Source — "Channeling the Language (and Spirit) of Clarice Lispector: An Interview with Katrina Dodson"

• Title: Channeling the Language (and Spirit) of Clarice Lispector: An Interview with Katrina Dodson
• Interviewer: identified in the transcript only by the initials "MB"
• Interviewee: Katrina Dodson, translator of Clarice Lispector's The Complete Stories (New Directions, 2015; PEN Translation Prize, 2016)
• Publication: Asymptote Journal (blog)
• Date: 2015-12-07
• URL: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2015/12/07/channeling-the-language-and-spirit-of-clarice-lispector-an-interview-with-katrina-dodson/
• Type: primary (interview transcript, translator's own first-hand statements); reflective, not making an untranslatability claim either way
• Accessed: 2026-08-31 (WebFetch returned HTTP 403 on this URL; fetched successfully via direct curl with a browser user-agent string, then HTML stripped to plain text locally — see Gaps)

Extract

This is the project's third English-language Lispector translator on file (after Ronald W. Sousa 1988 and Idra Novey 2012, both already on the saudade page for The Passion According to G.H.), and the first case where the translator explicitly frames her practice in gendered terms — directly relevant to the feminist/postcolonial translation-theory page's still-open question of whether von Flotow's gendered-translation-strategy vocabulary connects to any word case study on file.

A documented textual restoration, contrasted with a male predecessor's smoothing. Discussing her retranslation of the story "The Smallest Woman in the World" — previously translated by Giovanni Pontiero — Dodson describes restoring a colon at the story's end that Pontiero's version turned into a period:

"At the end of 'The Smallest Woman in the World,' there's a colon, a very strange and (I think) important colon the previous translator removed and turned to a period. ... that colon sets up an analogy. ... You lose that in the first story."

She frames this, and other choices, as resisting a prior tendency to "smooth... over her language": "There are these moments where you might want to try to explain away the strangeness with an explanation like 'Oh, there's nothing shocking here.' ... in this sense, I did want to show how the previous translations have really smoothed over her language."

Explicit statement of gender-conscious translation motivation, in response to a direct question from the interviewer about "gender-based concerns when translating her descriptions of ... female bodies":

"I think there's probably a man out there who could've translated these, but I will say I was very happy to have a woman translate, to be the woman to translate. But also I did feel like a woman could bring out a lot of the gender dynamics in these stories, because I do think there's so much more about women's experience in the world of men, of female roles, but also ... there's so much in these stories that connects to what it's like to experience the world in a woman's body ... each translator is going to come with a different set of affinities."

She goes on to ground this in her own life experience (watching her mother "as a wife and a mother") as an interpretive resource for translating Lispector's female characters, not a claim about a specific word or textual technique beyond the punctuation example above.

Relevance and limits

This is real, sourced evidence of a woman translator explicitly naming gender as a reason for specific textual choices when translating Lispector — the project's saudade source-author. It does not, however, map cleanly onto any single one of von Flotow's three named strategies (supplementing / prefacing-footnoting / hijacking) from the feminist/postcolonial page:

• It is not hijacking in von Flotow's sense (intervening in a source text that is not itself feminist to feminize it) — Lispector's own text is, on Dodson's own account, already centrally about women's interiority; Dodson is restoring/preserving that, not imposing it.
• It resembles supplementing (compensating in translation for something the target language or a prior translation lost) more than the other two categories, but Dodson never frames it in von Flotow's vocabulary and the "supplement" here is a restored punctuation mark rather than an added grammatical/lexical device — a loose resemblance, not a confirmed instance of the named strategy. (project inference)
• The interview itself functions as a paratextual space where Dodson explains her translation reasoning to a public audience, which is functionally adjacent to von Flotow's prefacing and footnoting category (making the translator's reasoning visible) — but an interview is not a preface or footnote bound into the book itself, and this project has not located Dodson's actual printed Translator's Note in The Complete Stories to check whether comparable reasoning appears there. (project inference; not confirmed against the book's own paratext)

No mention of saudade by name found in this interview. Two further targeted searches (this session) for a documented instance of Dodson or The Complete Stories handling saudade specifically came up empty; one review notes Dodson navigating a different Portuguese untranslatable, esperança (a pun meaning both "cricket" and "hope," in the story "A Hope"), which is a data point about the same translator's general practice with wordplay/untranslatability but not about saudade itself, and is not filed here as a saudade data point.

Gaps

• Dodson's actual printed Translator's Note (bound into The Complete Stories, per a secondary mention on the CAT Center literary-translation site, not independently confirmed by this project) has not been read directly — a further step for a future session, if reachable.
• No confirmed saudade instance in Dodson's translation — a stated gap, not a finding.
• The interviewer is identified only by initials "MB" in the transcript itself; full name not established this session.
• Fetch-method note: this URL returned HTTP 403 to the session's WebFetch tool but HTTP 200 to a direct curl request carrying a standard browser User-Agent header — worth trying for other sources that WebFetch reports as forbidden, before concluding a source is unreachable.

Used in

• Saudade