proofreader and translator, writing poetry and criticism for Latin American, Spanish and French literary magazines. In 1965 her book Los trabajos y las noches was named the best book of poetry by the Argentine Foundation of Arts. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969 and in 1971 a Fulbright. She killed herself by an overdose of senocal. In my youth I read her work but dismissed her as another of the many crazy over-psychoanalyzed Jewish girls of Buenos Aires, all of them writing poems and short stories. But she was different and her impact is growing. Now, she has become an important cultural figure of the Spanish language.
2 comments:
Why did she kill herself? I cannot read Spanish, but as an Latin matriculant, I can at least detect the subject matter of her poem does not appear to be a happy one.
And is this not a commentary on the limits of intellectual evolution?
Anon.
Why? I wondered for a long time why people kill themselves. It is so anti-evolutionary. I think it is a chemical thing, for example stopping xeroxat causes suicidal thoughts. Chemical imbalance in the brain.
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