I’ve mentioned that one of my favorite YouTube channels is Better Than Food hosted by Clifford Lee Sargent. Today he reminded me of something that I knew, but had forgotten: the great Brazilian author Clarice Lispector was born in Ukraine.
She wasn’t there very long—she was just over a year old when her family immigrated to Brazil. They were fleeing pograms that broke out during the Russian Civil War. This is told in great detail in Benjamin Moser’s excellent biography of Lispector called Why This World.
Sargent proclaims Lispector to be the greatest Brazilian writer of the 20th century. I don’t know if Braziliams would agree, but she is definitely up there. I would have thought that Brazilians might choose João Guimarães Rosa, but I can see how Sargent might reach this conclusion given that most of Guimarães Rosa’s books are out of print in English (except for The Third Bank of the River and other stories, which has been recently retranslated and published by a small Canadian publisher with the excellent name Orbis Tertius Press.) Many of Lispector’s books have recently been translated and made available to English-language readers. But I would be interested to learn what Sargent has to say about Guimarães Rosa. (Guimarães Rosa’s masterpiece, Grande Sertão: Veredas, was published once in English in 1963 by Knopf with the swashbuckling title, Devil to Pay in the Backlands. I have read that version and I loved it, but I’ve also heard that the translators James L. Taylor and Harriet de Onís simplified the modernist language of Guimarães Rosa.)
(One thing about the video that annoys me is that Sargent repeatedly mispronounces Lispector’s first name. He pronounces it the way we do in English, “Clair-REES”, but in Portuguese, they say it closer to “Clar-REES-ee”. This makes me think of one of my favorite songs by Caetano Veloso, Irene. Irene has a pronunciation in English that is completely different from its pronunciation in Portuguese. When I lived in Brazil, my coworkers would add an invisible syllable to my name. Instead of saying “Robert” as we do in English, they would add an “ee” to the end. This is because Brazilian Portuguese speakers find it hard to end a word with a hard consonant like “T”. So Robert becomes “Ho-BEAR-chee” when spoken by the rural Brazilian laborers we worked with every day. They like to have an audible vowel sound at the end of words—hence the “ee” pronounced at the end of “Clarice” and “Irene.”)
Anyway, if would be a stretch for Ukraine to claim Clarice Lispector as a native daughter since she lived there for a year at most and wrote exclusively in Portuguese, but it is an interesting origin. As Timothy Snyder wrote in his harrowing book Bloodlands, life in Poland and Ukraine between the wars was tough, especially for Jews like the Lispectors. One can certainly understand why they left, and lucky for them that they did—they missed the holodomor of the ’30s and the Holocaust of the ’40s. Would we have had any Clarice Lispector books if her family hadn’t gotten the hell out of Ukraine when they did?
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