Publishing Perspectives puts out a piece on the momentum behind reviving the literary riches of Clarice Lipsector. Benjamin Moser published Why This World, Lipsector's biography a couple years ago (which is listed in my Choose Books guide as a particularly good gift for the writers among you), and now the rewards are paying off: a series of new translations of the Brazilian writer that will elevate her "strange and unexpected language". Moser, wonderfully, gives the backstory about how this cohesive and complete effort to revive Lipsector's work is coming together. Moser is translating The Hour of the Star himself, while four others from around the world are taking on A Breath of Life, "the mystic classic The Passion According to G.H"; Água Viva; and "Clarice’s famous first novel, Near to the Wild Heart."
We deliberately selected a young group: there’s an urgent need for more translators from the Portuguese, and we thought that by giving some younger translators the chance to work with a classic author, we could expand the pool a bit and encourage other publishers to translate Brazilian and Portuguese literature.
My task, now, is to shepherd their work into publication. I still have to make them sound like Clarice (and even the best translators try, even subconsciously, to smooth her out!) and to sound like one another. This is no easy task when not only dealing with four different literary personalities, but also people who speak three different dialects of English: British, American, and Australian.
We’ve worked very hard, but we are convinced that this is the most important work of re-translation of a Latin American author since the translations of Jorge Luis Borges were published by Viking a decade ago. Elizabeth Bishop famously said that Clarice Lispector was “better than Borges.” While such comparisons are of course nonsense — writers cannot be ranked like athletes — we are convinced that this project will get many to take a first, or maybe even a second, look at one of the twentieth century’s iconic artists.
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