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:
Written in the 1950s, during the period in which she lived in Washington, The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit was the first children’s book written by Clarice Lispector.
In partnership with the Department of Humanities at Columbia University, the IMS presents the international seminar The Clarice Factor: Aesthetics, Gender, and Diaspora in Brazil.
Michel de Certeau, in his La fable mystique, addresses an important aspect in the relation between idiocy and holiness in the first centuries, particularly in Christian literature, namely: a mode of isolation in the crowd. Idiocy, in the form of madness, is attributed to the crowd, and additionally, is established as a provocation, a transgression in the field of the “right-minded.”
More or less fantastic in their plots, these children’s stories reveal narrators who, stripped almost completely of their fictional character, are very similar to the author: they are mothers, writers, they go by the initials “C.L.,” or even say their name is Clarice. Thus, if there is a horizontal posture in these narrators in which respect for the particularities of childhood is presupposed, this same movement also shows the desire to become a little more like a child.
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.
