Vision of Clarice Lispector by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Translated by Giovanni Pontiero
PN Review 60, March - April 1988
In December it is the tenth anniversary of the death of Clarice Lispector in 1977, the same year her novel The Hour of the Star was published. Born in Ukraine in 1925, Lispector was brought up in Recife, Brazil; she published her first novel in 1944 to critical acclaim, and was one of the most distinguished of contemporary Brazilian writers. It is fitting that she should be memorialized by Brazil's greatest twentieth-century poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987), in a poem from his volume Spring Discourse (1977).
Vision of Clarice Lispector
Clarice
issued from some mystery and departed for another.
We cannot fathom its essence.
The mystery was not essential,
it was Clarice travelling inside.
It was Clarice stirring in the lowest depths,
where the word appears to find
its true meaning, portraying mankind.
What Clarice expressed, what Clarice
lived for us in the form of a story
in the form of a dream of a story
in the form of a dream of a dream of a story
(in the middle was there a cockroach
or an angel?)
we can neither repeat nor invent.
These are things, gems peculiar to Clarice
we use on loan. She is mistress of all.
Clarice was no cliché,
identity card or portrait.
Di Chirico painted her? Of course.
But the clearest portrait of Clarice
is obscured by that cloud
the aeroplane divided. We perceive no more.
We recall her gestures.
Clarice struggling to emerge from Clarice
to become like the rest of us
with our civilities, worries and precautions.
Clarice did not emerge, even when smiling.
Those drawing rooms, stairways,
phosphorescent ceilings, never ending steppes,
domes, Recife bridges shrouded in mist,
formed an inner world where Clarice
lived alone and resolved, composing fables.
We could not hold Clarice on our terrain
spattered with social engagements. Documents
and greetings spoke of the here and now,
editions, perhaps cocktails
on the edge of the abyss.
Levitating above the abyss Clarice drew
a red line tinged with grey in the air
and cast her spell.
She fascinated us. Nothing more.
Later we shall try to understand her.
Much later, one day . . . we shall learn how to love
Clarice.
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This poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, translated by Giovanni Pontiero, is taken from PN Review 60, March - April 1988. Further contributions by Pontiero are available in the archive to paying subscribers, as well as more poetry, features, reviews and reports from across the back catalogue.