"I select portions from Água Viva and (re)arrange them to create a passage/prose/poem that foregrounds ‘writing’ in Clarice’s terms."

"I translate Clarice into Hindi, my mother-tongue."

Nikhil Ninguém Pandhi

Fiction writer and Graduate Student, Department of Anthropology, Princeton University

‘What is it like to write, Clarice?’ Could this question be posed in terms of an aesthetic quandry directed to Clarice Lispector? Could it be posed in terms of what does it mean to write like Clarice? Or in terms of what form writing takes in Clarice and her oeuvre? As a writer of fiction inspired indelibly by Clarice Lispector I take the first question – and its many playful derivatives – as an incitement to compose Clarice from her own writing. An incitement to both search for Clarice’s reflections about writing in her own words, and to write from them something that she may be directing our attention to especially in Água Viva (1973), which I read as, among other things, Clarice’s manifesto for writing. With the desire to pose the aforementioned questions to Clarice, here, I select portions from Água Viva and (re)arrange them to create a passage/prose/poem that foregrounds ‘writing’ in Clarice’s terms. It is a tract on writing assembled from the bricolage of Clarice’s wor(l)ds in the text.

I also further ask, what is it like to listen to Clarice in a language in which she didn’t write? For this, I translate Clarice into Hindi, my mother-tongue (note: the figure of the ‘mother’ and it’s resonance in Clarice, in terms of her mother as a liminal/absent/dead figure; mother as the symbol of a language, indeed Clarice’s own maternity…). What does Clarice sound like in Hindi, a language in which she has never been translated, and a language in which translating her requires a definitive attribution of her gender (a female writer) which the english ‘I’ and ‘you’ definitively obscure? Even if we don’t understand the translated language, in what ways can we re-cover the voice of Clarice from what reverberates in our ears? Perhaps we could even use this to ask ‘what is like to listen (to) Clarice?’