Covert Joy: Katrina Dodson on Clarice Lispector
City Lights welcomed Katrina Dodson to read from her translation of Covert Joy: Selected Stories by Clarice Lispector (New Directions) and discuss it in conversation with Rita Bullwinkel.
This radiant selection of Clarice Lispector’s best and best-loved stories includes such familiar favorites as “The Smallest Woman in the World,” “Love,” “Family Ties,” and “The Egg and the Chicken.” Lispector’s luminous regard for life’s small revelatory incidents is legendary, and here her genius is concentrated in a fizzing, portable volume.
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.
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.
Rita Bullwinkel is the author of Headshot and Belly Up. She is also the editor of McSweeney’s Quarterly. She lives in San Francisco.