“(…) the first truth is in the earth and the body.”

Clarice Lispector

Finally read Clarice Lispector. Specifically – Near to the Wild Heart (translated by Alison Entrekin, published by Penguin Modern Classics). I’d had her on my list for a while now, but I don’t think I was prepared for the way this book impressed me. The reader follows a young woman called Joana from childhood to adulthood; she is unsettling, whimsical, independent. We see her evolve and try to communicate with others: her widowed father, her hateful aunt, her husband Otavio, his lover Lidia. We glimpse Joana as complex, willful, fascinating to others, submerged within her self.

Plot-wise there’s not much; conversations, states of mind, a flow of emotions. Alison Entrekin had her work cut out for her – translating this sort of gossamer language is not easy. What emerges, however, is a book that I’m sure will stay with me, because a weft of razor-sharp observations runs through the warp of subtlety. Lispector is masterful at naming experiences and feelings that are on the knife edge between the conscious and the unconscious and that I, for one, have felt, but never seen them described – never thought they could be described at all.

While I haven’t got enough Portuguese to appreciate the original, I felt Entrekin’s translation pulsed with a rhythm in which nothing jarred, in which the hazy and the precise interplayed beautifully. If reading the book takes a lot of work, translating it must have been very difficult indeed – Lispector uses language in a way that’s entirely her own. In an interview, Entrekin says: “(…) with Clarice the big challenge any translator faces is allowing her to be herself. This is easier said than done.” I found it very easy to trust the translation and accept that the unusual prose does exactly what it should; the amount of underlined passages in the book attests to that. There are esoteric moments, but I believe this has nothing to do with the quality of the translation – rather with the fact that both Clarice and Joana focus on things which are not exactly run-of-the-mill.

Near to the Wild Heart is a dense, short book, an invitation to a world that is intensely personal, but allows for moments of radiant recognition.