Exchanging Lives: Poems and Translations

Exchanging Lives makes available for the first time in English the work of an outstanding Latin American poet, the Argentinian Alejandra Pizarnik. Pizarnik's work has been celebrated in feminist criticism for its subversive use of violent myth (comparable to the later work of Angela Carter). But Exchanging Lives is not a conventional translation, because the translator, Susan Bassnett, herself a published poet, enters into a personal dialogue with Pizarnik's poems. The dialogue is about finding womanist concerns that poet and translator share, but also about differences. Pizarnik, who described herself as "a silent woman/ . . . who sometimes flows with language," speaks of social isolation and not belonging, whereas Bassnett finds herself fighting for personal writing space. The effect of the dialogue in the book is to bring the person of Pizarnik, as well as her poems, into closer focus.