Two Voices Salon: Katrina Dodson on Clarice Lispector
Book Club of California | 312 Sutter Street, Suite 500 | San Francisco, CA
On Thursday, September 24, we were honored to present Katrina Dodson before a capacity audience at the Book Club of California. Dodson was there to discuss The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector, which she spent two years translating for New Directions. She was in conversation with Two Lines Press’s Scott Esposito.
The conversation was wide-ranging, including translation choices Dodson made (including contrasts with previous, domesticating translations of Lispector’s strange Portuguese), the growth of Lispector’s image, her non-adult-literary writings (including her columns and children’s literature), interactions between Dodson and Lispector series editor Ben Moser, the role of religious mysticism in Lispector’s writing, and some of Dodson’s favorite stories.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 Introductions by CJ Evans of Two Lines Press
3:10: Event starts
7:50: Katrina reads from “Love” by Clarice Lispector (in both Portuguese and English)
12:45: The development of Lispector as an author and as a person
16:55: Lispector as a person who “did her own thing,” her pornographic stories, and her evolution as a writer as seen in the Stories
20:08: The place of mysticism and Christian elements in Lispector’s writing
25:30: Direct comparison between the first-ever translation of a Lispector story into English and Katrina’s translation of that same story
32:00: Lispector as a writer of women’s bodies and experiences
35:30: Lispector’s image and the marketing of her books
41:05: Translating Lispector’s strange imagery
45:30: Separating out the sense from purposeful nonsense in Lispector’s strange writing
52:00 Katrina’s favorite stories
59:35: Lisepctor as compared to Bolaño as an emergent phenomenon in English
1:03:30 Authors Lispector could be compared to
1:06:45 Lispector’s journalistic work
1:08:25: Lispector’s children’s literature
1:09:22: What Katrina has learned from translating Lispector’s work
Katrina Dodson is the translator of The Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector (New Directions, 2015), winner of the PEN Translation Prize and other awards. Her translation of Mário de Andrade’s 1928 Brazilian modernist classic, Macunaíma: The Hero With No Character was published by New Directions in 2023. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Dodson holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and is an affiliated scholar of the Brazil LAB at Princeton University. A San Francisco native, she now lives in Brooklyn and teaches translation at Columbia University.
Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States, until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959; she died there in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil’s greatest modern writer.