Translating Clarice Lispector, Sentence by Sentence

There is a sentence near the end of The Passion According to G.H. that I have read in four languages and cannot translate to my own satisfaction. In Portuguese it is plain to the point of brutality — a few short words, a colon, a phrase that should not work and does. Every English version I have seen either smooths it into respectability or breaks it trying to keep the strangeness. This is the central problem of Clarice Lispector, and it is the reason new translations of her keep appearing while other writers settle into a single authorised English self. With Lispector, the definitive version is a fantasy. The strangeness is the point.

A writer who fit no category

Lispector was born in 1920 in what is now Ukraine, carried to Brazil as an infant by a family fleeing the pogroms, and raised in Recife and Rio de Janeiro speaking Portuguese as her only real language. She published her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, at twenty-three, and the Brazilian literary establishment did not know what to do with it. It had no plot to speak of. It was interior, philosophical, written in a Portuguese that bent the language’s ordinary grammar toward something more like thought caught in the act.

She spent years abroad as a diplomat’s wife, in Naples and Bern and Washington, writing in Portuguese the entire time, refusing the languages around her. She wrote novels, but also a vast, peculiar body of newspaper columns — the crônicas — in which metaphysics and household trivia sit side by side without apology. By the time she died in 1977, the day before her fifty-seventh birthday, she was a national institution whom almost no one outside Brazil had read. That she is now spoken of alongside Kafka and Woolf is the result, more than anything, of translation.

What exactly is being translated

Here is the difficulty stated plainly: with most writers, you translate what the sentence says. With Lispector, the sentence’s meaning and its manner cannot be separated, because her subject is frequently the failure of language itself to hold experience. Her prose does odd things on purpose. It uses a wrong-sounding word where a right-sounding one was available. It lets a sentence trail into a fragment, repeats itself, contradicts itself within a single breath. A careful translator’s instinct — to fix, to clarify, to make the English read well — is precisely the instinct that destroys her.

The American translator Gregory Rabassa, who translated Lispector early, said she resembled Virginia Woolf to look at and Gogol to read, and that he found her impossible in the most admiring sense. The puzzle is constant. When her Portuguese is awkward, is the awkwardness a deliberate effect or simply the texture of her thought, and does the distinction even matter if the result on the page is the same? Translate the awkwardness faithfully and English readers may think the translator incompetent. Translate it away and you have produced a different, lesser writer who happens to share her name.

The Benjamin Moser project

The reason a new generation reads Lispector in English at all is a coordinated effort, led by the biographer and translator Benjamin Moser, to retranslate her major work for New Directions, the publisher that has done more than any other to bring her into English. Beginning around 2011, New Directions issued fresh translations of the principal novels — each by a different translator, working to a shared editorial principle: stay close to the strangeness. Do not improve her. Let the English be as unsettled as the Portuguese.

The decision to use multiple translators was itself a kind of argument. Lispector’s voice is so particular that a single English translator might, over five novels, smooth it into a house style — their style, not hers. By distributing the books, the project kept the seams visible. The version of Lispector you meet in Água Viva is not quite the version you meet in The Hour of the Star, and that unevenness is closer to the truth of a writer who was herself never the same twice.

The approach was not without controversy; questions about Moser’s editorial dominance and about individual choices have been aired at length, including in the pages of The Paris Review, which has published both her work and the arguments around it. But the underlying achievement is hard to dispute. A writer who was effectively unavailable in English a generation ago is now, sentence by contested sentence, one of the most discussed authors in world literature.

The problem of the obvious word

Let me return to the sentence-level work, because that is where Lispector lives and dies in translation. Portuguese, like the other Romance languages, has a different relationship to abstraction than English does; words like coisa (thing) and vida (life) and Deus (God) sit comfortably in ordinary speech in a way their English cousins do not. Lispector uses these plain, enormous words constantly and without embarrassment. The translator must decide, again and again, whether to keep the bald English equivalent — thing, life, God — and risk sounding naive, or to vary and dignify the vocabulary and so betray the deliberate plainness of the original.

She also writes a great deal about the body, about animals, about the moment of contact between consciousness and raw matter — a cockroach, an egg, a glass of water. The famous central scene of The Passion According to G.H. turns on a woman crushing a cockroach and then, in a gesture of appalling intimacy, tasting it. The prose at such moments is at its most extreme: ecstatic, repetitive, almost liturgical. To translate it is to choose, syllable by syllable, between reverence and revulsion, and Lispector’s whole point is that the two are not opposites. There is a discipline of removal here not unlike the one practised by the composer Arvo Pärt, who reduced his music to a single chord and found that the reduction released, rather than diminished, its force.

Where to begin

Readers ask me where to start, and I no longer give a single answer, because the right entry point depends on what you want from her. The Hour of the Star, her last and shortest novel, is the most approachable — a brief, devastating book about a poor migrant girl in Rio, narrated by an author-figure who keeps interrupting himself. The Passion According to G.H. is the masterpiece and the hardest, a single uninterrupted interior monologue that some readers find unbearable and others cannot put down. Água Viva is the purest distillation of her late style, barely a narrative at all, closer to a held note than a story.

Whichever you choose, choose a recent New Directions edition and read slowly. Lispector punishes speed the way certain paintings do — the way the grey interiors of Vilhelm Hammershøi yield nothing to the hurried glance and everything to the patient one. The reward for slowness is the sensation, rare in any literature, of watching a mind think at the exact edge of what language can carry. That edge is where she wrote, and it is where, sentence by sentence, her translators have to follow her.

FAQ

Q: Who was Clarice Lispector? A: A Brazilian novelist and short-story writer (1920–1977), born in Ukraine and raised in Brazil, regarded as one of the most original voices in twentieth-century literature. Her introspective, philosophically charged fiction — concerned with consciousness, language, and the body — defied the conventions of plot-driven storytelling and made her a national figure in Brazil long before she was widely read abroad.

Q: What are her major works? A: Her best-known books include the novels Near to the Wild Heart, The Passion According to G.H., Água Viva, and The Hour of the Star, along with the short-story collection Family Ties and the posthumously gathered newspaper crônicas. The Hour of the Star and The Passion According to G.H. are her most studied.

Q: Why is she considered so hard to translate? A: Because her style and her meaning are inseparable. Lispector deliberately uses plain or “wrong-sounding” words, unconventional grammar, and unresolved sentences to mirror the failure of language to capture experience. A translator who smooths the prose into elegant English erases the very strangeness that makes her work what it is.

Q: Where should a new reader start? A: The Hour of the Star is the most accessible introduction — short, moving, and self-aware. From there, The Passion According to G.H. offers her most ambitious work, and Água Viva her most distilled late style. Recent New Directions translations are the standard English editions.