>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC. >> Good afternoon. My name is Georgette Dorn, and I'm
the head of the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. It is a great pleasure to welcome
you all to this wonderful event, and I want to thank
especially the Embassy of Brazil to have made this event possible
and cosponsoring it with us. I also want to thank the [inaudible]
Center, our other co-sponsor. The Ambassador of Brazil is with
us, and he will speak later on, Ambassador Figueiredo, welcome. It is a great privilege to introduce
our speakers, Benjamin Moser, who is and editor, translator,
critic, very well known, [inaudible] Claire Lispector's book,
"Why This World," and the editor of the volume that we
are presenting today. Benjamin is from Texas, has a PhD
from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and
has written for many, many journals including the
New York Review of Books. And Professor Vivaldo Santos
is a Professor of Portuguese at Georgetown University. He is a graduate of University
of California at Berkley and is the author Drummond
de Andrade, a very important Brazilian author. Ambassador Figueiredo. [ Applause ] [ Background Noise ] >> Good morning. >> Good morning. >> I'd like to thank you
all very much for joining us for this conversation on the life
and work of Clarice Lispector. I'd like to thank first
Ms. Georgette Dorn, the chief of the Hispanic
division as well as the poetry and literature center of the Library
of Congress for hosting us today. I couldn't think frankly of a better
venue to discuss Clarice Lispector, and I am pleased that we are able
to partner with Library of Congress on such an important event. Last week I had the pleasure
of visiting the Library and meeting librarian, David
Mao, and I was introduced to the beautiful Portinari Murals
that are at the Hispanic division. For those who haven't been
there, I highly recommend it. I have also visited
the Maps division, which kindly organized a very
special exhibit with rare and antique maps of my country
for what I am extremely grateful. Well, Vivaldo Santos and Benjamin
Moser frankly need no introduction. I will just say that those who
study Brazil in Washington will with no doubt have already been in
contact and met Professor Santos due to his large and strong
work for the benefit of the Brazilian culture
in the whole DC area. And it is indeed a privilege
for the Embassy to be able to help bring Benjamin
Moser to Washington. He is, among many other
things, a celebrated biographer of Clarice Lispector and the editor of this newly released,
complete stories. The first comprehensive
English translation of Lispector's short stories on this
beautiful edition, very quickly, as you know, made the New
York Times last year's list of 100 most notable books. It truly deserves it, and the attention it got only
reflects the depth and the span of both the work of Clarice but especially the
work of Benjamin Moser. Mr. Moser states in his biography
of Lispector that, and I quote, "She was both Brazil's
greatest modern writer, and in the profound sense not
a Brazilian writer at all." In my mind, I must say that
she really belongs to Brazil as she once said and deserves her
place among the greatest Brazilian authors of all times, but at the
same time, her deep understanding of the human soul defies
all boundaries. And I am very excited
about the discussion here, which sadly I will not be
able to continue to attend due to other commitments,
but I can't help but wonder how this mysterious
woman would react if she knew that her work was to be discussed
at the Library of Congress in Washington, a city
where she lived, with such a nice and
interested public. I think in a certain way
that the answer to this and other questions will emerge in
the context of today's conversation. So without further ado, I simply
would like to thank you very, very much for your presence, and I hope you have a
very interesting certainly and fruitful conversation about her. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Ben will now read some selections for you before joining
Vivaldo for a conversation. >> [inaudible] Thank you,
Georgette, and Talia [phonetic] and Gian [inaudible] and Vivaldo. It's great to be here. It's interesting to think what
Clarice, I'm always too tall for these microphones
[laughter], it's interesting to think what Clarice would
have thought about being here, being honored this way in the city
where she did live for the whole of the 1950's almost,
and where she wrote a lot of the stores that are in this book. And they're very -- it's
interesting to say she's a Brazilian or she's not a Brazilian. They're very Brazilian, the
stories are actually more Brazilian than the novels. I mean it's very much, these
women almost always women, living in a couple of
neighborhoods in Rio, and almost always doing
pretty much the same thing, which is having their
peaceful lives interrupted by some violent something. And it's very rarely a
violent event, like a shooting or a murder or something. It's something that
happens inside them. It's something that
touches them somehow. And what's interesting,
I've written about Clarice, so this is the first book that I
wrote about here, "Why This World," which is the biography that I
published in 2009, also in Brazil and in the United States
and then in lots of other countries
throughout the world. It's coming out in Holland
next week, which is why I have to get back there, and
it keeps going on and on. But it's part of a series that's
now, this is now the seventh book of this series, so there's five
of the novels that we've published in English, and now the stories, and then six more coming,
so, you know, get ready. It's not going to be as fast. I mean I'm doing one a year. But having done that for so
long, I got a little bit, I wouldn't say bored, because I
always love Clarice, but it's a lot of work doing other
things, you know, I have real job besides
doing Clarice. It's been more than
12 years of this. And she -- the thing about
working with a truly great artist, or truly great writer, is
there is always more to say, and when I was writing
the introduction to this, I thought haven't I already
said everything about her? But it turns out I hadn't. And working through these stories
in this way, from her first story that she publishes when she's 19
years old, and she's a student to the stories that leaves
incomplete as sketches on her death bed, which are
very fantastic stories too, you see this entire woman's life
being written out in her life, throughout her life, but
also writing about how women, specifically change and grow. And so I wrote a little
thing about this. I discovered this was the first time
a woman had ever done this anywhere, and this is -- if you are
familiar with feminist criticism, this is something that comes
up a lot, especially, you know, in the '60's and the
'70's when female cultural and intellectual achievement
is starting to be reevaluated and starting to be brought
out of the gutter, you know, where it was always relegated
because it was women. Even Virginia Woolf,
until the '70's, was not considered good
enough to be on any curriculum in this country or in England. And so there was this work
for two or three generations of female scholars who brought this
out of the closet and discovered. But one of the questions was
why had it not happened before. So I thought why it's interesting. She comes from an absolutely
destitute background. She comes from really
the dredges of society. I mean she comes from a very poor,
not even an immigrant background but a refugee background, and she
becomes by the time she's a teenager and she's writing this
story, she becomes famous as, in the literary world of
Rio, but she becomes famous as not only the most beautiful
girl in Rio de Janeiro, which was something, you
know, it's an accomplishment, but also this woman that
everybody knew was a genius. And so I wrote this thing about her. I'll just read it briefly,
and then we can talk about it. This achievement -- oh,
okay, so "The other side of silence is speech," and
there are a lot of silent women in these stories, women who can't
speak or who are silent forcibly by circumstances or by men. "Today women as writers and women
as the subjects of women writers are so familiar that it is hard to
believe that Clarice's respect of characters or their lives
ever needed to be discovered. But to see this work from the
perspective of what came after it is to miss it's historical novelty. Clarice was fundamentally
without a tradition. She was an immigrant, and though
she had the ancient European Jewish tradition behind her, that world,
particularly in the tiny shtetl where she was born in
the western Ukraine, was not easily adaptable
to modern urban lives. In the literature of
the language she wrote, the subject of modern
women no more existed than did woman writers themselves." Now this is kind of amazing if you
think about what comes after it. There were a couple
of Brazilian women who had written Cecelia
Morales [phonetic] and, but I mean it was very, very tiny. And now I say, "In this respect
Portuguese was no different from any other language,
and Brazil was no different from any other country. Clarice was 9 when Virginia Woolf
asked a question Clarice later quoted, 'Who shall measure the heat
and violence of the poet's heart when caught entangled
in a woman's body?' The question, Woolf believed,
applied as much to women of her own day as it did
to women of Shakespeare's. This novelty explains some of
the fascination and confusion that early readers of
Hurricaine Clarice," which is a title someone
gave her, a friend of hers, "one imagines a similar thrill of
discovery among the first readers of Dickens and [inaudible] when
literature first cast it's light on the working classes or when
gay readers first saw their lives written about sympathetically or when colonial people exchanged
the condescension of folklore for the higher dignity
of literature. The astonishment her achievement
provoked is still palpable in the yellowing scrapbooks
preserving the reviews in Clarice Lispector's archives." And so I want to just talk,
follow up about this a little bit and about other things
too, and you're welcome to ask us questions if you'd like. The phenomena of Clarice is
a really emotional thing. We were at Harvard the
other day, and Arthur said that he finally understood that Clarice is not a
writer, she's a church. And it was really funny because
people, it was kind of a long event, and I was screaming because
there was no microphone, but everybody got up. It was like an evangelistic revival. Everybody wanted to talk, and of course it was a
heavily Brazilian audience. And everybody wanted
to get up and talk about how they have first met
Clarice and what she had done to them and how she
had affected them, and it really did get a
little bit like a church. I mean you felt like this isn't just
a writer that people read in the way that you read something
that's outside of yourself, that you read to learn something
about, you know, navigation of, you know, Ferdinand
Magellan or something. You know, it's something that you
read because you learn something about yourself and because
it affects you in a way that is very hard to explain. It's nice when you have Brazilians
around because you don't have to really explain that to people,
because anyone who would come to an event who is Brazilian,
who is [inaudible] Portuguese, is obsessive almost by nature. So, that's kind of who
we're dealing with. We're not dealing with this iconic
great writer that is, you know, we're very respectful and you read
it because you have to at school, you read it because you have to,
and if you're susceptible to her, I think it's very easy to understand
why I would spend this much time on her, and why despite all the time
I've already put in her I'm excited to go forward and publish the
remaining volumes in English. So, thanks for coming,
and Vivaldo, let's talk. [ Background Noise ] [ Applause ] >> I just would like to thank
the Library of Congress, the Hispanic division, for the
invitation and also [inaudible], you know, sharing this
space with Ben, and I feel very honored to be here. And first thing it is to start
a conversation but also to open for comments and questions
as we start talking, and Ben, do you want to start? Because you mentioned something
about this passion for Clarice. That was one of, as a professor,
having done my homework, I have all these questions,
but one thing about, for me, when I read Clarice, and when I
read Clarice for the first time, there is something very
special about Clarice. It has to do with language, but
there is something about love, but not love in the idea of love
that we use for the romantic love. There is something
that goes beyond love. Love for a thing. Love for existence. The minimum thing, the thing that we
had done, we can see, and there is, I don't know, something that when I
read Clarice it makes me feel more, let's say, more humane. It touched me in a certain way
that like she has something that it goes deep inside myself, and maybe you could talk
a little bit about that. >> Well I think that's a
little bit what I, what I, what has kept me going for all these
years is that there's a feeling of love that comes out
of her that's a very -- it's not this romantic love at all. Clarice is extremely violent, and
she's extremely cruel sometimes to her characters, and yet there's
a feeling of love that comes out. And it's not -- she's very
much someone who comes out of an experience physically
and where she comes from in Europe. She comes from a place
of destruction. She comes from a place where
your life and you, yourself, can be absolutely wiped off the map
for no reason with no explanation. So there's a real refusal
of, you know, what's behind romantic is also
an idea of Christian love, which is a love for an idea of
a world that can be humanized, a world that can be
made to look like us and to conform to our wishes. And, you know what they
say in the Baptist Church, not my will but thy will be done. She doesn't believe in any of that. She thinks you're going
to get destroyed and crushed like a roach [laughter]. And that is actually true. That is where we're all going
unless you believe in life after death in some religious way. Physically that's what happens, and
that's what happens to the roach in "The Passion According to G.H." And that's a symbol for all of us. You know, we are all just a bunch
of tendons and veins and gross stuff that you don't even want to look at. I mean you often can't look
at, and that's the thing. I saw, I was interviewing a
photographer the other day in connection with my biography
[inaudible] and I'm writing about [inaudible], which is,
you know, part of this history of photography, and this guy, I was
talking to him, and as he said oh, look on my website, and
there's all this stuff. And he had gone to medical school. And I said, okay, I'll look on your
[inaudible], so I clicked on it. And he had taken all
these pictures of surgery and what happens in surgery. All very beautifully lit, like the
Rembrandts that you see in The Hague or in Amsterdam, of dissections. And that was actually,
I thought of Clarice, because you can't actually
look at it. It is horrifying to
look at, like a brain, a thing with like blood everywhere. I mean I guess doctors
get used to this, but most people don't
like to look at it. They don't like to think of what they're actually
made of, which is that. And, so she rejects this, this
aestheticized, humanized version of life, but at the same time, and
this is a really great richness of her, she accepts that
status of us as mortal beings, and she elevates it in
this absolutely divine way. So she makes the stuff that we don't
want to think about and historicize or aestheticize, and she makes
it, she makes it beautiful. And I think that's maybe one of the
reasons that people are so grateful to her, because she gives you
a way of going into your life and not understanding it in
some mythological fate way but in a very real way that accepts and that understands
what we really are. >> And I agree with you. And I also think that it is a, I
think Clarice is different from most of the existentialists who think
that, you know, [inaudible] nothing, and she goes beyond that. I think you mentioned that in
your biography about [inaudible] for example, because I
think for Clarice it seems to me there is a need for
confrontation with the self, for who we are, and in order to
really, is ours like a search, like daily to the existence, which
it seems to me she always kind of [inaudible] what's after
that, what after [inaudible], but she really, and the one thing
that really calls my attention when I read her, she really,
you know, all those things that we don't want to see, kind of
objects, that she forces us to look at them and to learn that we have
this, we also have this very nature, human but also very close nature to
ourselves, and we need to embrace that kind of nature
as a whole being. >> Well that's interesting because,
you know, it essentially forces you to look at things that
you don't want to look at. That could mean two things. I'm very much opposed to, and I
very much don't watch, for example, violent films or films about
murdering children or this kind of stuff that I don't want to watch,
and I know this exists in the world. I think we all so, but it's not that
kind of forcing you to look at stuff that you didn't want to look
at in a voyeuristic way, because that's something that
also comes up in the history of topography, whether there's
a picture of war that is meant to educate and spur people to
action, and what is just obscenity. Clarice is never. I mean Clarice is extremely elegant, and her language is extremely
beautiful, and part of the project of translating all of
these books, you know, I coordinated this project, and
I said it's now the sixth volume that we've done, is
getting that language right. Because if you don't get the
language then it can become shocking in the wrong way. It should be shocking
in a right way. It should be both extremely
beautiful and extremely appalling often. And in these very, you know,
she lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland, for many years. She was a very, she looked like
an upper middle class housewife. You know, she was married
to a diplomat. She had really nice clothes. She had good hair. She had nice makeup. And all of the stuff that she
just takes off in these stories. She just strips it all away, and
she shows what's really happening. And, but it's never obscene. It's just a way of, it's, she
thinks, I think she thinks the hair and makeup and things like this
are really important to people. She's not, she thinks
that's it important to have a face to present
to the world. You can't walk around with exposed
intestines all the time, which, you know, you have to have a
way of getting through your day and then picking up your kids
and going to the grocery shop, and that's what she writes about. And because she situates in these
very ordinary, recognizable parts of the world, it's even more
powerful than [inaudible]. >> You mentioned the
question of language. I think it's a very key, language
plays a very key role in the whole, in Clarice's work, and also I think,
[inaudible] my questions has to do with translation also, you know,
you are challenged to translate some of the kind of language in Clarice that there is a similar
function, not very direct. There is always like. I know one thing about when you read
Clarice, for example, you have to, I don't want to say force, but
I write, and so for [inaudible] to words, words have
different layers, and it seems like Clarice is
always trying to reveal something when she chooses a word that makes
us kind of dig and dig for some sort of meaning to kind of escape, and
she's always kind of, as I said, I go back to the idea of
excavation, and in her literature, all this digression, interspection,
and how do you deal with that in terms of working with
her in translating -- -- Well, I mean, it should be said, I
don't know, I think I'm just looking at faces, I would say there's
half Brazilian's here today. Is that about right? I would say if you read her
in Portuguese the funny thing about her is that she doesn't sound
like a normal Portuguese writer. I mean there's not a single sentence
in Clarice that's a normal way that any Brazilian
would say anything. And yet it's very readable. I mean you always know
what she is saying. It's not obscure in a way that like, you might [inaudible]
that's obscure, that you think, what does she mean. But, and you'll probably
never know because it's like an [inaudible] song
from the middle ages. But with her you know
what she's saying but then when you actually try to
figure out what she's saying, as a translator does, and so, you
know, I've worked with about six, I guess five, six translators,
bringing these works out, and my job is in a lot of ways, I mean of course it's
an editorial role of like correcting people's
Portuguese if they miss a word or that kind of thing, but it's
more trying to get a unified voice for her because in Portuguese
it's such a recognizable voice, and when you actually go
through it word by word, it's extremely difficult. And so my introduction to the story, I mean in the biography this is
the whole story of that, of how, why her language is so strained, but
if you go through it word by word, the sentences just fall apart. They actually don't mean
anything, or they mean everything. But the degree to which you as
a reader are supposed to fill it in is really exciting, actually,
and it's one of the things that draws you into her because
you want to get closer to it, and you feel that this is something
really grandiose and spectacular, and I don't totally get it. So you have a kind of feeling of
being somewhere and kind of like in a museum where you think like
all the other stuff is like right in the next gallery but it might
be closed and you might have to go around somewhere else,
and you might have to -- so it kind of sucks you in. There's a labyrinth feeling to her,
and she, as I write about it anyway, this world, she, her idea of language really does
come from Jewish mysticism. And this becomes very obvious
that she has that tendency, which is to move words around, to
move things around, to try to hint at something that you can never see. And the ultimate thing you can
never see and you can never reach it in Jewish mystical practice is the
name of God, which is something that you both are obliged
to seek, while still knowing that you'll never find it
because if you speak the name of God then you bring about the
end of the world, literally, so you shouldn't do it,
and you can't do it. But you have to do anyway. So this is -- it has all
these metaphorical extensions so you know you have
to put on makeup and go to school every day even though
you know you're going to die. You know, you have to do all these
things in life that are useless, and, you know, I have
to write books. And we were at the other side of the
street yesterday, and they showed that they treat books for a thousand
years at the Library of Congress. So they put them in gas
chambers, and they, and they, and they treat them with some
gas, is that right [inaudible]? [ Inaudible Comment ] Okay. I don't know. But, yeah, and they treat them, and that guarantees them a
life of a thousand years. Okay. Well even if a thousand
years is a really long time, a lot of barbarians
could invade the District of Columbia before a
thousand years is up. I mean a lot of things happen in
the District, so you don't know that it will be preserved,
but even if it is preserved for a thousand years, you know, what is a thousand years
compared to geology? So, we all do these things. I mean, I write these books,
and she wrote these books, and I'm very positive, and
she was happy about them. But they're gone, you
know, in a certain time, and so you do all these things
not because you are denying that but because you are knowing that and
because you want in that short space that you're allowed in the world
to make something beautiful and to leave something behind and
to make something of yourself, but not in a delusional,
grandiose way, in a humble way. >> You mentioned the idea
of [inaudible] for example, when I read [inaudible] it starts
with, everything starts with a yes and ends with a yes, but you
also kind of [inaudible] sense of history, like a
prehistory of time and things, there is always this continuous
surge, and you mentioned language. To me it seems very funny, Clarice
is very funny when you read her, especially like if you
read, Macabea for example, the way she uses language,
we kind of laugh because Macabea is described as
seeming kind of idiot, stupid, but there is something
about the kind. She is a deep ignorant. And Clarice says like there
is a beauty in ignorance that she is trying to
create this character that doesn't know anything,
that's really learning about life, that really experiences language for
the first time, kind of preverbal. It's kind of a child,
almost an animal. And Clarice is always kind of
going after that kind of character and like [inaudible] kind of
preverbal language as you mentioned in the Jewish tradition, like
of the mystic, like of digging and to reach something
that [inaudible] you. >> Well in Macabea, you know,
this is the character in "The Hour of the Star," which is Clarice's
last book where Macabea, as you know, if you know anything
about Brazilian literature, you know that she is killed, and the reason you know this is
there has been all these movies, and you know, it's just,
and it's a tiny book, so it's not really
giving anything away, and she pretty much says
this at the beginning. Macabea is like this roach. She just gets smushed. She gets run over in a car. And yet in that time that
she has, she is still able to create something really
beautiful that is behind knowledge. You know, so it's funny to be
writing about Susan Sontag, who is somebody who so believed
in the mind and in the knowledge. Clarice doesn't. Clarice was not an intellectual. She was always looking for --
at the same time we should say, she was one of the
most learned women of her generation and
not only in Brazil. I mean she was one of
the first journalists, one of the first lawyers
in Latin America. She was a very, obviously
very intelligent person, but she wasn't interested in
book learning and footnotes. You know, she was interested
in learning about what the world
was really like. I mean that's why my book
is called "Why this World." She was interested in
these much bigger questions that could be obscured by all this,
what she would call sophistication, which, so it's, you know,
I have a lot of views of why she calls the first
title is [foreign language], you know beyond the [inaudible]. She is interested in that and
not what's on the surface. So that's reflective
[inaudible], and it's very fun. I mean I have to say it's
really fun to work with her because you always are seeing
something that you wouldn't see. And it's often really stupid stuff. That's what's great about
Clarice, it's so obvious that you would never have
thought of it [laughter]. And that's really something that
I have found time and again. I think, God, I can't
believe I never thought of that, it's so obvious. But it's almost the kind of stuff
that children say, for example. And you think, wow,
that was really well put for a three-year-old [laughter]. And like a grownup would
never have said it. >> [inaudible] what
you just mentioned, if I think Clarice
said someone asked her like she has the reputation of
[inaudible] I understand myself. >> Yeah. >> And it's very interesting
what you are saying because when I read
Clarice it does, you know, the first time you think she's
talking about something like is hard to understand, but basically
if she is looking at things, basically through like
a lamp that makes things like really reveal things
to you, the basic things, like an egg that breaks when in
shopping, and we start, you know, this is like [inaudible], things
that happen in daily life, and the way she presents it,
it makes us do, you know, it's like this is basic life,
and she's very grounded. There is a [inaudible]
botanic garden [inaudible] one of her short stories, you know,
you think she is talking about kind of Eden garden, something
very obscure, like she says describing
how things really are. Just emphasizing nature for example,
so there is nothing existential, thinking about existentialist,
like [inaudible] for example, but when you read, it's like this is
just her way of looking at things. It's very direct, and it's very
[inaudible] like the chicken, for the chicken and
the egg, for instance. It was very simple, very direct. >> It's very simple, and then it's
very, very, very sophisticated. I mean that's what fun about
going through it as an editor, as a translator, as a
philographer, is you get a chance to read her not only from A to
Z, which is always interesting, I think in any writer, to read everything they wrote
is really a great experience. I mean if it's a good writer. If it's a bad writer, it's
a horrible experience, but you know it's somebody
that was worth talking about in the first place,
you see this evolution, and you see how the
directness is there, and the obscurity is there too. It's fun to be able to
both understand something and not understand something, and
with her, and a lot of the stories, especially they're very much on the
surface, they're very direct stories of some, you know, like I don't know
who he was talking about coming back from the grocery store, and she has
these eggs, the tram kind of shifts, and the eggs break in her grocery
bag, and this drives her insane. Literally. By the time she gets off the train
she is nuts, and then she goes to the garden and she
sees these plants. And so instead of saying isn't
nature beautiful, she says something like it was full of rotting brains. You know, there were all these like
flowers that were just fading away on the ground and all this stuff
and in nature was this cool thing. And she, but, again, just as
happens in normal people's lives, and it certainly happens in my life, and I'm sure that anyone here knows
this feeling, is you do get back to [inaudible] and go
to the dinner party. You know. You have these
moments and you're just like, oh, the world falls apart and it's
just like you're never [inaudible]. But most people unless you
really go mad, which does happen, and it happened to Clarice's
son, which is a very, you know, he had that over sensitivity
that she had, but she could go and she could come back,
and go, and come back. And he just went. And she writes not about him but
she does write about the mad. Most people don't go mad. Most people get on with it. Most people figure it out, and
they get up, and they go on. And I think that, there's
a beauty to that, really, is that you can step out
of your life for no reason, and it can be a myth,
and you come back, and then you go on
because you have to. >> I think we, I want to open
the questions and comments, and we can throw out
questions [inaudible]. Is there a microphone. >> Or you can just shout. >> I'll protect. >> Okay. Good [laughter]. >> So you just touched a
very interesting subject for me, which is madness. And she talks about madness
throughout a lot of stories and a lot of books, so I was like
interested in hearing what you think about what her idea of madness was
and if that had any relationship with what she calls
freedom all the time. She's also searching for freedom,
debating with her freedom, and talks about that all the time. >> Well freedom, you know, is
something she is very skeptical of. She is not interested in
political freedom particularly, and this is why. I mean she writes a lot of this
stuff during the dictatorship in Brazil, and of course, I mean
she is what we would consider a, in this country she would
be a democrat, you know. She is a pretty left-wing
but not communist, which in that day was a big divide, especially anywhere
in Latin America. She was, you know, what we consider
a pretty normal center-left person, so of course she was
against torture, she was against dictatorship,
all these things, but that wasn't the
freedom that interested her. The freedom that interested her was
a kind of soul freedom and a kind of how do you, how do you
create yourself in the sense that allows you to
experience freedom. She would never think that
freedom was a permanent state. You know, something that you
once, like a city that you get to and then you just check into
a hotel and you stay there. You know, it's something you
can visit, but there's all sorts of freedoms just in people's lives. The madness question, I mean
the real book about madness that I think is interesting
that's in the next series that we'll be publishing is "The
Apple in the Dark," Maca no escuro, which is an experience of mystic
madness, and it takes place as always with her in this very
boring place, which is this farm in the interior of [inaudible]
but it's not really named, you know, kind of nowhere, Brazil. You know, it's just a farm,
and it's a few people sitting on the farm doing things,
and he cleans out the stables and he milks the cows and
all this kind of stuff, and he realizes he is insane. And she writes in that
book a lot about how, how this delusion can
lead to a mystically and spiritually productive thing. The man, Martin, as in Martin,
he thinks he has killed his wife. Now you don't really hear this
until the very end of the book. When you think it, you think, wow,
he killed his wife, that's terrible. It's going to be like Agatha
Christie or something. But she doesn't, she's not
interested in that at all. This, this crime, and this is why
it's the apple, like "The Apple in the Dark," the apple is
knowledge from the tree of Eden. He uses this crime to achieve this
mystical knowledge, but it's not -- it's like she thinks that
madness is a productive state, but she also knows
what real madness is. I mean there are a lot of
writers, like if you think in Brazilian terms, like [inaudible]
or some of these people who think of madness as sort of
admirable in some ways. She does not think
madness is admirable. I mean this is part of
her being a normal person. She does not, she knows
what madness is. Madness is shocking and
horrifying, and it destroys people and it destroys everyone
around them. So it's a more productive
creative artistic madness, and that was something
that she channeled a lot, but she never entirely ceded to. Although, you know, it's
pretty clear at the end of her life she wants to. She would like to give in. You know, she dies very young. She's only 56 when she dies. And you feel, when you read this
last book that she's ready to go. Like you don't think, wow, I
wish she'd live 25 more years, like she really was done. And artistically she was
done, and she creates this arc in her work that is complete. Like Macabea, "The Hour of the
Star," that's her last book, and that's exactly how it should be. She says, the last word is yes. And then she's off stage. So, I don't know, there's -- yeah? >> Okay, maybe you already answered
it, but anyway, one of my questions, do you think she was
attached to life and how [inaudible] was
related to it or not. >> I think, well yes,
she was attached to life. She really did love life. And she's not a dreadful, sad,
black person, you know, like, uh, just everything's heavy
and miserable. She's not that person at all. She's actually, and the humor
that you see, also not just jokes and things like this,
because she's very Jewish. I mean those jokes are sometimes
like, Groucho Marx sometimes. I mean there's like a
certain voice there. But she was very funny,
and she was very fun. People loved her. You know, it's very interesting
to compare it with Susan Sontag, who everybody was interested
in, but, and people love her, but they also hated
her, you know, so it's, but everybody loved Clarice. Nobody, and I've talked to
hundreds of people about her in Brazil and all over the world. People loved her. I mean sometimes she'd be in a bad
mood or something, but she was, her attachment to life
was very physical. It was very sensual too. It was about water or a book or it wasn't outside what
her life actually held. She loved animals. She loved children. You know, she was a very normal
person in some ways except that she was a great genius. We were just at Emily
Dickinson's house last week. And it's sort of similar, I mean except that Emily Dickinson
never left her room for four years, but you get a feeling of Emily
Dickinson that you could portray her as crazy, but in fact what
he wanted to do was write, and she chose that in a world where
that was a hard choice to make, even for a woman like
Emily Dickinson or at least from an intellectual family and who had enough money
to be able to do it. She loved it, and the writing
is full of that joy, I think. >> Yeah, and she said something
about like, I quote actually from your book, "When I
don't write I'm dead." >> Yeah. >> She always this thing, that
writing is the way for her to overcome death, the
meaning of writing, you know, so you see that all over
her text and everything. I think, and now she
mentions in her, you know, interview like how she loves,
she doesn't consider herself, or didn't consider herself a writer
but more like a mother, you know, things like that, and she really,
you know, all this negativity that we see in this tradition, but
she is not, as been pointed out, she is not that negative in
terms of the dark view of life. >> Can you talk a little bit about
what the translator [inaudible] or how you guys work together and -- >> Well, so as I said,
Katrina, who did this book, was, I keep getting it wrong, I think
it's seven books, so it's five, so she's the sixth in the series
of translators who have done it, because we've done it, it's a
project that's pretty interesting. I'll just speak about it for one
second, but Portuguese is a language like most languages actually. Unless it's Spanish or French, most language are underrepresented
by good translators. So this is what you're starting
out with if you think I want to translate a great Brazilian. Well, the problem is there's
not many people to do it. So I liked, I mean
me and the publisher, we decided to take younger people, who hadn't really had
much experience, and give them a classic author
and work with them, you know, line by line and page by
page and with the idea that we would then create new
people who would then go out and translate other stuff and
make it easy for Brazilians to be in English because now that English
is so dominant internationally, it's very hard -- oh thank you -- it's very hard, it's very hard
having an international career if you're not translating
into English. It used to be you could
be translated into German. You could be translated into French. You could be translated
into Spanish. So what we, well I guess
what my role, I mean, and then you can hear a little bit
about what Katrina did specifically, but the, every translator just like every person has
a very different voice. So the real challenge for me and
for Katrina, who was the last of the series, I mean and more will
be coming, but would be not only to make Clarice's voice unified in
English, but also to make it unified in terms of how the other people
wrote Clarice, which is otherwise when I translated Clarice,
in another language, and so there was a real,
it's a challenge in two ways. Not only is Clarice difficult,
but it has to be in the series without sacrificing
individual voices, and I think Katrina's real talent for this was not only having this
one voice of [inaudible] and of my, whatever we invented for her,
but also in a book like this that has a million voices because
there's all these different stories. I mean if you're translating
a novel, no matter how difficult the novel
is, it's basically you get it, you figure out how to do
it, and then you keep going and then to the end, you know. But here it's like five pages and then you have a totally
difficult voice, new characters, and new social and economic
and political circumstances, and newer times, and so it's a very
difficult thing, and, you know, she just won the [inaudible]
translation prize last week, or this week, and you
know, so it's a really, I think that is a recognition of
just how daunting this project is. It's not easy, to put it mildly. So, I saw, next door to
you was somebody else. Yeah? [ Inaudible Comment ] Well I talk a little
bit about [inaudible]. She lived at 4311 Ridge
Road, if anybody is familiar with Chevy Chase, which I went
there last time I was in Washington about six months ago, and it's
funny because it's the only house, you know, this being America
we carry down anything that's over 20 years old, so all the houses
on the street are gone and replaced by McMansions, you know, except for
her house, which is still there. And I actually wanted to go, maybe
if people want to come we can all go and it can be a little
trip [laughter]. I wanted to get in the house,
and I schlepped out there. It was like a $70 cab ride, you know
how, I mean, or Uber or whatever, so we went out there, and
it was really freezing. It was really cold. This was maybe two years ago. It wasn't last summer. It was winter, because it was cold. And there was Clarice's living room
and her front door and her window and all this stuff that
really felt exciting for people who are into her. Just to think of her on this boring
suburban street writing these completely insane books, one after
the next, with her perfect hair and going to the Embassy
receptions and then, you know, taking care of the kids. You just, it's amazing to see it
if you have that in your head. I'm really hopeful -- Paolo,
her son, wrote me yesterday. He said, oh, you know, go see if the
house on Chevy Chase is still there because that's where he was born. Actually he was born at
George Washington Hospital, but he grew up there, and he said
for me the word, what was it? He said homesick always came
for me before [inaudible]. Because he was then, you know,
she separates from her husband and returns to Brazil in 1959, and he was an English-speaking
kid who was from Washington. I mean he went to school
and Chevy Chase, and suddenly he's brought back
to this world of Brazil at an age where he was certainly
old enough to know that he had left something behind
and he had -- you know, it was hard, and his parents broke up. So, you know, Washington is
an important place for him. Not only is it his birthplace, and
it was an important place for her, and the writer's that she had
here were only two really. Brazilians will always, well
anyone international will come through Washington. I mean it's a big city. It's the capitol. People do show up here,
but the only people which really lived
here were [inaudible] who were her best friends. And [inaudible] was a very famous
writer from the south of Brazil, [inaudible], and he was, he
was the head of something at the Organization for American
States, like some, one of those jobs that people have there [laughter]. And so they came here,
and they drank milkshakes and they took pills. They took like, I can't
remember what it was. You know those pills that
people took in the 50s where you would fall asleep in the
middle of the street [laughter]. She and [inaudible] would do that and just spend the afternoon
being zoned out in a diner. That's a great image. I mean if there's any painters
here, I would, you know, it's like an Edward Hopper painting. Clarice and [inaudible] in a diner,
like slumped over the milkshake. But, you know, but she, Washington
never shows up in her work. Europe, where she lived for many
years, never shows up in her work. She went all over the place. The only places she's
really interested in is Rio and [inaudible]. She does write about
[inaudible], she does write about San Paul [phonetic],
she doesn't, you know, the place of her childhood
and her early years, that's all she writes about. Yeah? Go ahead. >> I'm sorry, [inaudible]
the biography you wrote, what I was wondering is because I
only [inaudible] how can a foreigner read in Portuguese. I mean of course you could
translate it as you said, you've got to be careful [inaudible]
people have a sense of that. But when you're reading
in Portuguese, I mean, I don't know how even
how to say this. I mean, today, would you compare,
I don't knew Portuguese by then and when you found out about here,
but if you compare the understanding or the grasp or the
depth, I don't know, or because for me it was something
almost like an impossible task to think how can you
actually get it. >> Well, my Portuguese is good. Well that's [inaudible] but,
and it became better, an better, and better, and I'd
read her for many years, and I guess the real answer, I mean Portuguese is
something you can learn. You can learn a language. You go, you get a dictionary,
and you know, you study it. There are classes, you know,
for these things [laughter], but the thing is that
really, I mean it's funny, with Clarice like you
either understand her or you don't understand here. And you can actually
understand a lot if you don't know Portuguese
very well, if you understand her. If you don't understand her,
I can't explain it to you. And that happens with Brazilians
who just don't understand her. They think eh, like I don't
understand why are these people obsessed with her. And so you can't, but I would
say that as a more general answer to that everybody, every reader's
experience of a writer is different, and whether it's a language, I
mean, you're woman, for example, you'll read her differently
than I will. You know, you come from
somewhere different. You have a different
life experience. You read different books
when you were a kid. You know, maybe, I don't know,
maybe you're black, or you're gay, or your Mexican, or you're whatever, you're going to bring
something different to it. So, I don't have any
thinking that what I have dug out of her is the final word. You know, if Clarice [inaudible]
you know, Clarice [inaudible], this is the title of the
biography [inaudible] because that wasn't my idea. That was somebody else's
idea, but it was because it's, there's never a final word on her. There's a never a period. So, you know, you take, I'm I miss
a lot of stuff, but with Clarice, it's such a rich quality of work that you're always going
to miss something, so -- >> I have a question for you. >> Uh-huh? >> What you say about
she was full of life, and I believe "Agua Viva" is one
of the books that does show that. She is taking the moment. >> Yeah. >> Here and now, and she's kind
of full of life in that book. And then you say about
the "Maca no escuro," it's completely [inaudible],
the other side. How do you, how do you feel when
you did "Aqua Viva" for example? >> Well that's an interesting
comparison actually because "Agua Viva" is really tiny. It's like 80 pages long,
and it's written like wow, here's this crazy lady writing
[inaudible], woo, woo, you know. And actually it took her years, and
years, and years to write that book. It's very, very carefully written,
and if you see the manuscripts, she goes through I think five
full total rewrites of that book. "Maca no escuro" was the
other book that she rewrote. She actually rewrote it 11
times, which is just horrible because that's her longest book,
and it's like 500 pages almost. And you just, I mean,
it's a hard book to read. It's very intense. And thinking about writing it
is even worse, and then thinking about rewriting and then
rewriting and rewriting, so actually those books are more
similar than they look like, but this is 20 years later, and Clarice has this much
more poetic style by then. She's removed all these
elements of the plot. If you read "Maca no escuro," she never was interested
in the plot anyway. I mean it's like 300 pages of like,
he's like cleaning up the bathroom, you know, whatever he's doing. I mean nothing really happens. You know, there's a,
if you remember, there's the rain storm
that's coming. I think it takes like 400 pages
for the rain storm to come. Like it really just comes, and
they're like no another day and no rain, and there's the cloud. It's getting a little closer,
and none of that matters to her. I mean that's not the
point of the book. The point is what's happening in
the people and in the language. So Clarice is both very
different, and she's very similar, and I guess learning about her life
shows you how she constructed these books that seem very
difficult, so -- >> I have a couple of questions. >> Sure, sure. Go ahead. >> It just seems that I
think between audience that I know would be interested,
and they know, one is animal, [inaudible] and another is music. Those are very important things
and have a strong presence in Clarice's work, could
you elaborate a little. >> Yeah. Well in "Agua
Viva," you know, she says that what she's
interested in is not the music, but it's putting her hand on the
record and feeling the vibrations on the music, which is very
beautiful, and we live in part of the year in southwestern France, which is where the cave
paintings are, and, you know, the very oldest art in
the whole world is there. And I feel like it's so Clarice. You know, it's like, it's,
there's nothing really there. You can kind of see it sketched
out, but you have to fill it in. You have to imagine this
antiquity of where this comes from. This layer, under a layer,
under a layer, under a layer. And I think Clarice
has liked animals because she had been often
disappointed by people, which is something we've
all been familiar with. She not the only one? And, so she loves animals
because they were physical, and they were warm, and they
were, and they didn't think. I think that's maybe really
an important part of animals. And music too. You know, music doesn't have words. I mean it can have words, but what
makes the music music is the sound, not the words. And she, as part of the idea
of getting beyond thought and getting beyond these kind
of constructions of ourselves. That she was just really
not interested, and I think she saw through that. She thought that was a tool. You know, just like clothing. And she was a feminine, you know, as they say in Brazil,
a feminine columnist. She wrote about makeup and
hair and clothes for years, every day in the papers in Rio. So she knew how women were
supposed to look or men. She wrote advice about how to use
perfume and how to use mascara, which is hilarious if you
know anything about her. I mean she's like the
most radical thinker, I think probably the most radial
thinker of the 20th century. Like when you think about,
like the existentialists, I would maybe accept [inaudible],
but some of these people like [inaudible] and oh,
I mean it's so boring and over thought after you read her. You know, she's, and that's why
I quote in the very beginning of the biography this whole cabalist
in the 13th century who gets in Spain somewhere very
upset with these people. He's like, ah, you
know, you ought to know. But, you know, we begin,
no where you end, we begin, speaking to the philosophers. Mystics are not philosophers. They're, they're beyond that. >> So when -- >> I'm sorry, just [inaudible] -- >> Yeah. >> A couple years before she died,
she gave [inaudible] TV interview, and you probably saw that. >> I subtitled it. >> You did? [laughter] She was
kind of really for me, she looked really sad, you know. The last time. And then she said, I
don't understand myself. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. She said that of all
of the books that she wrote, I don't understand what they say. >> Clarice was very
fakely modest oftentimes. She knew exactly who she was. Just like you think didn't Emily
Dickinson probably know who she was? She must have. You know, you can't have
that level of thinking. That video was not a couple
of years before she died, it was a few months before she died. She was dying when she
gave that interview, which was a great interview, because it was the only time
she ever spoke on television. And fascinatingly enough,
that interview was something, she was interviewed by a
journalist, and he actually went mad after that interview,
in a certain way. I spoke to him. He was a little bit crazy at the
end of his life, but all because of that interview, and he had
this thing, he said once to me, he said neither Kafka nor
Rudolf [phonetic] would ever be interviewed. I had her, and I fucked it up. >> Wow. >> So he felt the weight of
this historic responsibility, and actually his interview,
she shows up. She was visiting San Paolo. She was in the studio
with her friend, Olga, who was one of her companions at the
end of her life and would take her around and put her in a taxi
and all this, and she walked into [foreign language], which was
the old sort of PBS or whatever of Brazil, and she
walked through the door, and she said you can
interview me now. And she was like the most
famous writer in Brazil, and she had famously never been
interviewed, and she just walked in, and she said okay I'm ready. And there was total panic,
and everybody ran to try to get her a studio and get her a
thing and you know and find this guy who was like, I don't know,
smoking a cigarette or eating lunch, and he said, you know, come on
Clarice, and it's fascinating that interview is so powerful
because everybody who's seen it, I just sent it to Holland last
night for a television thing, and the woman who watched it was
amazed she'd never seen it before, the power that comes
out of this dying woman, and that's why I think every
Brazilian has seen that, you know, because it's so unforgettable. It's a powerful thing. >> I think we have, we'll take one
more question, and then we'll -- >> Sorry, I'm a little
under the weather. I wanted to do a little bit more
about the role of religion in her, you know, in her writing, for
her, and I don't even know how to formulate this question, but
it's very curious to me, you know, about being Jewish and [inaudible]
her books are so autobiographical for me that you see different
factors and different directions that she goes about [inaudible]. >> Well so Clarice comes
from a rabbinical family. She comes from -- this is obvious
if you know Jews, and if you know where Jews come from,
especially in terms of class and education background, these
things go, as they did in Europe, they went from generation
to generation, and the rabbinical families
were the same people. And she comes from
those, that background. And what happens to her at the
very beginning of the book, I tell the story, the disaster that
happens to her family that happened to hundreds of thousands of
Jews after the First World War, even before the Second World
War, which was even worse, but hundreds of thousands
of people killed. Her grandfather was murdered. Her mother was raped and got
syphilis and died in Brazil. All of their being nice
to God didn't work. This is the point. All of the 613 commandments and
the, you know, do three dances around the Magilla
[phonetic], and all this kind of stuff, complete failure. Nothing about that. And these were religious people. They were forced to see the failure
of this human-centered existence, or this human-centered idea of God, which is that God is this
basically benevolent guy, who if you do certain things,
like if you clean out the crumbs from your pantry in April,
and if you, you know, cut the foreskin off
your kid, you know, then basically God is going piece,
sort of like a touchy parent, you know, but it's basically
an idea of God as a human that can be pleased or
displeased, and he can get mad. And he'll be happy if
you do this or that, so you have to do these
little dances. That's a ridiculous thought. I mean it's a ridiculous thought
even as I'm formulating it now because it actually is ridiculous. It is not the reality
of anybody's life. And it's not the reality of
physics or astronomy or anything. And yet, what's so fascinating
about her is the spiritual impulse as opposed to the religious
impulse is still there, and it's 100 percent there, and
it's not just there in a way that is some kind of legacy. If this is my family, used to be
in clothing, so I love a good suit. You know, it's not like that. It's something really deep, and
she uses this expression not to ridicule religion but to find
some other spiritual values, and she finds them where the
Jews have always found them, which was in language, and that's
I think what you feel of the beauty if you read her, especially if
you read her in her own language. And so, of course it's something
she regretted losing that, because it's comforting to believe that if you just do these certain
things and everybody's happy and you don't get cancer, but
of course you do get cancer, and you do die, and you
do suffer horrible things. Your child can go mad, and your
mother can die, and these things -- so it's a very complicated thing, but it actually becomes
more beautiful because the hocus pocus
gets taken away from it, and what you have is this desire
to connect with something divine. And she does. So, on that note -- >> Thank you very much, Ben
Moser Vivaldo Santos, and -- [ Applause ] -- and Ben will be
signing books outside. Thank you very much. >> This has been presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
