Complete Stories

by Clarice Lispector

  Perhaps no one will be as distraught as the translator over what seem to be grammatical mishaps. Why all those commas, why that face? It’s challenging to carry out these choices with the conviction the author is entitled to. A previous translator chose to smooth things over and interpret the face as an expression: “Beside her sat a woman in blue with an expression which made Ana avert her gaze rapidly. On the pavement a mother shook her little boy.” Yet the original really does include these oddities: “Junto dela havia uma senhora de azul, com um rosto. Desviou o olhar, depressa. Na calçada, uma mulher deu um empurrão no filho!” The word rosto is almost always just a face, sometimes suggesting a look but in the sense that “face” also can. My advantage in translating the Complete Stories nearly forty years after their author’s death, as her international fame and readership rise, is that a growing familiarity with her style enables its peculiarities to be understood as more than arbitrary. If my first instinct is to explain, rereading almost always reveals that Clarice’s mysterious decisions maintain their power in English — as they do here, where the jittery phrasing and the riddle of the face frustrate ordinary comprehension in a way that evokes the unraveling of Ana’s everyday life.

  If Clarice’s language were more stridently experimental, finding equivalents would be more straightforward. The departures from standard Portuguese would be more emphatically marked and allow more freedom in English. Instead, she produces a maddening effect (maddening if you’re tasked with reproducing it) of bending known forms nearly to the breaking point, yet almost always making them sound right if not correct, as if they ought to exist, or somewhere already do. These unexpected choices often make you do a double-take or blur your reading even if you don’t stumble. She shuffles words, leaves out parts of speech, invents new yet generally understandable words by giving them alternate suffixes or extra syllables. These touches sometimes lend a literary effect and sometimes come off as conversational in the flexible, playful mode of spoken Brazilian Portuguese.

  Clarice’s most head-tilting constructions are those involving basic words. “I knew that only a mother can resolve birth,” seems to invoke a saying, yet “só mãe resolve nascimento” is just as ambiguous to Brazilians. In the multiple meanings of resolver, is birth a puzzle to solve, a decision to make, or a matter to resolve? Elsewhere, she turns morrer, to die, into a cryptic transitive verb in the phrase te morro, “I die you,” as in, “Oh how I love you and I love so much that I die you.” And it’s difficult to conclude what a husband means when he reminisces of his sinning wife, “There was no jewel she did not covet, and for her the bareness of her neck did not choke,” and describes her as “awaiting me in her empty necklaces.” When there’s no context to determine a more recognizable sense, the most transparent translation is often precisely the most opaquely literal.

  Having all these stories in one volume for the first time in any language allows us to apprehend Clarice’s tremendous range, and to become acclimated to her singular style as it develops over time. The stories share certain characteristics of the novels, such as mystical, philosophical musings, passages that read like fever dreams, a certain noir feel, and intense psychological drama. Yet the stories also offer a more Brazilian, down-to-earth side of Clarice. They give a fuller taste of everyday Brazil during her time, from bourgeois ladies in Rio and drunks at the local bar to children’s adventures in Recife and the dramas of small-town life. She’s also more mischievous and affectionate with her characters, taking pleasure in portraying human vanity, pettiness, and idiosyncratic fixations. This makes for a diverse, often colloquial range of dialects and voices, and language that’s less consistently otherworldly than in the more abstract novels like The Passion According to G. H. and Água Viva. Clarice’s Portuguese, in fact, often sounds surprisingly normal in these stories, which can make the inevitable deviations hard to assimilate.

  Even as Clarice’s voice is distinctly her own from the start, the early stories show a young writer enamored of words and their creative possibilities, revealing a sophisticated knowledge of Portuguese and the ability to write fluid, beautiful prose when she so chooses. She takes up themes she will return to throughout her life — magnetic relationships that flame out, the passion that ideas inspire, questions of perfection versus error, and the trouble with masculine authority, with adult authority, with intellectual authority. Family Ties and The Foreign Legion, written in the period that bridges marriage, motherhood, and divorce, show a writer in full command of her literary powers. These collections contain her most tightly constructed stories; translating them required constant fine-tuning to follow her dense style. Clarice also becomes more comic during this period, especially in her family and animal portraits, mixing perverse or warm humor with a solemn, mystical tone in the same story, as in “Happy Birthday,” “Temptation,” and “The Foreign Legion.”

  In Clarice’s last decade there is a rupture. The great writer is sick of literature and sick of life. She gravitates toward what she calls “antiliterature” and declares, “Any cat, any dog is worth more than literature.” Her stories in Where Were You At Night and especially in The Via Crucis of the Body take on a certain rawness that goes against writerly restraint. Rejecting concern for reputation or literary refinement, in both technique and subject, she writes in a looser, more provocative mode. She dwells unflinchingly on the body’s mortality and its desires, so often associated with discomfort and shame. Storylines take whimsical turns, as when a prudish secretary loses her virginity to a being from Saturn named Ixtlan. Sentences are bare and disjointed, as in the erotic and bloody story “The Body”: “Sometimes the two women slept together. The day was long. And, though they weren’t homosexuals, they’d turn each other on and make love. Sad love. One day they told Xavier about it. Xavier quivered.” Accounts of the author’s life break into the fiction — waiting for the phone to ring, having a glass of rosé, debating whether to watch television alone, thinking of death — a feature she excised from earlier work. “That Clarice made people uncomfortable,” thinks one character, suddenly interrupting the narrative in “The Departure of the Train.”

  In keeping up with Clarice’s shifting registers and translating nearly four decades of work in two years’ time, I’ve often felt like a one-woman vaudeville act, shouting, laughing, crying, musing, singing, and tap-dancing my way breathlessly across the stage. Her language swings between elegant, formal, and poetic in her more conventionally literary stories, colloquial in her comic moods, stark and fragmented in her abstract, oracular pieces, and spontaneous, even delirious, in her later works. Beyond the technical difficulty of capturing these diverse voices and distinguishing the standard from the strange, what makes translating Clarice especially taxing is the emotional weight of inhabiting her characters, often moody, volatile individuals caught in an upheaval. She draws you into these worlds until their logic is yours. I found myself growing as restless and combative as Cristina and Daniel while working on “Obsession.” And I knew I was deep inside “The Buffalo” when I matter-of-factly described it as “a story about a woman who goes to the zoo to learn how to hate,” only realizing from my friend’s confused look that this “plot” wasn’t perfectly normal.

  What remains constant is the intimate physicality of Clarice’s voice — its strong rhythms and the way she seems to be whispering in your ear like a sister, mother, and lover, somehow touching you from far away. Part of her rhythm comes from a fondness for repetition: refrains that produce an incantatory feel or thematic crescendo, anaphoric structures that lend a biblical tone, the slapstick effect of a repeated catchphrase, or the compulsive reiterations of an obsessive mind, like Laura’s in “The Imitation of the Rose.” Her words hold onto a sensory coherence, even when their semantic logic threatens to come undone.

  Clarice inspires big feelings. As with “the rare thing herself” from “The Smallest Woman in the World,” those who love her want her for their very own. But no one can clai
m the key to her entirely, not even in the Portuguese. She haunts us each in different ways. I have presented to you the Clarice that I hear best.

  Katrina Dodson

  .

  Bibliographical Note

  The present volume collects, for the first time, all of Clarice Lispector’s stories. There are many reasons why this has not been done before, even in Brazil. These include a publishing history that created variants of her writings in her lifetime, thanks principally to the author’s habit of recycling her older works for publication in new formats. The instability of the publishing industry and of her own “critical fortune” often forced her to change publishers. Her nine novels had eight different publishers, for example, a number that does not include the reprints of earlier works in her lifetime.

  It is much the same with the stories. Stories published in one place show variants with the same story published elsewhere; financial concerns often forced her to recycle earlier material in magazines and newspapers. Other later publications were careless and published without her supervision or approval. For the sake of simplicity, we have generally opted to translate the first editions of these stories as they were published in book form.

  This decision, despite its theoretical cleanness, has not always been easy in practice, particularly because many of these stories were never collected in her lifetime and only emerged years — even decades — after her death in 1977.

  When she died, she was a cult favorite among artists and intellectuals. Her reputation as the greatest figure of modern Brazilian literature came posthumously. Her acolytes — the word “admirers” is unequal to her obsessive, lifelong enthusiasts — have scoured the archives, discovering much early work. Though more stories may yet emerge (especially from fresh examinations of the periodicals with which she collaborated as a young woman), none have appeared since the discovery of the short first part of “Letters to Hermengardo” several years ago. It is reasonable to expect that the list of works we present here will not be significantly expanded.

  Clarice Lispector was no respecter of genres. Many of her writings were presented as journalism but are clearly fictional; many published as fictions might be more comfortably classified as memoirs or essays; and so on. In the interests of making as much of her work available in our language as we can, we have cast a broad net, excluding journalism, essays, and short miscellany.

  For these stories in the context of her work and life, see Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser.

  First Stories

  The works we have called “First Stories” are the juvenilia of Clarice Lispector, published when she was a law student in Rio de Janeiro, before her marriage and subsequent departure from Brazil. They also predate the spectacular debut of Near to the Wild Heart.

  These early works come from three sources. The first is Clarice’s earliest known manuscript, which has a note on the first page in her late handwriting: “In 1942 I wrote Near to the Wild Heart, published in 1944. This book of stories was written in 1940–41. Never published. Clarice.” (In fact, the novel was published in December 1943, around Clarice’s twenty-third birthday.)

  These are: “Interrupted Story,” dated October 1940; “Gertrudes Asks for Advice,” September 1941; “Obsession,” October 1941; “The Fever Dream,” July 1940; “The Escape,” bearing only the notation “Rio 1940”; and “Another Couple of Drunks,” December 1941. They were published in that order in a posthumous volume entitled Beauty and the Beast (A bela e a fera, Nova Fronteira, Rio de Janeiro, 1979), edited by Olga Borelli, the friend and collaborator of Clarice’s final years. The original manuscripts are kept in the Instituto Moreira Salles, Rio de Janeiro.

  The second source for the “First Stories” is another posthumous volume called Other Writings (Outros escritos, Rocco, Rio de Janeiro, 2005), which preserves some of her early journalism as well as essays, speeches, and interviews. It includes her earliest known story, “The Triumph,” published in the magazine Pan on May 25, 1940; “Jimmy and I,” published in the Folha de Minas, Belo Horizonte, December 24, 1944, but probably dating from several years earlier; the fifth part of “Letters to Hermengardo,” published in the newspaper Dom Casmurro, August 30, 1941; and “Excerpt,” Vamos Lêr!, January 9, 1941.

  The third source, for the fourth part of “Letters to Hermengardo,” is a copy of Dom Casmurro from July 26, 1941, preserved in the Museum of Brazilian Literature, Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, Rio de Janeiro. The first three parts of “Letters to Hermengardo” are taken from Todos os contos (Rocco, Rio de Janeiro, 2016), the Brazilian edition of Lispector’s complete stories, which was published following the original hardcover publication in English of The Complete Stories in 2015.

  Family Ties (“Laços de família”)

  This work, famous in Brazil, did not appear until 1960, when it was published by Francisco Alves, São Paulo. Several of its stories had been published by the Ministry of Education and Health in 1952 in a now-rare pamphlet called Some Stories (Alguns contos). These were “Mystery in São Cristóvão,” “Family Ties,” “Beginnings of a Fortune,” “Love,” “A Chicken,” “The Dinner.” At the time, Clarice was living in the United States. Others appeared in the legendary magazine Senhor, around the time of her definitive return to Rio de Janeiro in 1959.

  The collection is dedicated to Clarice’s psychiatrist, Inês Besouchet. The story “Preciousness” is dedicated to her close friend Mafalda Verissimo, wife of the celebrated novelist Erico Verissimo. She mentions Erico in a stray note following “A Full Afternoon” in Where Were You at Night.

  The Foreign Legion (“A legião estrangeira”)

  This work was published in 1964 by the Editora do Autor, Rio de Janeiro. It was divided into two parts: “Stories” and “Back of the Drawer” (“Fundo de gaveta”). Subsequent Brazilian editions have included just the 13 selections from “Stories,” all of which we include here — from “The Disasters of Sofia” through “The Foreign Legion.” “Back of the Drawer” is a compilation of mainly occasional pieces, short fictional sketches, and essayistic fragments. Of the more substantial pieces, we have selected the versions more formally collected later in Covert Joy, and we also include four additional works here. Two of these illustrate the difficulties in making our selection: “The Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels” is Clarice’s only play; and “Mineirinho” is sensu stricto journalistic, but its style brings it much closer to her stories. Many of these works, too, were originally published in Senhor magazine; many, too, would be recycled.

  At the beginning of “Back of the Drawer,” Clarice includes the following note:

  This second part will be called, as the never sufficiently quoted Otto Lara Resende once suggested to me, “Back of the Drawer.” But why get rid of things that pile up, as in every house, at the back of drawers? As Manuel Bandeira put it: so that it [death] will find me with “the house clean, the table set, with everything in its place.” Why pull from the back of the drawer, for example, “the burned sinner,” written just for fun while I was waiting for my first child to be born? Why publish things that aren’t worthwhile? Because worthwhile things aren’t worthwhile either. Besides, things that evidently aren’t worthwhile always interested me very much. I have an affectionate fondness for the unfinished, the poorly made, whatever awkwardly attempts a little flight and falls clumsily to the ground.

  Covert Joy (“Felicidade clandestina”)

  This collection of twenty-five stories was first published by the Editora Sabiá in 1971. It includes many works that originally appeared in The Foreign Legion, two of which Clarice retitled: “Journey to Petrópolis” became “The Great Outing” (“O grande passeio”) and “Evolution of a Myopia” became “Progressive Myopia” (“Miopia progressiva”).

  The thirteen we have included are those that had not been previously published or that appeared, sometimes in a less developed version a
nd with different titles, in the second section of The Foreign Legion.

  These include: “Eat up, My Son”; “Forgiving God,” formerly “Vengeance and Grievous Reconciliation” (“A vingança e a reconciliação penosa”); “Boy in Pen and Ink,” formerly “Sketching a Boy” (“Desenhando um menino”); “A Hope,” formerly in a shorter variant as “Hope” (“Esperança”); and “Involuntary Incarnation,” which began as the fragment “The Missionary Woman’s Turn” (“A vez da missionária”).

  Where Were You at Night (“Onde estivestes de noite”)

  Published on April 5, 1974, one of the three original works Clarice Lispector published in that year — the others were The Via Crucis of the Body and Água viva — at Editora Artenova, Rio de Janeiro.

  We have included all but three stories, featured in other collections: “Emptying Out” (“Esvaziamento”) appears as “A Sincere Friendship” in Covert Joy, which also contains “Waters of the World.” “A Complicated Case” (“Um caso complicado”) is translated as “Before the Rio-Niterói Bridge” in The Via Crucis of the Body for reasons noted below.

  “Report on the Thing” was originally published as “Object: antistory” (“Objeto: anticonto”) and given its current title when published in the newspaper Jornal do Brasil. There, Clarice included this preface:

  Note: this report-mystery, this geometrical anti-story was published in São Paulo’s Senhor magazine. In his introduction, Nélson Coelho says that I have killed the writer in me. He cites several writers who attempted suicide of the written word. None succeeded. “Just as Clarice shall not succeed,” Nélson Coelho writes.