The translating subject: another double of Alejandra Pizarnik’s lyrical I?

Abstract

Fragmentation of the subject is one of the distinctive features of the poetry of Argentine writer Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1072). Indeed, her poems convey her perpetual dissatisfaction with language, which cannot express her lyrical self in all of its complexity or resuscitate her biographical self. Particularly in her fourth poetry book, Árbol de Diana (1962), the poet’s creative persona suffers from a serious multiple personality disorder. Now, what happens when a translating subject takes on the voice of Pizarnik’s already fragmented lyrical I? First, an analysis of the original pronouns will show that the book’s lyrical I is most often a woman who is both one and multifaceted, and that this shifting subject permeates all the poems. Then, the transformations of this voice will be observed in three of the most circulated translations of the book, in order to identify and determine the degree of intervention of the translators’ re‐creative persona: Claude Couffon’s “je” (1983), Frank Graziano and María Rosa Fort’s “I” (1987), and Juana and Tobias Burghardt’s “ich” (2002).