This essay was part of a PhD thesis, submitted in 2006, which comprises the translation into English of Pizarnik's Poesía completa, with the exception of the disowned early work La tierra más ajena (1955). In the first part, I explore Pizarnik's subjectivity and her ambiguous positioning of the first-person subject in language. I then move on to a consideration of the practical difficulties that arise on a phonological and syntactical level for the translator of Pizarnik as a result of this often multiple persona.

‘Toda la noche espero que mi lenguaje logre configurarme’ Pizarnik says in the poem ‘L’Obscurité des eaux’ (Poesía, p. 285), from the last collection published in her lifetime, El infierno musical (1971). A few lines below, she adds: ‘A mí me han dado un silencio pleno de formas y visiones.’ For Pizarnik night is when language becomes her language, and hence poetry, and where, through this transformation of word into poem, she is configured, in the sense that she is gathered together, takes form, or, in other words, gains subjectivity. Pizarnik is concerned with the night and its silence; it is in the silence of the night that she chases the words that will make poems. It is there that she constructs her own subjectivity within her poetry. The poem is the place, the ‘morada’ or dwelling, where this subject comes to exist and live:

In this respect, ‘lo que no es’ can be read not only as her visions and dreams, but also as her own subjectivity.

This does not mean that at all times the passage from silence to language, or from vision to word, and hence to subject, is a smooth one. Many times the poet is ‘perdida en el silencio/ de las palabras fantasmas’ (Poesía, p. 319), chasing what cannot be said: ‘Yo era lo imposible y también el desgarramiento por lo imposible’ (Poesía, p. 358). My concern is not with the success or failure of this enterprise, but with this search for subjectivity in language. And the first issue to be addressed here is the understanding of ‘subjectivity’ as different positions in language.