Maria Lourdes Riillo

on translating Alejandra Pizarnik

“Shadow of the Coming Days” is dedicated to Ivonne A. Bordelois, an Argentine poet, essayist, and friend of Pizarnik. The two frequently exchanged correspondence. The poem reflects not a resignation, but an acceptance of the transfiguration of the body and mind, a reflection of days to come. To translate this poem, I began with a literal translation, then meditated on specific words. The word at the end of the first line, alba, means “sunrise” or “dawn.” I translated it as “daybreak,” however, because “daybreak” reminds me of the Spanish word parto, which means both “break” and “labor (birth).” I enjoyed the juxtaposition “daybreak” contributes to in “They will dress me with ashes at daybreak.” Also, instead using the literal translation of muro, which is “wall,” I settled on “mural.” I think that a memory of a mural is still a wall, but a wall with a vivid painting on it is potentially a haunting memory. I had trouble with the second-to-last line specifically because I wanted to preserve its stops and silences. Its literal translation is “in the respiration.” I preserved the “in,” and changed “respiration” to “steady breath.” As for the last line, “beast” is more mystical and threatening than “animal,” which I thought would mesh better with the word “dreaming” and the dreamlike quality of the poem.

“A Word’s Wish” is incredibly disorienting in the original Spanish, and unlike anything I have ever read. As with “Shadow of Days to Come,” I wanted to preserve the unsettling feeling in the English translation. Pizarnik wrote many poems about the night. She often stayed up late, writing endlessly. This poem is a journey back into the night, where she contemplates who she was as a little girl and whether that girl ever even existed. The second and fourth stanzas were the most challenging for me to translate. The Spanish is not grammatically correct in the second stanza of the original poem, so it was difficult to translate while preserving the uniqueness of the original. Further, the last line of the second stanza is particularly interesting because it is not a straightforward sentence. A literal translation is “at any moment, the fissure in the wall and the sudden undoing of the girls I was.” In order to retain the broken and unclear nature of the sentence, I kept the first half of the sentence and left “girls” plural. Regarding the fourth stanza, it is not gendered in the original poem, but as I was translating, I began to use “she” and it resonated with me. It seems to me that the narrator in the fourth stanza yearns for the little girl that she once was. The little girl is long gone, but her imprint remains. She is so distant, in fact, that she even speaks a different language. Finally, I spent some time on the last sentence because it didn’t have a verb. Literally, the line translates as “to bread and water all life.” I think that at the end, the narrator accepts there will be no miracle, and that she must continue to live satisfied by the simple things, such as bread and water. It’s not defeat, but an acceptance of reality.