Will the Real Clarice Lispector Please Stand Up?

Great essay, e.g.

"There should be a word for the ambiguous kinship between translators who share an author. It’s a bond marked by tender antagonism or light rivalry, mixed with a uniquely intimate solidarity."

It does seem interesting that such a word does not exist in light of the bitter feuds resulting from translations one of the foremost being Nabokov vs.Wilson (summary: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/books/review/feud-nabokov..., read Wilson's scathing review of the Eugene Onegin translation that's a textbook case of a hatchet job: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1965/07/15/the-strange-case-...).

If you're interested in her, another good essay is by her other translator, Benjamin Moser, adapted from his Introduction to Collected Stories : https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-true-glamour....

A good essay about the Bishop-Lispector relationship is https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70270/its-complica.... From what we know of Lispector's development, Bishop's assertion that “She’s never read anything that I can discover” sounds either like gross naïveté or an outsider's bumbling misunderstanding. But it agreed with the carefully constructed self image by Lispector, e.g. see https://www.thenation.com/article/not-the-word-but-the-thing....

“What if Clarice Lispector had not been a disconcerting beauty?” is an interesting question examined lightly here. Again, I'd say that the beatific, straight pose is an important part of the image that Lispector herself created rather than the one imposed on her by "the male gaze". Almost all images of her have the rather unsettling straight on gaze, more of a glare really, and she never smiles.

I always think about the particular difficulty of translating authors who use language in ways that are very subtly strange to native speakers. How do you recreate that strangeness in a second language without completely reimagining the writing?

A great read. It made me want to read Clarice again.