, Without Formulas. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2014. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2014/04/28/sem-formulas/. Acesso em: 07 November 2024.
In 1970, Clarice Lispector started to write a work that would come to be called Água viva [translated into English as both Água Viva and Stream of Life].
According to Nádia Gotlib in “Memória seletiva” (Selective Memory), published in a special edition of Cadernos de Literatura Brasileira (Brazilian Literature Notebooks) on Clarice Lispector:Incorporating old notes, she begins to work on a new novel entitled Atrás do pensamento: monólogo com a vida (Behind Thought: A Monologue with Life). The book, which in a later phase would be called Objeto gritante (Screaming Object), would finally be called Água viva and would come out under the broad genre of “fiction,” given the author’s understanding that she had surpassed conventional classifications of literary narrative.
Cover of the 1st edition of Água viva, published in 1973 by Artenova. Ana Cristina César Library/ IMS collection
Professor Clarisse Fukelman analyzes Água viva and says that, in this work, the author “radicalizes innovative writing processes with which she had already experimented in previous publications” and develops a book in which “there is no linear story or central theme.”
Água viva was published at the end of August 1973 by the publisher Artenova. Below is a handwritten excerpt from the work’s manuscript under the care of the Moreira Salles Institute, followed by its transcription.
Excerpt from the manuscript for Água viva, by Clarice Lispector. Clarice Lispector Collection / IMS collection
Calo-me.
Porque não sei qual é o meu segredo. Conta-me o teu, ensina-me sobre o secreto de cada um de nós. Não é segredo difamante. É apenas esse isto: segredo.
E não tem fórmulas.
[I go quiet.
Because I don’t know what my secret is. Tell me yours, teach me about the secrets of every one of us. It’s not a slanderous secret. It’s only this: a secret.
I died. I found out when, one day, on the sidewalk of Praça Maciel Pinheiro, I lifted my head, opened my eyes, and saw myself dead, there on the plaza’s sidewalk, the two-story house on the other side of the street. My broken heart inside my chest, the two-story house on Rua do Aragão, 387, where, on the second floor, Clarice Lispector lived a happy childhood here in Recife, despite the pains of the world and experiencing and feeling, mainly, the pains of an implacable disease that would one day take Mania, her mother, away from her. I found out when, laid out on the sidewalk there under the scorching Sunday sun, I turned my head to the right and saw a man beside me, who was also looking at the house.
The numerous commentators who not only in Brazil but also throughout the world investigate Clarice Lispector’s work encounter several aspects to highlight in her multifaceted writing.1 From the fruitful tension between transcendence and contingence to the profound and refined attention to the human condition, one can encounter an immense variety of dimensions in her body of writings.
The chronicles of Clarice Lispector were collected in a book for the first time in 1984, in The Discovery of the World, a volume edited by Paulo Gurgel Valente, the author’s son, who arranged in chronological order 468 texts published in the Jornal do Brasil between 1967 and 1973.
The Brazil LAB is an interdisciplinary initiative at Princeton University that considers Brazil to be a crucial nexus for us to understand today’s most pressing issues. Based at PIIRS (Princeton Institute of International and Regional Studies), the LAB brings together professors, researchers, and students from more than 20 different university departments (from the social to the natural sciences, from engineering to the arts and humanities) in interaction with dozens of researchers from academic institutions of excellence.
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