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’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.
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.
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.”
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?”
It would be possible to say that Clarice Lispector’s finesse recalls that of Virginia Woolf – which actually seems to be her strongest influence. But what most surprises and captivates me in Clarice’s short stories...
At the 35th edition of the Paris Book Fair, Brazil was the country of honor. The program was marked by an exhibition dedicated to Clarice Lispector at Éditions des Femmes,
