FRIENDSHIP AND MUTUAL FRIENDS

Alejandra Pizarnik was a friend and admirer of Silvina Ocampo. Her acquaintance with the older writer, on paper at least, dates from 1967 when her article on Ocampo's anthology El pecado mortal was published in Sur. From Pizarnik's letters to Ocampo covering the three years from 1969 to Pizarnik's death in 1972, we can see that both the infantile and the erotic played a part, from Pizarnik's point of view, in their idiosyncratic relationship. Cristina Piña describes their friendship as ‘una amistad hecha de fascinación, risas, bromas perversas, admiración y complicidad’ (Mujeres argentinas, p. 318) and sees Ocampo's symbolic world of ‘niños perversos’ as ‘un universo gemelo al de la Alejandra que con sus gestos, su rostro y su comportamiento infantiles, divertía y escandalizaba […] a sus interlocutores […], o la que “jugaba” con […] la muerte’. It is noteworthy that Piña situates them in twin universes but in doing so she compares Ocampo's work not only with Pizarnik's writing but also, in the first instance, with her life. This underlines the absolute fusion in Pizarnik's universe between self and poetic work. Noemí Ulla, at the end of her introduction to Emecé's new edition of Viaje olvidado (which presumably aims to outline the current state of Ocampo's reception and position within Argentine literature) slips in a tantalizingly elliptical reference to Pizarnik:

Her allusions bring together quite different strands of River Plate literature; the link with Borges and Bioy is not surprising, nor that with Wilcock given their collaboration on Los traidores and Daniel Balderston's article linking their stories,5 but Ulla does not elaborate on the nature of the ‘audacity and particularity’ which moves her to link Ocampo with Pizarnik in this way.