Macabéa killed me.
She was finally free of herself and of us. Don’t be afraid, death is an instant, it passes like that, I know because I just died with the girl. Pray forgive me this death. Because I couldn’t help it, you accept anything because you’ve kissed the wall. But then all of a sudden I feel my last grimace of revolt and howl: the slaughter of doves!!! Living is luxury.
Okay, it’s over.
With her dead, the bells were ringing but without their bronzes giving them sound. Now I understand this story. It is the imminence in those bells that almost-almost ring.
The greatness of every one.
Silence.
If one day God comes to earth there will be great silence.
The silence is such that not even thought thinks.
Was the ending as grandiloquent as you required? Dying she became air. Energetic air? I don’t know. She died in an instant. The instant is that blink of time in which the tire of the speeding car touches the ground and then touches it no longer and then touches it again. Etc., etc., etc. In the end she was no more than a music box that was slightly out of tune.
I ask you:
— What is the weight of light?
And now — now all I can do is light a cigarette and go home. My God, I just remembered that we die. But — but me too?!
Don’t forget that for now it’s strawberry season.
Yes.
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, I wrote that
much of Clarice Lispector’s subsequent fame, her enduring popularity among a broad public, rests on this thin book, in which she managed to bring together all the strands of her writing and of her life. Explicitly Jewish and explicitly Brazilian, joining the northeast of her childhood with the Rio de Janeiro of her adulthood, “social” and abstract, tragic and comic, uniting her religious and linguistic questions with the narrative drive of her finest stories, The Hour of the Star is a fitting monument to its author’s “unbearable genius.”
It is a particular personal satisfaction to inaugurate the New Directions retranslation of Clarice Lispector with The Hour of the Star, the first book of hers that I read, as a college sophomore. I have since been intimate with her work for many years, but it was only during the translation of this book that I fully realized how much courage it took to write like this.
I hope that this new version, along with the work of the translators responsible for the subsequent volumes, will restore the spines to the cactus.
Benjamin Moser
Utrecht, August 2011
ALSO BY CLARICE LISPECTOR
AVAILABLE FROM NEW DIRECTIONS
Soulstorm
Near to the Wild Heart
The Foreign Legion
Selected Crônicas
FORTHCOMING
A Breath of Life
The Passion According to G. H.
Água Viva
The Hour of the Star () Page 9
