The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

Author:Clarice Lispector
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780811219600
Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Translator’s Afterword

In 1954, when she was living in Washington as the wife of a Brazilian diplomat, Clarice Lispector received the French translation of her first book, Near to the Wild Heart. This book, published in Rio de Janeiro a decade before, was the first of her works to be translated in any foreign country, and the result was calamitous.

In a series of letters that reportedly “damaged the health” of her editor, she offered valuable advice to her future translators.

“I admit, if you like, that the sentences do not reflect the usual manner of speaking, but I assure you that it is the same in Portuguese,” she writes. “The punctuation I employed in the book is not accidental and does not result from an ignorance of the rules of grammar. You will agree that the elementary principles of punctuation are taught in every school. I am fully aware of the reasons that led me to choose this punctuation and insist that it be respected.”

Her translators would do well to recall this point. Because no matter how odd Clarice Lispector’s prose sounds in translation, it sounds just as unusual in the original.

“The foreignness of her prose is one of the most overwhelming facts of our literary history, and even of the history of our language,” the poet Lêdo Ivo wrote.

The Canadian writer Claire Varin has regretted her translators’ tendency to “pluck the spines from the cactus.”

The tendency is understandable. It may even, to some extent, be inevitable. Clarice Lispector’s weird word choices, strange syntax, and lack of interest in conventional grammar produces sentences—often fragments of sentences—that veer toward abstraction without ever quite reaching it. Her goal, mystical as well as artistic, was to rearrange conventional language to find meaning, but never to discard it completely.

Paradoxically, the better one’s Portuguese, the more difficult it is to read Clarice Lispector. The foreigner with a basic knowledge of Romance grammar and vocabulary can read The Hour of the Star with ease. The Brazilian, however, often finds her extremely difficult. This is because her subtle rearrangements of everyday language are so surprising that they often baffle the reader, particularly the reader with little experience of her work.

When my biography of Clarice Lispector, Why This World, was published in Brazil, a surprising problem appeared. No fewer than five copyeditors examined the lengthy manuscript. And every one of them tried to correct Clarice’s own prose.

Yet her books are not untranslatable. They are not littered with regionalisms, slang, puns, or inside jokes. Her meaning is almost always perfectly clear. The translator must therefore resist the temptation to explain or rearrange her prose, which can only flatten it and remove from it that “foreign” aura that is its hallmark, and its glory.

Here, in the last book Clarice Lispector published in her lifetime, the language she had dislocated in Near to the Wild Heart almost cracks. It has a kind of crepuscular beauty that, even when not entirely intelligible intellectually, creates in the reader an emotional—even tactile—sensation. In Why This World,

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