Celebrated in Argentina, New York, and Paris, Clarice’s Hour 2016, organized by the Moreira Salles Institute, was divided last year between the themes of correspondence and translation.
Clarice Lispector’s oeuvre has been consolidated through recent translations into French, Spanish, Greek, and, above all, English. It is certainly true that the publication of all the stories in a single volume, The Complete Stories, included in the New York Times best books list, provoked a new wave of interest and readers. The arduous and, at the same time, delicate transposition of Lispector’s stories from Portuguese into English was the responsibility of Katrina Dodson – whose efforts were recognized with the Pen Translation Prize.
A little more of the translation work could be appreciated on December 10, 2016, with a chat between Katrina Dodson and Paloma Vidal, a Brazilian poet and professor who translated and wrote the preface to Un soplo de vida (Um sopro de vida/A Breath of Life) and La legión extranjera (A legião estrangeira/The Foreign Legion), released by the Argentinian publisher Corregidor in 2010 and 2011.
In the second part of the celebration, Clarice’s Hour turns its attention to the rich set of affectionate letters Clarice sent to her sisters, Tania Kaufman and Elisa Lispector, during the period in which she was living outside Brazil. From the selection of this set of more than 150 items under the care of the IMS and directed by Bruno Lara Resende, at 6:30 pm the actresses Georgiana Góes, Gisele Fróes, and Raquel Iantas performed a reading of the letters – there are themes such as the difficulty of publishing her second novel, O lustre (The Chandelier), the marriage dynamic, the end of the Second World War, and the birth of her two sons, Pedro and Paulo.
Both events can be viewed with complete details available below:
Benjamin Moser, one of the most significant biographers of Clarice Lispector, said in an interview that one of his goals in writing Why This World, published in the United States and translated into Portuguese as Clarice, uma biografia, was to make space for a theme rarely explored by literary critics, commentators, and biographers: the writer’s “Judeity.” Most tend to limit themselves to reflecting on her “Brazilianness,” “as if one had to choose between being Jewish and being Brazilian.”
A little known concept in Portuguese, unediting is less a theory and more a practical way to support complex publishing cases, such as the publication of A Breath of Life, a posthumous novel by Clarice Lispector organized by Olga Borelli. The aim of unediting is to undo the illusion of transparency that the ready, finished, and linear book, with a minimally stabilized narrative, conveys to readers.
This August, Todas as crônicas will be released, a volume that brings together for the first time all the chronicles written by Clarice Lispector for newspapers and magazines.
In the interviews done by Clarice there is a sort of unsuitableness for the job with respect to journalistic technique. With Vinicius de Moraes, her first approach sounds like a provocation: “Vinicius, have you really ever loved anyone in life?”
Clarice’s connection with politics does not take place on the surface of public life, or in the texts that directly address the issue. This is due to the writer’s understanding of the rift between art and politics, which is addressed in two related texts, “Literature and Justice” and “What I Would Like to Have Been,” in which she observes with disconcerting lucidity the uselessness of her literature as a political instrument.
, LispectorFest at the University of Tennessee. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2017. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2017/01/04/lispectorfest-na-universidade-do-tennessee/. Acesso em: 06 May 2026.
Every year the University of Tennessee prepares AuthorFest, a series of activities to celebrate the work of a single author. During the month of October 2016, in its second edition, AuthorFest paid tribute to Clarice Lispector.
Among the events offered to the public, in a collaboration between the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Knox County Public Library, there was a guided reading of The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, an exhibition of works of art by Professor Rubens Ghenov inspired by the novel The Passion According to G.H., and a session of the film The Hour of the Star, which was directed by Suzana Amaral, followed by a discussion mediated by Euridice Silva-Filho, research professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
One of the most anticipated activities of LispectorFest was the lecture by Katrina Dodson, translator of the Complete Stories (New Directions, 2016). In “Rediscovering Clarice” Katrina comments, from her own experience, on the influence of the recent translation in the construction of a kind of “Lispectormania.”
The IMS, in partnership with UT Knoxville’s College of Arts and Sciences, has made this lecture available in full.
This August, Todas as crônicas will be released, a volume that brings together for the first time all the chronicles written by Clarice Lispector for newspapers and magazines.
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 year 2017 marked the 40th anniversary of The Hour of the Star, the last book written by Clarice Lispector, which was published in the year of her death.
Mineirinho, one of the Rio de Janeiro police’s most wanted criminals during the 1960s. José Miranda Rosa earned this nickname, naturally, for being born in the state of Minas Gerais.
That was the first sensation which I had when I saw Clarice’s paintings: my whole body shivered in a flush that was shared with these two women who worked every day at the archive. A kind of slip, a discomposure, a “human dismantling.” As Clarice wrote, “She needs to move her whole boneless head to look at an object.”
