Diana's Tree: Arbol de Diana - Tapa blanda

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Alejandra Pizarnik was born in 1936, in Avellaneda, Buenos Aires, to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland. After a difficult childhood, she began studies at the University of Buenos Aires, and shortly afterwards published her first poetry collection. She dropped out of university in order to study painting, and published two further poetry collections in the 1950s. From 1960-1964, Pizarnik lived in Paris, working for the magazine Cuadernos and several French publications. She published widely while there, and translated the works of Artaud, Michaux, Césaire, Bonnefoy and Duras. She also studied at the Sorbonne, where she became close to Julio Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo and Octavio Paz. The latter wrote an introduction for her fourth collection, Árbol de Diana (1962). She returned to Buenos Aires in 1964, and published the books which were to make her name: Los trabajos y las noches (1965), Extracción de la piedra de la locura (1968) and El infierno musical (1971). Alejandra Pizarnik took her own life in 1972, taking an overdose of barbiturates one weekend when she was on short release from the psychiatric hospital where she was under care.

Anna Deeny Morales has translated poetry by Raúl Zurita, Mercedes Roffé, Alejandra Pizarnik, Amanda Berenguer, Nicanor Parra, Gabriela Mistral, Idea Vilariño, Marosa di Giorgio and Malú Urriola. She is the editor and translator of Sky Below, a volume of selected works by Zurita (Northwestern University Press). She has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and teaches at the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.