Susan Bassnett

Alejandra Pizarnik

Exchanging Lives brings poet and translator into a transforming dialogue. The act of translating the Argentinean poet Alejandra Pizarnik not only frees 'fixed and frozen signs' to migrate into another language, but brings about changes in Susan Bassnett's own writing. The collection contains four sections. The first is of translations from Pizarnik's Arbol de Diana (1962), that Octavio Paz wrote, 'does not contain a single false detail' and put Pizarnik among the 'finest Latin American writers'. The second juxtaposes translations of Pizarnik with poems by Susan Bassnett. These share common concerns as women, but it is a dialogue of difference as Bassnett, fighting for personal writing space from the clamours of work and the 'mothering/wings [that] hold back my writing hand' enters the world of Pizarnik, who described herself as 'a silent woman/ ... who sometimes flows with language', whose work speaks always of social isolation and not belonging. The third section, 'Asia of my imaginings' is a sequence of poems by Bassnett that could not have been written without the experience of translating Pizarnik's daring, subversive work. The fourth brief section condenses the recognitions of identity and difference. Book jacket.

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