Near to the Wild HeartBy Clarice Lispector(New Directions)
Sooner or later, being deprived of the power to read all the languages of our wide world leaves one in the hands of a translator.
If you are lucky you get one who is both a good writer as well being in tune with the author whose work they are translating. On the other hand, you might end up worlds away from the original that could still be amazing, yet might not be exactly what you expected.
The publishing company New Directions are no novices to the issues that arise ‘in translation’, and maybe to widen the scope of hitting the right notes they have recently released a nice-looking series of Clarice Lispector’s work, each of which has a different translator.
In re-reading this new version of Near to the Wild Heart, as translated by Alison Entrekin, I found myself jumping back and forth between it an older copy (also published by New Directions but translated by Giovanni Pontiero) to look for gaps and changes, rather than take the translator’s word for it, so to speak.
What I found was illuminating, both in regards to the translation process, and for what I learnt about the notoriously complex Lispector.
By looking at her work through the translations of it (and bearing in mind my having not read it in the original Porgtugese) it is so much more obvious that she truly accomplished her plans.
She most definitely brought life to her writing, which shifts within itself, creates itself, and thus continues to stay alive long after the death of its author.
The story of book concerns the life of a woman named Joana. We encounter her in different important stages of her life: as a child, an adolescent, a married woman, an adulteress, and finally as a woman freed from the constraints of wifely duties or personal ‘love’ relationships.
Through each stage we see Joana trying to fit in, to feel, to understand, but nothing really makes sense to her until, at the end of the book, she is on the way, on a ship to a new life somewhere else, which hopefully will suit her better.
This is a remarkable and remarkably spiritual work, like most of Lispector’s oeuvre, which really should be read if you are looking for literature that does a hell of a lot more than try to make money or pass your time. And perhaps my suggestion above might enhance your enjoyment.
