Translation :: Alejandra Pizarnik, 'Meeting House'

• ‘Casa de Citas’,¹ from Prosa completa, (Lumen - Barcelona, 2021), 69-71.

J’en parle en fin de traduire un état de terreur.

I’m speaking of it in order to convey a state of terror. —Georges Bataille

—It’s as if there are little beggar boys jumping over my mind’s fence, searching for openings, burrows, things to break and steal. 
—Someone was amazed that the cats had two holes in their fur where their eyes should have been.
—‘I hate ghosts’, she said, and it was clear from her tone that it was only after she had uttered the words that she grasped their meaning.
—Open your mouth a little more so we can tell you’re talking.
—I feel like I won’t ever be able to speak again.
—Speak in a very low voice. And, above all, remember who you are.
—Then she screams.

—I am thinking that.
—It’s not true. Things converge around you from nothing.

—In the distance, there was the indistinct sound of a little girl singing songs from her time as a little girl.
—What do you think about while singing?
—That this dream of riding a bicycle to see a waterfall surrounded by green leaves was not meant for me.
  —I just wanted to see the garden.
—And now?
—I feel like escaping to a more hospitable country and, at the same time, I’m reaching under my clothes for a knife.
—Like you, I would like to be a thing that doesn’t experience the passing of years.
—I suppose that the ageing of the face must be a terrible knife wound.
—Life has forgotten us and the worst of it is that we don’t die as a result.
—All the same, we’re getting worse and worse.
—So life hasn’t forgotten us then.

—Bitch words. How could my screams define a syntax? Everything is articulated in the body when the body speaks the indescribable force of primitive desires.
—I am just saying the space where the sign of the reflection of a thought which emits screams is written.

—I am real, she said. And she began to cry.
—Real? Get out of here.
—Something flows. It doesn’t stop flowing.
—I said go away.
—You told me to go away. I’ve been trying to do that since my mother gave birth to me.
—You do not exist, nor does your mother, nor does anything else. Except the dictionary.

—I have attained the marvellous ability to sympathise with anything that suffers.
—I do not understand. I went to the brothel, that beautiful constellation of dead diviners. 
—I understand. The critique of whore reason.
—I was amazed at the amount of amazement; I saw a woman mounted upon an animal in its brute state.
—My fear of applying a single adjective to life.
—I always stumble over my childhood prayer. 
—It’s always like this: I stand by the door; I knock; nobody opens. 
—I told him how much was in my heart. 
—That’s why you ran away, isn’t it?
—At the hour of death, one sings for oneself, not for anyone else. 
—Only by her song could the silent lover be recognised.
—All around the world the women who sing and the men who sing and all those who sing will be dispersed.

—And then she will quietly assume the habit of madness.
—Again the shadow.
—And then I walked away, or arrived. Will I have time to make a mask for when I emerge from the shadows?
—The shadow, it is here. A house of spilt salt, a house of broken mirrors. I had found a small, lonely place, suitable for crying. This time the shadow came in the afternoon. And it doesn’t always eat at night. I don’t have a name for it anymore.
—This time it came in the afternoon, and it doesn’t always eat at night. It came back, but even during the day I don’t have a name for it anymore. This time it looked yellow. I was sitting in the kitchen with a burnt match between my fingers.

1971