The passion according to C.L.

Essay on Clarice Lispector in Open Letters Monthly.

In Brazil, the novelist Clarice Lispector is recognized by her first name. Her face appears on postage stamps, condominiums are named after her, and her books sold in subway stations. Many Brazilian artists regard her as an inspiration. The singer Cazuza reportedly read Água Viva 111 times. The filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar compares her to J.M. Coetzee. Despite this reputation, she has been little known in the English speaking world.

The American writer and translator Benjamin Moser first encountered Lispector’s The Hour of the Star in a college Portuguese class. Intrigued, he devoted his career to bringing her work to a wider English speaking audience. His Why This World, which appeared in 2009, is the first major biography of Lispector in English. He also oversaw the retranslations of the five of her books listed above. As he writes, previous translators tended to flatten her unusual syntax and grammar. In these new versions, he aims to “restore the spines to the cactus.”

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Lispector’s accomplishment lies in her language, which comes through in these translations. She wrote in Portuguese, the language of her adopted country, where her voice was read as strange and foreign. As Moser writes, “Clarice Lispector’s weird word choices, strange syntax, and lack of interest in conventional grammar produce sentences – often fragments of sentences – that veer towards abstraction without ever quite reaching it. Her goal, mystical as well as artistic, was to rearrange conventional language to find meaning – never to discard it completely.” With this language, she renders the tumult of her characters’ interior monologues.

See also, ‘A Naked Face’ by Joanna Walsh.