Exchanging Lives Poems and Translations

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.

Alejandra Pizarnik was born in Buenos Aires in 1936, of a lost Russian-Jewish ancestry. Her work is confessional, oblique, dense. Her fantasies were dark, of blood and knives. She wrote of being 'a few steps away from the eternity of silence' and took her own life in 1972 Susan Bassnett is Professor of Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her fantasies 'were of secret sexual encounters and having the strength to break through bars'. Her poems have appeared in Babel, Start, Sheaf, Writing Women, Signs, The Literary Review and the Virago Book of Love Poetry