post-colonial_translation

144 Rosemary Arrojo
with Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian novelist and short-story writer
whose work began to be known outside Brazil only after it was literally
adopted and celebrated by her most illustrious reader. Interestingly
enough, the story of this affair began on an anniversary of Columbus’s
‘discovery’ of America. In a book specially dedicated to honouring
Lispector’s texts, Cixous writes:
Like a voice from a birth town, it brought me insights I once had,
intimate insights, naive and knowing, ancient and fresh like the
yellow and violet color of freshias rediscovered, this voice was
unknown to me, it reached me on the twelfth of October 1978,
this voice was not searching for me, it was writing to no one, to
all women, to writing, in a foreign tongue. I do not speak it, but
my heart understands it, and its silent words in all the veins of my
life have translated themselves into mad blood, into joy-blood.
(Cixous 1979b, p. 10)
The primary task I intend to undertake here is the examination of the
main implications of Cixous’s allegedly nonaggressive ‘discovery’ of
Lispector and the contours of the devoted relationship which she has
established with the Brazilian writer, and which has been perceived
as a reversal of the paradigm of colonial, patriarchal encounters even
by a sensitive critic of Cixous’s treatment of Lispector like Marta
Peixoto, for whom ‘Cixous’s reception of Lispector inverts the usual
colonial and post-colonial dynamic whereby Latin Americans
translate and celebrate literatures from Europe and the United States’
(Peixoto 1994, p. 40). In other words, in the Cixous/Lispector story,
it is the influential European who would be playing the role of the
seduced, faithful reader as she transforms the Brazilian writer into
the very source of her own productivity both as a writer and as a
thinker. However, as I will try to argue, Cixous’s feminist approach
to reading which professes to treat the texts as well as the authorial
name of Clarice Lispector with ‘extreme fidelity’ and outside the
traditional opposition between dominant and subaltern, is far from
letting the alterity of Lispector’s work speak as such and, in fact, ends
up serving and celebrating its own interests and goals. From such a
perspective, how to characterize the dialogue that has been taking
place between the author Clarice Lispector, her ‘foreignness’, the
language in which she wrote her texts; and Cixous, widely regarded
as one of the most influential thinkers of our time and the Brazilian
writer’s best-known reader so far Or, if I may state the same question