But while Clarice agreed that telling the woman's experience was essential, and that she regularly used women as her protagonists, she did not like being labeled “a feminist”; indeed, she didn't like being labeled at all, regarding it as restrictive and limiting. She preferred to think of herself as a woman who wrote. And, as we shall see, a woman for whom the act of writing was not a profession but the affirmation of life itself. Clarice had to write; to do so was, for her, tantamount to feeling the blood pump through her veins. The subtitle title of her final, posthumous narrative was, in fact, “pulsações,” or “pulsations” (trans. mine). In an excruciating February, 1977, interview with journalist Julio Lerner and TV Cultura, Clarice, who wrote until the final moment, confessed that “When I am not writing, I am dead” (trans. by Pontiero, Discovering the World, 30).

     Today, Clarice's work, which has been translated into more than thirty-seven languages, has made her an international celebrity, a fixture on the internet and a staple of Women's Studies and World Literature reading lists.

     What is it about Clarice's writing that makes it so attractive to so many people, men and women alike? For one thing, it is seductive and compelling. The reader feels she is hearing someone's truth being told. And in many of Clarice's texts, this truth is that of a woman. But Clarice writes to—and speaks for—all of us, and we see ourselves, in all our conflicted glory, in her work. This accounts, perhaps, for the dizzying variety of ways she is read. Benjamin Moser, Clarice's English-language biographer, puts it this way: “Clarice Lispector has been described as just about everything: a woman and a man, a native a foreigner, a Jew and a Christian, a child and an adult, an animal and a person, a lesbian and a housewife, a witch and a saint” (5). She has also been called a Communist, a conservative, a psychologically needy but defensive and reticent person, and a mystic. And she has been regarded as both a religious person and an atheist. I am constantly struck by her mix of political concern, domesticity, and eroticism. Her intense, nakedly honest texts remain open to a plethora of interpretations. Like Clarice herself, they stubbornly resist rigid categorization. And she was loathe to clarify very much about herself or her work.

     I believe it was Hélène Cixous who first compared Clarice to Kafka, allowing that Clarice is what Kafka would have been if he had been a woman. While this has been useful in terms of orienting global thinking about her, I prefer to think that Kafka is what Clarice would have been like if she had been a man.

     Clarice worked in a wide variety of literary genres. Her work runs the gamut, from very poetic novels and stories to journalism, and from newspaper columns to translation work. Tying all of her different forms and modes of expression together are certain basic motifs: water and fluidity, darkness, silence, the female body, desire and sexuality, humor, immanence, birth, the instant, mutability, words, and semantic relativity. These are the basic building blocks of her writing. Clarice's style is easily identifiable. In Brazil, they say that no one writes as she does. Her work is unmistakable. In her best translations, this idiosyncratic, mercurial, and self-interrogating style, which is profoundly a function of syntax, is reproduced as faithfully as the laws of English grammar allow.

     Possibly more famous today for her novels than for her stories (which are rightly gaining ground in the acclaim department), Clarice's renown rests largely on five lengthy narratives: Near to the Wild Heart, The Apple in the Dark, The Passion According to G.H., The Stream of Life, and The Hour of the Star.

     Appearing in 1943, Near to the Wild Heart features a young woman, Joana, who greatly resembles Clarice herself. While not what we would call an autobiographical novel, this close affinity between the real author and a fictional character would become a recurring feature of Clarice's work. In this sense, whenever we read Clarice, we get the sense that we are experiencing something deeply personal on the author's part, some stress, anxiety, struggle, or pleasure that she is going through. Joana's struggle is for agency. Chapters oscillate between her childhood and her adult years, when, as a married woman, she seeks a personal satisfaction and authenticity of being that are denied her as a middle-class wife. Her rebellion manifests itself in three ways: she wants out of what has become, for her, a stifling marriage; she wants to chart her own course and to embrace the wild heart of life; and she wants sexual freedom, which begins with her pleasing herself. The final pages recall the life-affirming Molly Bloom episode of Ulysses (1922).

     Although I suspect that, deep down, Near to the Wild Heart is my favorite Clarice novel, I nevertheless have a special place in my heart for The Apple in the Dark (appearing, in Portuguese, in 1961). The first Clarice Lispector novel I ever read, I had the pleasure to go through it (in Portuguese) with the late, great Gregory Rabassa, who was its first English-language translator. For me, the novel was like catnip, and I became hooked on Clarice's writing. A dense, lushly lyrical novel, The Apple in the Dark is a meditation on the nature of being and human relationships. Martin, a man who believes (erroneously, as it turns out) that he has murdered his wife, also goes on a quest. Not unlike Joana, Martin, one of Clarice's few male protagonists, seeks to shed his own inauthentic existence, a consequence of his culturally assigned gender role, and reinvent himself. Confused and distracted, he fails, primarily because he lacks the courage to confront life as it really is. In the end, he begs forgiveness for his transgressions, real and imagined, and seeks to reassume his former position as an unthinking cog in the larger machine that is society. What is most intriguing in this novel is the similarity of its plot structure, which rests on an intense relationship between two women that is interrupted by the unexpected appearance of a man, to that of “The Fox,” a story by D. H. Lawrence, a writer Clarice knew and admired.

     Largely ignored outside of Brazil, The Passion According to G.H. (1964) is a brilliant example of what we might think of as a Brazilian version of the then reigning “Nueva Novela Hispanoamericana,” the “New Novel,” then surging out of Spanish America and, via some outstanding English translations (including those by the legendary Gregory Rabassa), having an impact in the United States. The novel is built once again around the motif of the quest; the protagonist, a woman known only by her initials, G.H., is trying to understand—herself, life, everything—but she is tormented by doubt and uncertainty. Lost in the explosion of great Spanish American “new novels,” Clarice's very different novel featured a woman, again with similarities to Clarice, who undergoes a spiritual crisis and who emerges both with a heightened sense of awareness and self but a realization that she cannot bear the burden of honesty that accompanies it. The Passion According to G.H. is a “new novel” in both form and content, and it has never garnered the respect it deserves. Harrowingly personal in its revelations, it ends on a touchingly human and slightly comic note; her spiritual journey done, G.H. returns to the world of human beings knowing she has to make a decision—will she live now as the newly conscious woman she knows she should be, or, fearing the burden will be too great of doing so in a society that demands falsity and inauthenticity, will she retreat to her former ways and shallowness? Or, rejecting the either/or choice, will she find a way of combining her new, painfully acquired knowledge with a comfortable, middle-class existence? Can this be done? Can a person be an honest, authentic person in a dishonest and inauthentic society? Clarice leaves it for the reader to decide.

     More a poème-en-prose than a traditional novel, Água Viva (1973) is Clarice's great language novel about language and being. It is also about writing, not in the technical sense or as a profession but as a form of existing. Água Viva is also the text that inspired Cixous' theory of “écriture féminine,” which translates into English better as “writing the body” than “feminine writing.” As Verena Andermaat Conley has said, “Cixous claims to have been overwhelmed by her encounter with Agua (sic) viva (The Stream of Life). In it she finds the finest practice of écriture féminine,” less a kind of writing “practiced mainly by women than “one based on an encounter with another—be it a body, a piece of writing, a social dilemma, a moment of passion—that leads to an undoing of the hierarchies and oppositions that determine the limits of most conscious life” (vii). Marta Peixoto has argued persuasively that while Cixous' enthusiasm for Clarice has augmented her appeal outside of Brazil, it has also denatured it, making Clarice seem more nurturing and less prickly than she really is (39-59). The Clarice text that most productively integrates all of the basic motifs that leaven her work, Água Viva seamlessly melds language, being, and desire into a text that throbs with life, its pain but also its pleasure.

     The last novel to be published in her lifetime was The Hour of the Star, also one of her most globally popular narratives. This final novel was also Clarice's most overtly political. Although set in modern Brazilian city, The Hour of the Star is global in impact as it indicts the wealthy and privileged of any society for exploiting and then simply abandoning the less fortunate. In this novel, these people are represented most poignantly by the pitiable female protagonist, Macabéa, but also by her brutish male counterpart, Olímpico. Hardly Olympian in nature or conduct, Olímpico is, like Macabéa, a victim of social, political, and economic systems he cannot even pretend to understand. Importantly, Olímpico's presence in the novel reminds us that Clarice's feminism was not restricted to women alone; it applies to men as well. Her vision of a better world was one in which both men and women lived together, as equals, and not as enemies. For Clarice, both women and men had to be liberated, and from the same abusing structures of patriarchy.

     In charging the rich and powerful as she does, Clarice does not exculpate herself or people like her, writers and artists who benefit from exposing the cruelty and injustice of twentieth century life but whose best efforts are powerless to bring about change. Here, at the end of her career and her life, Clarice elects to employ a male narrator, a writer whom we take to be speaking for Clarice, to tell the story of a hopelessly disadvantaged young woman who comes to the big city seeking a life but who ends up with nothing and dying, struck down by a speeding Mercedes-Benz (a symbol of the elite), in the gutter. It is hard for today's reader not to view this poor waif, whose name, Macabéa, ironically invokes the tradition of Jewish warriors, the Maccabees, as nothing more than detritus left in the wake of global capitalism.

Photo of Rio by Krys Amon on Unsplash

     For me, three collections of Clarice's stories stand out. Family Ties (1961); The Foreign Legion; and Soulstorm. I consider these indispensable to understanding her and her view of life. Family Ties, a collection of early stories, ranks as one of her most popular books. There are some real gems here. Many of the stories, all very readable, are of the coming-of-age variety, but with a twist; in addition to tales of adolescents (girls) entering into adulthood (one of these, “Mystery in São Cristóvão,” may deal with sexual molestation; as with so much of Clarice's work, it is impossible to know for certain), there are several that concern themselves with adults suddenly forced to confront who and what they really are. In these stories, “The Crime of the Mathematics Professor,” for example, where guilt over a curious transgression leads a teacher to a mysterious confession, frustration and resignation reign supreme. In “The Imitation of the Rose,” a woman who seems to be slowly succumbing to madness, a condition brought about, the reader can think, by the crushing conformity demanded of her as a middle-class wife, may be suffering even more by the unrequited love she feels for another woman. The story can be read either way, and it is for the reader to decide.

     The tales of The Foreign Legion (1964) are among the most complex Clarice ever wrote. And most fascinating, especially with respect to gendering and identity. Dark, though larded with sardonic humor, and not infrequently disturbing, they challenge the reader's sense of orthodoxy and social mores. Often, human relationships are at the core of the conflicts, which lay within the people involved or with the social mores that constrict them and their lives. In “A Sincere Friendship,” for example, Clarice seems to deal with the theme of male homosexuality, though no hard evidence appears in the text. The two young men involved are very much friends, but they are also presented as if they were, in fact, a happy couple, two people devoted to each other. À la Kafka, they have a problem with “the Authorities,” a vague but implacable presence which one reads as the legal code or social censure, and, in the end, it destroys their relationship (Lispector, “A Sincere Friendship,” 80). With “The Obedient,” Clarice presents us with an eponymous couple, known only as “the husband” and “the wife,” who, though physically in close proximity to each other, grow increasingly apart. Though “the husband” appears to have no idea “his wife,” the life-giving water of his otherwise barren life, is growing increasingly desperate, she is, until one day, instead of going to the dentist, she commits suicide by throwing herself out the window of their high-rise apartment. In “The Message,” one of Clarice's most powerful stories, the focus is on the damage done by rigid gender expectations. As children (another fixture, along with animals, of Clarice's world), an unnamed boy and girl are friends and equals. They regard each other as comrades in arms, united in the face of a world that would divide and debase them both. And, as time passes, that is the fate that befalls them. The uncompromising gender rules to which they must conform separate them, with the result that former allies are turned into antagonists, participants in a mutually destructive struggle between predators and prey. Because this is what their society demands, a sense of needless tragedy permeates this tale.

      The Foreign Legion also offers us the only play Clarice ever wrote, “The Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels” (in Dodson's translation). Though taking the form of a medieval morality play, and recalling the misogyny and barbarism of the fourteenth century, the words and actions of Clarice's text speak to modern hypocrisies and double standards about sex and gender. A nameless woman, who haughtily never speaks, is burned at the stake for doing exactly what her male cohort does, entering into an adulterous affair. Condemned by the righteous of society (all men), she suffers a cruel death while the men involved suffer nothing, except, possibly, a twinge of guilt about what has happened.

     Judged by many critics as trash, and beneath the dignity of a great writer, the stories in The Stations of the Body (1974) are my personal favorites. Written during some of the worst years of the Brazilian dictatorship (1964-1985), which our government supported, these droll tales are, for me, political allegories. Short, seemingly absurd little narratives, they could pass through the censor's office and be published. A closer reading, however, reveals a collection of commentaries that strike a blow against the hard-right regime that was abusing both the Brazilian people and their democracy. The parallels between the Brazil of 1974 and the United States of today are all but irresistible.

     What is most compelling about this collection is not the various kinds of sex involved (masturbation, sex with supernatural beings, geriatric sex, transvestism, heterosexuality, male homosexuality, and lesbianism, for example) but the roles empowered women have. Women making decisions about their own lives is the motif that ties all of these stories together. It does not take much for an imaginative reader to see women as leading the revolt of the Brazilian people against all forms of tyranny and injustice. The goal is not to reclaim the old Brazil but to build a new and better one, one in which women will play new and important roles. In their roles as citizens, Clarice's readers, mostly middle- and upper-class Brazilians, see that they must throw off the oppressive and utterly patriarchal yoke of the generals (all male) in which both women and men are fully and equally engaged. No one must be left out or shunted aside. Albeit presented in a comic and fantastic mode (again, less likely to rankle the censors), we see the transformative power of female agency in the collection's lead story, “Miss Algrave,” where a sexually and politically repressed woman becomes awakened to new and freer ways of being and demands respect and a pay increase from her flabbergasted male boss. Hypocritical and fatuous in nature, this “boss,” a Mr. Clairson, can easily be understood as a specific man, the generals in control, or patriarchy in general. One of the most complex and poignant tales is “Plaza Mauá,” which features multiple forms of gender transformation and of sexual and economic liberation. The drama takes place at a popular club, “The Erotica,” which, like Brazil itself, is “full of men and women” trying to enjoy themselves (Lispector, Soulstorm, 57). What gets the reader's attention, however, is the next line: “Many mothers and housewives went there for the fun of it and to earn a bit of pocket money” (57). How they would have this fun and earn this money is not specified. But the implication is clear; in contrast to Brazilian life under the dictatorship, “The Erotica” is a place women, whose active presence is clearly emphasized in the above quote, but also men (as the text later reveals) can go to be who they really are or to be something they would like to be. And in “The Body,” two lesbians (or, as Clarice suggests, offering an alternative relationship, two women who have a bond that includes sex, thus striking another blow at patriarchy) plot the death of their cloddish male oppressor. However one reads these sometimes hilarious, sometimes achingly sad stories, they all show the many ways the lives of both women and men are blunted and warped by Neanderthal ideas about a supposed male “superiority.”

     A loving and devoted mother, Clarice wrote several children's stories. These were not, however, of the standard issue variety. They all have sharp edges to them. The tumultuous 1960s, as Brazil fell prey to a brutal dictatorship, saw several of Clarice's best children's stories appear. There would appear to be a clear connection between the politics of the period and the nature of the seemingly innocent stories. “The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit” (1967), for example, was written first in English during Clarice's sojourn in Washington D.C., where her husband was stationed as a diplomat. Clarice herself would later translate it into Portuguese for publication in Brazil, where it garnered major prizes. Her son, Paulo, had asked his mother to write him a story and she obliged, focusing it on his pet rabbit. Given the time of its writing the story, which involves a pet rabbit that keeps escaping from its cage, has obvious political overtones; the cage was the dictatorship, the rabbit the Brazilian people. The “thinking” part of it would be the need for the people (of Brazil and of every other nation!) to think hard about their predicament and decide about how they should respond. The next year, 1968, another story, “The Woman Who Killed the Fish,” was written, this time at the behest of Clarice's other son, Pedro. The story features a woman, whom we can take as Clarice (to whom this really did happen), forgets to care for two fish left in her care and they die. Guilt, a legacy of Clarice's childhood and an omnipresent force in her life and work, comes to the fore here. Clarice always felt guilty, believing that her birth had caused her mother's death. It did not, but the fear that it might have was all but unbearable for her, and the story can be read as an attempt to expiate guilt and seek forgiveness. A third children's story of note is “The Intimate Life of Laura,” the title of which points to a subject matter long plumbed by Clarice but which is dealt with differently here. Longer and more tangled than her other tales of this type, the story of Laura appears in 1974, the same year that the politically charged “The Stations of the Body” appeared. Laura's story has its own political implications. Laura, an aging hen, is concerned, and with good reason, that as her best egg laying days are behind her (that is, her productivity has dropped), she will be abandoned and cast aside. As time goes by, and her decline increases, she begins to worry that she will simply be killed, cooked, and served up in a nice sauce. If that is to be her fate, she concludes, she hopes she will be eaten by the great Pelé! One can certainly read “The Intimate Life of Laura” as fantasy, and as a children's story, albeit a rather bizarre one; but it takes no great distortion of the text also to read it as another indictment of the dictatorship's treatment of the Brazilian people, or as the ways the Brazilian people exist only to serve the interests of, to assuage the hunger of, their “leaders.”

     In the column she wrote between 1967 and 1973 for the Saturday edition of the Jornal do Brazil, Clarice wrote in a genre known as the “crônica,” a hybrid form peculiar to Brazil that can freely mix fiction and fact, truth and fancy, reportage and opinion. Immensely popular, “crônicas” have long been written by a number of Brazil's leading writers. For Clarice, however, it served a special purpose, that of a kind of sounding board. Several of her stories and sections of various novels appear in her “crônicas” either verbatim or close to it. Probably the best known case of this has to do with the 1964 novel, An Apprenticeship, or the Book of Delights and a column Clarice wrote for the Jornal do Brasil on 8 May, 1964. The differences between the two texts are minor but arresting.

     Clarice was an inveterate tinkerer, altering her texts in a variety of ways, some large, some small. There are several reasons why she might have done this: to make her publishing burden with the paper easier, meet deadlines, or simply to make money. Then, too, she might have done this because she liked certain lines (or because she didn't!) and wanted to re-enjoy them. Another explanation of this phenomenon, and one that appeals to me, is this: Clarice, we know, was intrigued by how words change their meaning depending on their relationship to other words in the same structure. Meaning is not fixed or inherent in words; it's relative, subject to change depending on a number of factors. It's entirely plausible that this is what motivates her with respect to An Apprenticeship and the newspaper column. Here, a simple pronominal change causes virtually the same words in the utterance to generate a different range of meanings. Following such seemingly insignificant shifts, from an “I” to a “you,” a “she,” a “he,” an “it,” or a “they,” major transformations are produced—in the genre being cultivated, a story, say, as opposed to a newspaper column, and in the minds of her readers. Connecting with a multitude of issues, including age, gender, and race, the reader's response to the text has been changed; her interpretational expectations are altered, and this, in turn, alters her reaction to the same text. Given the topics that interested Clarice, and given her understanding about how language, a fluid semantic system, works, it is entirely plausible that this played into the odd, but also oddly productive, relationships her fiction and her non-fiction enjoyed.

     Always interested in language and fluent in at least French and English, Clarice was an active translator for much of her adult life. She understood the power of translation to give an “afterlife,” as Walter Benjamin famously put it, to certain works, thus allowing them to circulate from one age and culture to other ages and cultures. Among the authors Clarice is known to have translated are Agatha Christie, Poe, Oscar Wilde, Bella Chagal, and Anne Rice (Moser 339). This is quite an eclectic group. And, as we can see in the translations that she did, Clarice was also interested in the idea that translation is a matter of interpretation but also a form of creative writing. Her translations constitute an area of Clarice scholarship that needs more attention.

     Much of Clarice now exists in more than one English translation. This means that, for any given text, more than one Clarice exists. Generally, the versions are far from identical. The reader should not panic at this realization, however. The very nature of Clarice's writing admits, as we have seen, a multitude of different approaches. In the main, this is due to matters of syntax, where the fit between English and Portuguese is problematic, tone, and semantics, the way a particular reader/translator understands and then recreates a word, phrase, or image. This can vary, and it can do so without amounting to what we would regard as a mistake. Translation is, to a surprising degree, a form of creative writing, and the translator does have a bit of choice, of latitude in terms of how a text is read and then rewritten, in a different language and for a different audience. In a few cases, however, the question of Clarice in English translation does involve a slip by the translator or an error. One example will suffice to illustrate this point: in his English rewriting of Clarice's first novel, Perto do Coração Selvagem, Giovanni Pontiero renders what is clearly “gato castrado,” or “castrated cat.” In Portuguese, the sentence reads: “O professor parecia um grande gato castrado reinando num porão” (Lispector, Perto do Coração Selvagem, 128); in Pontiero's English, this becomes “The teacher was like a great tom-cat reigning supreme in a cellar” (Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, 105). A “castrated cat” is not normally what one thinks of as a “tom-cat.” Was this simply a mistake? Or was it intentional, caused by some personal, ideological, or even interpretational issue with the translator? We cannot know. Whatever the reason, it is there and it does have an impact on the character's development and therefore on how the English language reader responds to this scene. Something different in the original, the translator's decision here does affect the reader's response. One can find other examples of this sort, scattered through the non-Portuguese versions of her works, but, overall, I would say that Clarice has been well served by her translators.

     In addition to Pontiero, one of the earliest English-speaking writers to show an interest (albeit a backhanded one) in Clarice's work was the poet, Elizabeth Bishop, who averred that, in contrast to the early novels, some of Clarice's short fictions had potential. One has to wonder about Bishop's literary acumen, at least with respect to writers not from her own cultural vantage point, since she pronounced Clarice as provincial and uninformed and allowed that Borges (presumably in translation) was “good, but not all that good!” (Moser 257). How well Bishop really knew Portuguese at this point is open to question as well. Nevertheless, in 1964, she was able to get the influential U.S. journal, The Kenyon Review, to publish three of Clarice's pieces.

     Done by Alison Entrekin, we now have a new version of Clarice's inaugural novel, the extraordinary Perto do Coração Selvagem. It captures very well the violent psychological oscillations of the contemplative but also iconoclastic protagonist, Joana. And it replicates the fluid but also explosive relationships, in the original text, between Joana's husband, Otávio, to whom she is constantly compared (he is dry prose; she is poetry, drenched in her passion for life) and his mistress, Lídia, with whom Joana compares herself and with whom she discusses, with astonishing frankness, their desires and what they will do with Otávio. As Peixoto has pointed out, the novel is full of triangular relationships, and these come through largely without distortion (5).

     Unless I am mistaken, Rabassa's luminous, pitch-perfect The Apple in the Dark has not yet been retranslated. It is easy to understand why. It is that good. Greg was a great scholar of Portuguese and Portuguese-language literature and he was intimately familiar with Clarice's writing. More than that, he was a meticulous, discerning reader and, on top of it all, a superb writer. Indeed, Greg preferred to think of himself first as a writer, rather than as a translator. All of this goes into the making of a great translation. When thinking about new translations, it is always good to remember one salient fact: a retranslation is certainly going to be different, but, on balance, it may well not be “better” than extant translations. And “different” is not necessarily “better.” Or, to put this another way, a new translation is not automatically superior to existing ones. Still, improvements can be made; errors can, and should, be corrected.

     Katrina Dodson has recently retranslated Clarice's stories. This was a monumental undertaking, and, well promoted by New Directions, it has gained for Clarice more new fans than ever. To appreciate what she has achieved, it is instructive to compare a line, from the story, “Amor,” that is fully representative of Clarice's art, from the original, the earlier Pontiero translation, and Dodson's new version:

“Junto dela havia uma senhora de azul, com um rosto. Desviou o olhar, depressa. Na calçada, uma mulher deu um empurrão no filho!” (Lispector, Laços de Família, 34).
“Beside her sat a woman in blue with an expression which made Anna avert her gaze rapidly. On the pavement a mother shook her little boy.” (Pontiero, Family Ties, 41).
“Next to her was a lady in blue, with a face. She averted her gaze, quickly. On the sidewalk, a woman shoved her son!” (Dodson, The Complete Stories, 119).

     A “rosto” is a “face,” though one can understand the logic of Pontiero's decision to translate it as “expression.” And in Portuguese, the word for “shake” is, in almost all senses of the term, “sacudir,” and not “dar um emparrão,” which is unmistakably an expression meaning to push or shove someone or something. It is possible that Pontiero felt a frustrated mother was more likely to shake a recalcitrant child, but this is simply not what Clarice writes. Perhaps she meant “shake” but the translator cannot read her mind; she can only go by what is written. As we can see, Dodson re-complicates what Pontiero had clarified. And in this case, at least, we have to conclude that Dodson's rewriting is more faithful to the original. The desire to explain, to turn the semantic richness of intentional ambiguity on the author's part into a single, or simpler, idea or image, is a powerful temptation for the translator, but it must be avoided.

     In his new English re-creation of Água Viva, Stefan Tobler leaves the original title as it is. I admit to having a certain fondness for the text entitled The Stream of Life, which is the translation Elizabeth Lowe and I did of this work in 1989. One is always tied to something one writes. And though no translation is ever perfect, I feel our effort is still a good one. But Tobler's is good, too. He makes some interesting decisions, as we see in the case of the title. My recommendation to readers—and especially to readers who want to better understand Clarice's famously opaque style—would be to read both versions, and do so comparatively.

     Moser's new translation of A Hora da Estrela is a solid achievement as well. Even by Clarice's standards, it presents the reader, and the translator, a welter of shifts in voice and tones. The novel depends on these things being picked up and responded to. The old contemplativeness is there, along with Clarice's concern with words, human existence, and language as ontological and epistemological systems, rather than a matter of stylistic adornment. There is no issue of the “mot juste” here. But there are more newly intense issues of anger, frustration, and, though her voice is cloaked in that of another (a male author and narrator), personal anguish on what we take to be Clarice's part. It's not just his/her character, Macabéa, who dies in The Hour of the Star; Clarice is dying, too, and she knows it. The pathos generated from this is exquisite.

     I am also very impressed by Idra Novey's new version of A Paixão Segundo G. H. , which brings us close to the original's abrupt tonal changes and bristly moments. Of his own 1988 translation of this novel, Ronald Sousa has said he “often made the translated text more conventional than the original,” with the result that some of the original's “ambiguity and idiosyncrasy” was lost (ix). Novey's effort seeks to restore these and other elements lost or minimized in the 1988 translation.

     For those who seek further reading about Clarice and her work, I suggest Diane Marting's Clarice Lispector: A Bio-Bibliography, Marta Peixoto's Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative, and Violence in Clarice Lispector, and Marília Librandi's Writing by Ear. Those who are gluttons for punishment, might also dip into my own Sexuality and Being in the Poststructuralist Universe of Clarice Lispector.

Conley, Verena Andermaat. “Introduction.” Reading With Hélène Cixous, edited, translated, and introduced by Verena Andermaat Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, VII-XVIII.

Dodson, Katrina. The Complete Stories: Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson and with an Introduction by Benjamin Moser. New York: New Directions Press, 2015.

Ferré, Rosario. “On Destiny, Language, and Translation, or Ophelia Adrift in the C. & O. Canal.” Voice-Overs: Translation and Latin American Literature, Daniel Balderston and Marcy E. Schwartz, editors. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002: 32-41.

Lispector, Clarice. Laços de Família, 21st edição. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 1960.
______________. Family Ties, translated by Giovanni Pontiero. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1960.
______________. Near to the Wild Heart, trans. by Giovanni Pontiero. New York: New Directions Press, 1990.
______________. “A Sincere Friendship.” The Foreign Legion: Stories and Chronicles, translated by Giovanni Pontiero. Manchester: Carcanet, 1986: 78-80.
_______________. Soulstorm, translated by Alexis Levitin, with an Introduction by Grace Paley. New York: New Directions Press, 1989.

Lowe, Elizabeth. “The Passion According to C.L.: Elizabeth Lowe Interviews Clarice Lispector.” Review 24. New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1979: 34-37.
______________. Perto do Coração Selvagem, 15th edição. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 1990.

Moser, Benjamin. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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