Alejandra Pizarnik

The Bloody Countess - A Fragment

The criminal does not make beauty;
he himself is authentic beauty.
SARTRE

Valentine Penrose has compiled documents about a real and very unusual character: the countess Báthory, assassin of 650 girls.
An excellent poet (her first book carries an enthusiastic preface by Paul Eluard), she hasn't separated her poetic gift from her meticulous erudition. Without altering the actual information she laboriously obtained, she has fashioned it into a vast and beautiful prose poem.
The sexual perversion and dementia of the countess Báthory are so evident that Valentine Penrose leaves them aside in order to concentrate exclusively on the convulsive beauty of the character.
It's not easy to show this kind of beauty; Valentine Penrose, however, has achieved this, as she admirably plays with the aesthetic values of this sinister story. She inscribes the subterranean realm of Erzébet Báthory in the torture room of her medieval castle: there the sinister beauty of nocturnal creatures is rendered in a silence of legendary pallor, demented eyes, hair the sumptuous color of crows.
A well-known philosopher includes screams in the category of silence. Screams, pants, imprecations, form a "silent substance." That of this dungeon is malignant. Sitting on her throne, the countess witnesses torture and hears screaming. Her old and horrible servants are silent figures who bring fire, blades, needles, spokes; who torture girls and later bury them. Like the spoke or the blades these old women are instruments of her possession. This somber ceremony has a sole silent spectator.

The Iron Maiden

…among the red laughter of glimmering lips
and the monstrous gestures of mechanical women.
R. DAUMAL

There was in Nuremberg a famous automaton called "the Iron Maiden." The countess Báthory acquired a replica for the torture chamber of her castle Csejthe. This metallic maiden was of the size and color of a human creature. Naked, dolled up, jeweled, with blond hair that reached the floor, a mechanism would allow her lips to open into a smile, her eyes to move.
The countess, seated in her throne, watches.
To activate the "Maiden" it is necessary to touch some precious stones in her necklace. She responds immediately with horrible mechanical sounds and slowly raises her arms so they close in a perfect embrace around that which is near her - in this case, a girl. The automaton embraces her and it is no longer possible to disentangle the living body from the iron body, both equal in beauty. Soon, the made-up breasts of the Iron Maiden open and five daggers appear, penetrating her living companion whose long hair is loose like her own.
Having already consummated the sacrifice, you touch another stone on the necklace: the arms fall, the smile closes as the eyes do, and the assassin becomes again the immobile "Maiden" in her coffin.

Death By Water

He is standing. And standing
in such an absolute and definite way
as if he were sitting.
W. GOMBROWICZ

The path is snowy, and the somber lady bundled in furs inside the carriage grows deathly bored. Suddenly she calls the name of some girl in her entourage. They bring the named one: the countess bites her frantically and drives needles through her. Soon thereafter the cortège abandons in the snow a wounded young girl and continues to travel. But as it comes to a stop again, the wounded girl flees, is persecuted, captured, and reintroduced into the carriage which proceeds moving, yet stops again as the countess has just asked for icy water. Now the girl is naked and standing in the snow. It's night. A circle of torches sustained by impassable footmen encircles her. They pour the water over her body and the water turns to ice. (The countess watches from inside the carriage). There is a slight final effort on behalf of the girl to grow closer to the torches, from which emanates the only heat. They throw more water over her and there she remains, standing forever, erect, dead.

Alejandra Pizarnik's Poetics

"Ojalá pudiera vivir solamente en éxtasis, hacienda el cuerpo del poema con mi cuerpo, rescatando cada frase con mis días y con mis semanas, infundiéndole al poema mi soplo a medida que cada letra de cada palabra haya sido sacrificada en las ceremonias del vivir."

If only I were able to live solely in ecstasy, making the body of the poem with my body, redeeming each phrase with my days and weeks, infusing the poem with my breath for each word that has been sacrificed in the ceremonies of living.

"La poesía es el lugar donde todo sucede. A semejanza del amor, del humor, del suicidio y de todo acto profundamente subversivo, la poesía se desentiende de lo que no es su libertad o su verdad. Decir libertad o verdad y referir estas palabras al mundo en que vivimos o no vivimos es decir una mentira. No lo es cuando se las atribuye a la poesía: lugar donde todo es posible."

Poetry is the place where everything happens. Similar to love, humor, suicide and every profoundly subversive act, poetry is not interested in that which is not its freedom or truth. To say freedom or truth and refer these words to the world we live in or do not live in is to tell a lie. It isn't when they are attributed to poetry: the place where all is possible.

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