The Passion According to G.H. (19 page)

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Authors: Clarice Lispector

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BOOK: The Passion According to G.H.

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And handing myself over with the trust of belonging to the unknown. Since I can only pray to whatever I do not know. And I can only love the unknown evidence of things, and can only add myself to what I do not know. Only that is really handing myself over.

And such handing-over is the only surpassing that does not exclude me. I was now so much greater that I could no longer see myself. As great as a far-off landscape. I was far off. But perceptible in my furthest mountains and in my remotest rivers: the simultaneous present no longer scared me, and in the furthest extremity of me I could finally smile without even smiling. At last I was stretching beyond my sensibility.

The world independed on me — that was the trust I had reached: the world independed on me, and I am not understanding whatever it is I’m saying, never! never again shall I understand anything I say. Since how could I speak without the word lying for me? how could I speak except timidly like this: life just is for me. Life just is for me, and I don’t understand what I’m saying. And so I adore it. ——————

Translator’s Note

A friend in Brazil told me of a young woman in Rio who’d read Clarice Lispector obsessively and was convinced — as I and legions of other Clarice devotees have been — that she and Clarice Lispector would have a life-changing connection if they met in person. She managed to get in touch with the writer, who kindly agreed to meet her. When the young woman arrived, Clarice sat and stared at her and said nothing until the woman finally fled the apartment.

To translate an author who is no longer alive is always a bit like this woman’s encounter. You can ask a question but you don’t get an answer. The author just stares at you and says nothing and you wonder if the best thing to do would be to get up and run out of the room, especially if the work you’re translating is as mystifying as
The Passion According to G. H
.

I would have liked to ask about her curiously alternating use of “o Deus” (“the God“) and “Deus” (“God”) — how strange she intended that article to sound to the reader. I also would have liked to ask her about the various words that recur throughout the book like the subjects in a fugue, returning each time at a slightly different pitch. She uses the word
preso
, for example, to refer to a prisoner and then to the figures in a bas-relief on a wall and then to the narrator’s feeling as she stands inside the dry, hot room of her former maid where the entire novel takes place.

I knew one of my priorities as the translator of this novel had to be recreating the fugue-like repetitions of words like
preso
throughout the novel, but in several instances using “imprisoned” made the sentence sound odd in English in a way it didn’t in the original, as when she uses
preso
to describe the sensation of being pinned under a rock. I ultimately used “pinned” instead of “imprisoned” for that instance, but wish I could have asked her: was I right to go with “pinned” here, or should I have used “imprisoned” instead, as the lyrical use of repetition is so essential to what makes this novel such a hypnotizing book?

This dilemma came up with certain moments of wordplay as well, as when she says there are so many roaches that they “parece uma prece,” which literally means they “seem a prayer.” That literal rendering, however, fails to capture the sonic pleasure of the phrase in the Portuguese. I ultimately went with the phrase “they appear a prayer.” The repetition of the
p
’s and
r
’s offered some of the inventive lyricism of the phrase in the original, although seeming and appearing are not perfect matches sensewise. As I couldn’t ask Clarice when to prioritize the music and when the meaning in this book, I had to trust what I’d come to hear in my head rereading
G. H
. many times over the past decade. This was the first work of hers I encountered in college, and I was so riveted by it that I immediately read everything else she’d written. The following year, I learned Portuguese in part to learn how her voice sounded in the original.

Even after rereading this novel so often and so intently that I know a number of passages in it by memory, I still feel as if every hair on my head has caught on fire when I reach the end of it. The experience of translating
G. H
. has left me feeling bald, and not as if I lost my hair in the process so much as discovering that like
G. H
., like the roach, I am actually all cilia and antennae and would never have come to know this without gradually, painstakingly experiencing every word in this book. And so — as in the last line of this finest of novels — I adore it.

I
DRA
N
OVEY

Originally published as
A Paixão segundo G. H
. Published by arrangement with the Heirs of Clarice Lispector and Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells,
Barcelona.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

First published by New Directions as
NDP
1224 in 2012

Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited

Design by Erik Rieselbach

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lispector, Clarice.

[Paixão segundo G. H. English]

The passion according to G. H. / Clarice Lispector ; translated by Idra Novey ; edited by Benjamin Moser ; introduction by Caetano Veloso.

p. cm.

eISBN 978-0-8112-2069-9

I. Novey, Idra. II. Moser, Benjamin. III. Title.

PQ9697.L585P313 2012

869.342—dc23