Extracting the Stone of Madness

The daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants, Pizarnik suffered throughout her life from severe depression and committed suicide one weekend on leave from the psychiatric hospital where she was institutionalized. Pizarnik spent several years in Paris in contact with the European poetic vanguard and toward the end of her life held a Guggenheim Foundation award. Her poetry portrays the life of Latin American women as a bodily dismemberment by a multiply oppressive and repressive patriarchy. It sparked interest alone for the intensity with which it chronicles the obsessions of a feminine poete maudit. Concomitantly, Pizarnik's poetry assumed a clandestine and iconic dimension because the bulk of her mature output coincided with the military regimes in Argentine. For some, her work is a symbol of the destruction of the individual by neo-Fascist tyranny. Although Pizarnik mostly wrote highly charged poetic vignettes, leading her to be compared with Sylvia Plath, she also wrote outstanding prose poems, culminating in The Bloody Countess (1971). This is a chilly recreation of the nefarious Hungarian noblewoman, Erzbet Bathory, who was accused in the seventeenth century of torturing to death 600 maidens; and it is a work whose interest overlaps, if only obliquely, with the significant lesbian dimension of Pizarnik's writing. 020