Source — Dodson, "Rediscovering Clarice Through Translation"
- Title: Rediscovering Clarice Through Translation
- Author: Katrina Dodson (translator of Lispector's The Complete Stories, New Directions, 2015)
- Publication: Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies, Spring 2017, pp. 78–79 (Center for Latin American Studies, UC Berkeley; adapted from a talk Dodson gave for CLAS on 2017-03-08)
- Date: 2017 (Spring issue)
- URL: https://clacs.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/publications/brlasspring2017-dodson.pdf
- Type: primary (the translator's own account, in her own words, of Lispector's English-language translation history) — neutral/informational, not making an untranslatability claim either way
- Accessed: 2026-08-31 (full text obtained via PDF text extraction —
pdfminer.six+cffireinstall, per the working method already on file)
Extract
A short essay by Dodson surveying Clarice Lispector's translation-into-English history, in three waves:
- 1961 — the University of Texas published Gregory Rabassa's translation of The Apple in the Dark, the first Lispector novel in English. At the time, Dodson notes, "the translator ... was more famous than the author," Rabassa already known for translating Latin American Boom writers (Cortázar, later García Márquez).
- 1980s — a second wave driven by French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous, who "wrote the first of several books rapturously elevating Lispector as the muse for Cixous's theory of l'écriture féminine, feminine writing." Cixous's attention led to further French translations (by the feminist press Des Femmes) and to Lispector's inclusion on U.S. Women's Studies syllabi. Later in the 1980s, New Directions/Carcanet and the University of Minnesota published further translations — most by Giovanni Pontiero — including The Passion According to G.H. (1988) and Água Viva (1989, as Stream of Life, tr. Earl Fitz and Elizabeth Lowe).
- 2009–present — "Lispectormania," beginning with Benjamin Moser's 2009 biography Why This World, leading to New Directions's new translation series (starting with The Hour of the Star, 2011) and, eventually, Dodson's own Complete Stories (2015).
Dodson gives one concrete word-level example of her own translation practice, presented in the piece as a sidebar ("Translation as performance"): Lispector puns on Portuguese prova (meaning both "proof" and a clothing "fitting"). Literal translation: "So I had proof, the two proofs; of God and the dress." Dodson's published rendering: "So I had fitting proof, the fitting and the proof; of the dress and of God." — an example of preserving a pun's dual meaning by restructuring the English sentence, from her short story "The Dead Man in the Sea at Urca."
Dodson describes Lispector's post-2009 reception as moving "increasingly ... beyond strictly Latin American and feminist frameworks, now integrated into English classes at American universities and high schools."
Relevance and limits
This essay is not the same text as Dodson's printed Translator's Note in The Complete Stories (reprinted separately in The Scofield 2.1, Summer 2016, pp. 23–26) — that note remains unobtained; see the saudade page's "Not yet done." This is a distinct, separately published piece.
Checked directly for this project's two open threads and found not to serve either:
- No mention of saudade anywhere in the text (checked by full-text search of the extracted PDF). Does not advance the saudade page's open item of finding a translator's own account of handling that specific word.
- No mention of von Flotow, feminist translation strategies, "supplementing," "prefacing," "footnoting," or "hijacking." The essay does discuss gender (Cixous's feminist theorizing, the "Women's Studies" reception wave) but at the level of reception history, not as a description of Dodson's own textual choices — it does not supply a von-Flotow-taxonomy instance for saudade or for Lispector translation generally.
Retains value as reception-history background (the Rabassa → Cixous/Pontiero → Moser/Dodson three-wave account, and one genuine word-level pun-translation example, "prova"), but should not be cited as bearing on the saudade or von Flotow threads specifically.
Gaps
- Dodson's actual printed Translator's Note (The Complete Stories, 2015; reprinted The Scofield 2.1, 2016) is still not obtained — this essay is a related but separate piece by the same translator.
- The "prova" pun example is from a different Lispector short story ("The Dead Man in the Sea at Urca"), not from The Passion According to G.H. (this project's existing saudade-in-Lispector data point) — not cross-checked against that story's own Portuguese text.