{"id":88865,"date":"2015-08-17T12:30:36","date_gmt":"2015-08-17T16:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=88865"},"modified":"2015-08-17T13:47:44","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T17:47:44","slug":"passionate-acolytes-an-interview-with-benjamin-moser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/08\/17\/passionate-acolytes-an-interview-with-benjamin-moser\/","title":{"rendered":"Passionate Acolytes: An Interview with Benjamin Moser"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Paulo Gurgel Valente<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve gotten accustomed to talking about the \u201cClarice Lispector tidal wave.\u201d For weeks on end, I\u2019ve scarcely been able to go online without seeing Lispector, who died in 1977, raved about, serialized, reviewed, discussed, or marveled at.<\/em><\/p>\n

The occasion for this outpouring of attention is the publication of <\/em>The Complete Stories<\/a> by\u00a0Clarice Lispector<\/em>, translated by Katrina Dodson and edited by Benjamin Moser. But this story goes back much further, at least to 2009, when Moser published his biography of Lispector, <\/em>Why This World<\/a>. Since then, we\u2019ve seen a remarkable resurgence of interest in the author, whom many consider to be among the best Brazil ever produced, and one who is often compared to Virginia Woolf. <\/em>Why This World was followed by Moser\u2019s translation of Lispector\u2019s final novel, <\/em>The Hour of the Star<\/a>, and then new translations of four of Lispector\u2019s major novels, each by a different translator.<\/em><\/p>\n

With <\/em>The Complete Stories<\/a> upon us, I asked Moser why Lispector is worthy of all this effort, what makes the new book such a monumental publication, and what\u2019s next for the Brazilian author.<\/em><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s begin with a very basic question\u2014why Lispector?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes you meet someone in a bar and end up in bed after a few drinks. And sometimes you wake up and look over at the person snoring by your side and gasp and say, What was I thinking? But other times that person turns out to be the love of your life. With Clarice, I certainly had no idea that our relationship would be as long or as intense as it turned out to be. Writing her biography taught me about her life, introduced me to her world, her country, her friends. Translating her books brought me into her mind on the molecular level where the translator has to work. And the better I got to know her, the more my love deepened. <\/p>\n

Have you been surprised by the strong response to the stories, as well as the new translations of the novels?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The other day, a friend of mine, a Brazilian writer, said it took Brazil half a century to absorb her, and they\u2019re not done yet. I think that there\u2019s no denying that, as much as she writes about apparently accessible subjects\u2014all her housewives with headaches\u2014the books are extremely strange and disconcerting. In the opening of The Passion According to G.H.<\/em>, she warns people away from the book unless their \u201csouls are already formed.\u201d And it sounds a bit melodramatic. But then you read the book and you realize that she was not at all speaking flippantly. That is a book powerful enough to destroy a human being, someone who is not prepared for it. And all her writing has a quality of spiritual rigor and emotional relentlessness that makes them far more difficult to absorb. What happened in Brazil is similar to what is happening now. She was read by a small group of the intellectual elite, mainly in Rio de Janeiro and S\u00e3o Paulo. People in a few neighborhoods. And then her passionate readers recruited others, who recruited others. Journalists, singers, critics, actresses, teachers brought her to more and more people. And then it reached a critical mass, and she became the most famous of modern Brazilian writers. That was certainly not the case in her lifetime. And in English, the more she is read and absorbed, the more apparent it will become that what I\u2019ve always said, things that everyone thought were exaggerations, are obviously true\u2014that she is, for example, the greatest Jewish writer since Kafka.<\/p>\n

One of the things I like about the five Lispector books you\u2019ve overseen is that they\u2019re almost like a life chronology\u2014you can read them at different stages of your life. To an extent, you have to grow into them. And that\u2019s one of the amazing things about\u00a0Complete Stories<\/em>\u2014you get that whole life right in one mammoth volume, from the first stories where she\u2019s talking about women right on the verge of adulthood who just know they\u2019re different all the way to the very last stories that feel like they\u2019re the product of an intelligence that has seen everything and has finally learned to exist with itself. How would you recommend readers approach\u00a0Complete Stories<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was talking about Why This World<\/em> in S\u00e3o Paulo, I described the terrible drama of Clarice\u2019s early years. Her mother was raped in a pogrom in Ukraine and died of her injuries when Clarice was nine. And this little girl would tell magical stories in which some angel or saint would come along and save her mother. And all her life she felt the weight of having failed to save her mother. When I reached that point in the story, a skinny gay guy\u2014exactly the kind of person who would have been an outsider, the kind of kid who would have been bullied and mocked\u2014stuck up his hand urgently and said, But! But! But Clarice saves people every single day!<\/p>\n

So she\u2019s a writer we look to to help make sense of our lives. But you need a certain emotional constitution. Not intellectual, though of course she demands a highly literate reader. But I\u2019ve often seen very intelligent people try to get her and fail. This is something I\u2019m seeing yet again in some of the reviews. In three lines I can tell if the reviewer has that constitution or not. It\u2019s not something you can force. She herself said, in her only televised interview<\/a>, that it\u2019s a matter of \u201ccontact.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"clarice-book-cover\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What do you think Lispector excelled at in the short stories that she didn\u2019t do in her novels?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The novels and the stories feed off each other. The novels are mystical laboratories, in which Clarice is seeking and perfecting the language she will deploy in the stories. If, on the one hand, the nobility and beauty of this language can hardly be overpraised, it is also sometimes a highly difficult language to adapt to narrative. Sometimes in the stories we see that\u2014we call the delirious \u201cBrasilia\u201d pieces \u201cstories,\u201d though that is truly only for lack of a better word. And in the stories we so often see the arrival of the mystical moment, which is the crisis or the climax of the plot, the moment in which something happens that changes the protagonist\u2019s life. But without the novels we might not see that what appears to be a breaking point in a life, or in a day, is really the emergence of the divinity that Clarice Lispector so fervently sought. It\u2019s hard to imagine a writer who is so diverse yet so of a piece. Reading one part of her work will always illuminate the others. And to read as a whole is fantastically rewarding.<\/p>\n

How was it working with interpreting Lispector\u2019s voice and working with Katrina Dodson, who translated The Complete Stories<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have a friend who is dyslexic. The condition was hardly understood when he was a kid\u2014 there were no facilities for people like him. He was telling me that part of dyslexia is learning to think your way around words. The original word is missing and you have to come up with something else. And it occurred to me that translation is exactly that. It\u2019s hard to explain to people who haven\u2019t done it themselves that it barely matters how well a translator knows the language she\u2019s translating from. Of course, Katrina\u2019s Portuguese is excellent or we never would have brought her onto the project. But more importantly, her English is excellent. Like a dyslexic, the translator has to have not one but ten words on hand in her own language for every word in the original language. And then it is a matter of very hard, often boring and grinding work, draft after draft after draft. And I suppose my role is to go along with that, to read it word for word in both languages, to try to think alongside both author and translator until we\u2019ve sorted through all the debris of the dictionary and found something that sounds like the original.<\/p>\n

You got the Lispector retranslations started off with your 2011 translation of The Hou\u200br of the Star<\/em>, which many consider her masterpiece. Why did you start there?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I took Portuguese in college, but I didn\u2019t feel a real connection to the language until our class started reading short works of Brazilian literature. One of them was The Hour of the Star<\/em>, and that was when my eyes met Clarice\u2019s across the smoky barroom. \u200bOne of the most fun things about reading is sharing your reading with others, but when I looked at the old translation, it was so awful that it actually made my stomach ache when people would say they\u00a0were reading it. I couldn\u2019t stand it! So I found myself in the weird position of telling people not<\/em> to read a book that I was desperate for them to read.<\/p>\n

As the series editor for new translations of four of Lispector\u2019s other novels, you oversaw some extremely talented translators working on some very exacting prose.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was someone who was very trusting of translations because\u200b,\u200b even though I knew languages\u200b,\u200b I had never really gone through them line by line. \u200bWhen I look back at my younger self being shocked at the old translation of The Hour of the Star<\/em>, I feel like one of those people who suddenly realizes that everything he reads in the newspaper isn\u2019t actually true.<\/p>\n

So when I started out with this project, I wanted to accomplish several things. First, I didn\u2019t want to do it all myself, because I felt that after five years of work on the biography I needed to move on. Second, I wanted to increase the number of translators from the Portuguese. The well-known ones are few and often booked years in advance\u2014everyone wants the same four or five people. I wanted to find younger people. \u200bThird, I wanted to create a unified voice for Clarice in English. Her Portuguese is extremely distinct, and translators, like all\u00a0writers, have very distinct voices of their own. Not to mention accents\u2014we had people from England and Australia as well as Americans. So I felt sometimes like the director of the orchestra. People play their own instruments, but the audience should hear a single voice. The work this required can\u2019t be overstated. I explained my approach to the translators I interviewed for the project. And they all agreed that it was important, especially, to try to preserve Clarice\u2019s strangeness in English, not to muck with her syntax, not to try to iron her out, but to let these books clash and bang as cacophonously and as gloriously as in her inimitable Portuguese.<\/p>\n

\"four_lispectors\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Can you talk a little about some of the strategy behind how these books were published and marketed?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I should say the word marketing<\/em> always sounds a little creepy to me. I would rather speak of translation in the literal Latin sense, which means \u201cbringing across.\u201d Finding a readership is an arduous thing. People have more going on in their lives than the dead Brazilian lady you keep going on and on about. And I think it\u2019s important for people who work with international literature to avoid the eat-your-broccoli tone I see in a lot of these discussions. Because in fact there is nothing about being Brazilian or Swedish or Korean that makes a book superior to a book already sitting around in boring old English. I think it\u2019s important to ask yourself, before you start, why people should spend their time on this book and not on the hundreds of thousands of wonderful books in English that they haven\u2019t yet read. I was able to devote all these years to Clarice because I really believed that she was one of the\u00a0handful of great universal artists who were, like the UNESCO<\/small> monuments, the patrimony of all humanity. I thought she would enrich\u2014and indeed save\u2014the lives of those who would encounter her. And if you believe that about an author, then by all means the work of bringing across is tremendously thrilling and rewarding. But that feeling is still only a starting point to the hard work to come. Bringing across only begins once the book can be read in English. Finding the publishers, the reviewers, the booksellers, the readers \u2026 Let\u2019s just say that I\u2019ve sent a lot of e-mails on Clarice Lispector\u2019s behalf. And you have to enjoy sending them. And you certainly can\u2019t despise or look down on people who work in publicity and marketing and sales\u2014you can learn a lot from the people whose job it is to make the phone calls and send the e-mails, professional bringers-across. I say this because I\u2019ve often been appalled by the condescending attitude a lot of writers and translators, particularly from the academic world, display toward these people and their work.<\/p>\n

I have sometimes felt like a politician, trying to bring people together in the name of a cause. When I was writing Why This World<\/em>, I was very aware\u2014because I knew this but also because people would always tell me\u2014that nobody had ever heard of her. And I was very aware of how risky it was for a young writer to devote so much time to a book for which I had no publisher and no prospect of a publisher. At the same time, when people would cock an eyebrow and say something condescending about how courageous I was, I would think, But you have no idea<\/em> how the people who do know her care about her. They aren\u2019t so much readers as they are passionate acolytes. I don\u2019t know any other writer who inspires that degree of zeal.<\/p>\n

I wanted to ask if you had a favorite quote or story, anything at all about her that stands out to you.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The kind of relationship I have had with her for all these years is such that there\u2019s almost no separation, emotionally and intellectually, between me and her\u2014or between me and whatever I imagine her to have been. In so many situations in life, she is just there. If I\u2019m going through one thing or another, the appropriate Clarice quote will pop into my mind without being summoned. I\u2019m sort of like a devout Baptist who reflexively reaches for a favorite Bible quote at different moments in life. You get the cancer diagnosis, and you automatically think, \u201cNot my will but thy will be done.\u201d Or like a Jew who reaches the end of a book of Torah and automatically says, \u201cHazak, hazak venithazak\u201d\u2014Let us be strong, strong, stronger yet. These are things that are imprinted on one\u2019s mind. So even though this shouldn\u2019t be a hard question, it is.<\/p>\n

Right now you\u2019re working on the mammoth task of telling the story of Susan Sontag\u2019s life, which is surely work enough for one man. Are there more Lispector books on the way? Other Lispector-related things in the works?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We are definitely going to translate the four remaining novels. And then there are other works that I would love to publish. The exact schedule remains to be seen, but I have to take a year off from Clarice and finish Susan. Otherwise I\u2019ll never finish either\u2014although I realized early on that I would never actually be done with either, and wouldn\u2019t want to be. You become a kind of medium, a spokesman, for these great spirits. As jobs go, it\u2019s not the worst.<\/p>\n

Scott Esposito is the coauthor of <\/em>The End of Oulipo? He is currently writing a short book on gender, to be published next year.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve gotten accustomed to talking about the \u201cClarice Lispector tidal wave.\u201d For weeks on end, I\u2019ve scarcely been able to go online without seeing Lispector, who died in 1977, raved about, serialized, reviewed, discussed, or marveled at. The occasion for this outpouring of attention is the publication of The Complete Stories by\u00a0Clarice Lispector, translated by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[199,192,5004,19166,71,12640,747,10796,7845,19169,19167,530,14674,19168],"class_list":["post-88865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-biography","tag-brazil","tag-clarice-lispector","tag-clarice-lispector-the-complete-stories","tag-fiction","tag-fiction-in-translation","tag-novels","tag-portuguese","tag-short-stories","tag-the-hour-of-the-star","tag-the-passion-according-to-g-h","tag-translation","tag-translators","tag-why-this-world"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBenjamin Moser on Clarice Lispector\u2019s Complete Stories<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The 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