ÁGUA VIVA
Clarice Lispector
Translated from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler
Introduction by Benjamin Moser
Edited by Benjamin Moser
Contents
Breathing Together by Benjamin Moser
ÁGUA VIVA
Introduction: Breathing Together
The brevity and apparent simplicity of Água Viva mask several years of Clarice Lispector’s struggle to write it. A first version, entitled Beyond Thought: Monologue with Life, was already complete by July 12, 1971, when Clarice met Alexandrino Severino, a Portuguese professor at Vanderbilt University. She gave him a copy of the manuscript for translation into English, along with specific procedural instructions. He was not to budge so much as a single comma.
She was still “drying out the book,” she told Severino, before handing it over to her publisher. But a year later, in June 1972, the book had not appeared, and Severino wrote to ask if she still wanted him to proceed.
When she answered, the manuscript had another name. “As for the book—I interrupted it—because I thought it wasn’t achieving what I wanted to achieve,” she wrote. “I can’t publish it as it is. Either I am not going to publish it or I am going to work on it. Maybe in a few months I will work on the Loud Object.”
The process of “drying out,” Severino noticed when he finally saw the subsequent version, consisted mainly in removing its many explicit biographical references. But Loud Object, weighing in at 185 pages, was even longer than Beyond Thought (151). The manuscript seems to capture an everyday voice utterly unrefined by literary or fictional artifice. Clarice reminisces about her pets and goes into great detail about her favorite flowers, one of which sends her back to her origins in Eastern Europe, a reference surprising because so rare: “The sunflower is the great child of the sun. So much that it is born with the instinct to turn its enormous corolla toward its creator. It doesn’t matter if it’s a father or mother. I don’t know. Is the sunflower a masculine or feminine flower? I think masculine. But one thing is for sure: the sunflower is Ukrainian.”
If at times this manuscript is as brilliant and inspired as the mature work of a great artist, at other times it is as dull and uninspired as a housewife’s neighborly chitchat. Clarice often claimed that she was a simple housewife, and in this formless, plotless conversation, an unfiltered “brainstorm”—she uses the English word—in which she types anything and everything that pops into her mind, that is often exactly how she sounds.
She complains, for example, about money, another constant topic: “I’m back. The day is still very nice. But things are very expensive—I say this because of the price the man asked to fix [the record player]. I have to work hard to get the things I want or need.” She defends herself against her mythology: “I mean to say that my house is not metaphysical. They can hardly forgive bad food. All I do is open and close my purse to hand out money to buy things. . . . Besides eating we talk a lot about what is going on in Brazil and in the world. We talk about what clothes are appropriate to different occasions.” And: “I sleep too and how! My readers think I am always an insomniac. But that’s not true. I sleep too.”
Loud Object’s direct and confessional tone, the sense it offers of Clarice’s unfiltered conversational voice—she frequently pauses to answer the phone, light a cigarette, or pour herself a drink of water—can distract the reader from the reality that it, too, is a fiction. In Beyond Thought she bluntly addresses the reader: “Here’s what’s happening. I had been writing this book for years, spread out in newspaper columns, without noticing, ignorant of myself as I am, that I was writing my book. That is the explanation for readers who recognize this: because they have already read it in the paper. I like the truth.”
She apparently did not like the truth enough to refrain from retouching it in the second draft. The critic Lícia Manzo points out that Loud Object contains a new, and completely contradictory, explanation: “This book, for obvious reasons, was going to be called Beyond Thought. Many pages have already been published. But when I published them I didn’t mention that they had been extracted from Loud Object or Beyond Thought.”
It does not particularly matter whether Clarice took her newspaper articles and stitched them into a manuscript or whether she plundered a manuscript for material for her journalism. Yet the two conflicting explanations emphasize that in Loud Object she is still wrestling, and somewhat guiltily, with fictionalization.
Perhaps the least satisfying part of An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, the novel that preceded Água Viva, was the way Clarice extracted large chunks from her newspaper columns and dropped them, often unmodified, into her novel. The process could work flawlessly, but sometimes the pieces felt undigested. In Loud Object she does the same thing. She must have known that these reminiscences were out of place, since almost none reached the final book. In the drafts, doubts about how to use her personal experience lead to repeated meditations on the creative process itself.
Throughout Loud Object she is aware that she is doing something completely different, but she does not yet know what or how: “What will my liberty lead to? What is this that I’m writing? As far as I know I never saw anybody write like this.” Such remarks frequently recur in the manuscript. The knowledge of the novelty of her invention is sometimes thrilling, sometimes frightening, and in one case is followed by a surprising interjection: “Who invented the chair? Someone with love for himself. So he invented greater comfort for the body. Then the centuries went by and nobody noticed a chair because using it was a merely automatic question. One needs courage to do a ‘brainstorm’: we never know what might come and frighten us. The sacred monster died. In its place was born a little girl who lost her mother.”
Of all Clarice Lispector’s works, Água Viva gives the strongest impression of having been spontaneously committed to paper. Yet perhaps none was as painstakingly composed. Even the apparently artless exclamation about her mother—who died when Clarice was nine, a victim of the pogroms in her native Ukraine—reappears in at least two other books, as well as in an essay she later published about Brasília. As she writes in Loud Object, “Art is not purity: it is purification. Art is not liberty: it is liberation.”
Clarice had serious doubts about the work. “She was insecure and asked a few people for their opinion,” her friend and editor Olga Borelli recalled. “With other books Clarice didn’t show that insecurity. With Água Viva she did. That was the only time I saw Clarice hesitate before handing in a book to the publisher. She herself said that.”
“I don’t know why you liked my book Loud Object,” Clarice wrote the poet Marly de Oliveira. “Since once the first impulse had passed, I reread it and was horrified. It’s so bad, so bad, that I’m not going to publish it, I already pulled it from the publishers.” Olga’s delicate interventions may have saved the book, and with it the new kind of writing Clarice was pioneering.
Clarice’s writing had always pushed the limits of her language. In 1954, in her longest known statement on the subject of translating her work, she wrote her French publisher a series of letters that reportedly “damaged the health” of her editor.
“I admit, if you like, that the sentences do not reflect the usual manner of speaking, but I assure you that it is t
he same in Portuguese,” she writes. “The punctuation I employed in the book is not accidental and does not result from an ignorance of the rules of grammar. You will agree that the elementary principles of punctuation are taught in every school. I am fully aware of the reasons that led me to choose this punctuation and insist that it be respected.”
In editing these new translations of Clarice’s Água Viva, The Passion According to G. H., The Breath of Life, and Near to the Wild Heart, I have kept her point very much in mind. Because no matter how odd Clarice Lispector’s prose sounds in translation, it sounds just as unusual in the original.
“The foreignness of her prose is one of the most overwhelming facts of our literary history, and even of the history of our language,” the poet Lêdo Ivo wrote.
The Canadian writer Claire Varin has regretted her translators’ tendency to “pluck the spines from the cactus.”
The tendency is understandable. It may even, to some extent, be inevitable. Clarice Lispector’s weird word choices, strange syntax, and lack of interest in conventional grammar produces sentences—often fragments of sentences—that veer toward abstraction without ever quite reaching it. Her goal, mystical as well as artistic, was to rearrange conventional language to find meaning—never to discard it completely.
Paradoxically, the better one’s Portuguese, the more difficult it is to read Clarice Lispector. The foreigner with a basic knowledge of Romance grammar and vocabulary can read her work with ease. The Brazilian, however, often finds her difficult. This is because her subtle rearrangements of everyday language are so surprising that they often baffle the reader, particularly the reader with little experience of her work.
In Água Viva, Clarice pushed her language as far as it could go without risking incoherence. The book was written in fragments, and Olga Borelli’s editorial method, she wrote, was “breathing together, it’s breathing together.”
Because there is a logic in life, in events, as there is in a book. They follow one another, they must. Since if I took a fragment and wanted to move it further ahead, there wouldn’t be anywhere to put it. It was like a puzzle. I took all the fragments and collected them, kept them in an envelope. On the back of a check, a piece of paper, a napkin . . . I still have some of those things at home, and some of them still even smell of her lipstick. She would wipe her lips and then stick it in her purse. . . . Suddenly she noted something down. After collecting all those fragments, I started to note, to number them. So it’s not difficult to structure Clarice, or it’s infinitely difficult, unless you commune with her and already are in the habit of reading her.
As ultimately published in August 1973, the book was called Água Viva. This is the only one of Clarice’s titles that offers no ready translation. Literally “living water,” the words can mean a spring or a fountain, a meaning often suggested inside the book, but to a Brazilian the words will first of all refer to a jellyfish.
This was not the meaning Clarice intended—“I preferred Água Viva, a thing that bubbles. At the source”—but for a work without plot or story, the hint of invertebrate floating is especially apt. Perhaps this is what Olga Borelli had in mind when she compared this book to those that had come before it: “The Passion According to G. H. has a backbone, doesn’t it?”
Água Viva does not, and this initially made Clarice uneasy: “That book, I spent three years without daring to publish it, thinking it would be awful. Because it didn’t have a story, it didn’t have a plot.” The question of what exactly she was writing preoccupied Clarice, and with good reason. “This is not a book because this is not how one writes,” she announces at the beginning. It does not, in fact, resemble anything written at the time, in Brazil or anywhere else. Its closest cousins are visual or musical, a resemblance Clarice emphasizes by turning the narrator, a writer in the earlier versions, into a painter; she herself was dabbling in painting at the time. The epigraph comes from the Belgian artist Michel Seuphor: “There must be a painting totally free of dependence on the figure—or object—which, like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth. Such painting would simply evoke the incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought, where line becomes existence.”
The title Beyond Thought referred to these “incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit,” the unconscious realm she had meant to simulate, and provoke. “Could it be that what I am writing you is beyond thought? Reason is what it isn’t. Whoever can stop reasoning—which is terribly difficult—let them come along with me.”
As Borelli understood, this “spineless” writing is not random, or even abstract. Instead, its consistency more properly belongs to the realm of dreams, in which ideas and images connect with a logic that may not be immediately apparent but is nonetheless real. This was the writing Clarice described when she wrote in The Foreign Legion, “In painting as in music and literature, what is called abstract so often seems to me the figurative of a more delicate and more difficult reality, less visible to the naked eye.”
In Água Viva she would discover a means of writing about herself and that “delicate and more difficult reality” in a way that transformed her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically radical as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particularly magnificent triumph. The reviews reflect the same amazement Clarice had provoked thirty years before, when she published Near to the Wild Heart. “With this fiction,” wrote a critic who had attacked An Apprenticeship, “Clarice Lispector awakens the literature currently being produced in Brazil from a depressing and degrading lethargy and elevates it to a level of universal perennity and perfection.” The book has inspired passions among Brazil’s greatest artists. The famous singer Cazuza, for example, read it one hundred and eleven times.
BENJAMIN MOSER
UTRECHT, MARCH 2012
Água Viva
There must be a kind of painting totally free of the dependence on the figure—or object—which, like music, illustrates nothing, tells no story, and launches no myth. Such painting would simply evoke the incommunicable kingdoms of the spirit, where dream becomes thought, where line becomes existence.
— Michel Seuphor
It’s with such profound happiness. Such a hallelujah. Hallelujah, I shout, hallelujah merging with the darkest human howl of the pain of separation but a shout of diabolic joy. Because no one can hold me back now. I can still reason—I studied mathematics, which is the madness of reason—but now I want the plasma—I want to eat straight from the placenta. I am a little scared: scared of surrendering completely because the next instant is the unknown. The next instant, do I make it? or does it make itself? We make it together with our breath. And with the flair of the bullfighter in the ring.
Let me tell you: I’m trying to seize the fourth dimension of this instant-now so fleeting that it’s already gone because it’s already become a new instant-now that’s also already gone. Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space. I want to possess the atoms of time. And to capture the present, forbidden by its very nature: the present slips away and the instant too, I am this very second forever in the now. Only the act of love—the limpid star-like abstraction of feeling—captures the unknown moment, the instant hard as crystal and vibrating in the air and life is this untellable instant, larger than the event itself: during love th
e impersonal jewel of the moment shines in the air, the strange glory of the body, matter made feeling in the trembling of the instants—and the feeling is both immaterial and so objective that it seems to happen outside your body, sparkling on high, joy, joy is time’s material and the essence of the instant. And in the instant is the is of the instant. I want to seize my is. And like a bird I sing hallelujah into the air. And my song belongs to no one. But no passion suffered in pain and love is not followed by a hallelujah.
Is my theme the instant? the theme of my life. I try to keep up with it, I divide thousands of times into as many times as the number of instants running by, fragmented as I am and the moments so fragile—my only vow is to life born with time and growing along with it: only in time itself is there room enough for me.
All of me is writing to you and I feel the taste of being and the taste-of-you is as abstract as the instant. I also use my whole body when I paint and set the bodiless upon the canvas, my whole body wrestling with myself. You don’t understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body. When you come to read me you will ask why I don’t keep to painting and my exhibitions, since I write so rough and disorderly. It’s because now I feel the need for words—and what I’m writing is new to me because until now my true word has never been touched. The word is my fourth dimension.
Today I finished the canvas I told you about: curves that intersect in fine black lines, and you, with your habit of wanting to know why— I’m not interested in that, the cause is past matter—will ask me why the fine black lines? because of the same secret that now makes me write as if to you, writing something round and rolled up and warm, but sometimes cold as the fresh instants, the water of an ever-trembling stream. Can what I painted on this canvas be put into words? Just as the silent word can be suggested by a musical sound.