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:
Clarice Lispector will be honored at the Brazil booth at the 44th Buenos Aires International Book Fair, which will take place between April 24 and May 14.
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.
In addition to confirming the value of the biographical genre as a privileged means to meet the demands of a curious public about the past of famous personalities, Teresa Montero challenges the genre’s conventions by reconstructing the family life, personal experiences, friendships, and creative process of Clarice Lispector, an author who, with all her strengths, gave life to her vocation for literature as a fatality and a salvation.
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.
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.
The second part of the original manuscripts of Um sopro de vida (A Breath of Life) was delivered by the writer's son, Paulo Gurgel Valente, to be incorporated into the Clarice Lispector Collection
In February of 1977, Clarice visited the studios of TV Cultura and accepted the invitation to be interviewed by the journalist Júlio Lerner, host of the program “Panorama Especial”
Clarice Lispector will be honored at the Brazil booth at the 44th Buenos Aires International Book Fair, which will take place between April 24 and May 14.
