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:
The critic José Castello will teach new classes for Grupo Clarice, a group dedicated to the reading and study of the works of Clarice Lispector. Among the works discussed are...
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.
Na cavidade do rochedo: a pós-filosofia de Clarice Lispector (In the Cavity of the Rock: The Post-Philosophy of Clarice Lispector) is a study published exclusively in electronic format and available for download here.
On December 10th, IMS Rio celebrates Clarice Lispector’s birthday. This year, we will present, in a single screening, the short film Perto de Clarice (Close to Clarice), by João Carlos Horta, from 1982, in a new digital version based on the 35mm original preserved by the Audiovisual Technical Center (CTAv). After the film screening, there will be a conversation between the writer Heloisa Buarque de Holanda, who was involved in the making of the film and is the director's widow, and Teresa Montero, author of the most recent biography of the writer, À procura da própria coisa (In Search of the Thing Itself – Rocco, 2021), mediated by the IMS literature consultant, the poet Eucanaã Ferraz.
The work of Clarice Lispector revolves around on two notions: the symbol and the thing. The thing, physics, and the symbol, metaphysics; the thing, immanence, and the symbol, transcendence; the thing, the body, and the symbol, language; the thing, existence, and the symbol, the saying; the thing, the event, and the symbol, the way to make it possible to read the nonsymbolizable thing.