post-colonial_translation

Cixous, Lispector and fidelity 147
not to be mastered but listened to, contemporary theories of reading
which emphasize the reader’s productive, authorial role are ‘resisted’
and leave room for ‘the adoption of a state of active receptivity’ in which
the reader tries to ‘hear’ that which the text is ‘consciously and
unconsciously saying’ (Sellers 1988, p. 7). ‘Feminine’ reading is, thus,
‘a spiritual exercise’, a form of gentle ‘lovemaking’, in which what is
important is ‘to take care of the other’: ‘to know how to read is to take
infinite time to read; it is not to take the book for a little geometric object,
but for an immense itinerary. It is knowing how to scan, to pace, how to
proceed very slowly. To know how to read a book is a way of life’ (quoted
in Conley 1992, p. 128).
But how is Lispector brought to participate in Cixous’s writing and
reading projects First of all, she has been the exclusive object of several
texts by Cixous, including books such as Vivre l’orange/To Live the
Orange (1979b), L’heure de Clarice Lispector (1989) and Reading with
Clarice Lispector (1991b); as well as articles and parts of books such as
Writing Differences – Readings from the Seminar of Hélène Cixous
(1988) and Readings – The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist,
Lispector, and Tsvetayeva (1990), which have been widely translated
into several languages all over the world, including in Japan where,
paradoxically, there is interest in Cixous’s writings about Lispector even
though Lispector herself has not been translated into Japanese (Castello
1996). Besides these publications, since the late 1970s Lispector has
been one of the authors systematically studied in Cixous’s seminars
held at the University of Paris, in France, and also in the United States
(Irvine University, California), in Canada (Queen’s University, Ontario),
and in England (University of York) (ibid.).
As she has been given prominence in Cixous’s writings and
seminars, Lispector has begun to share a very select world, together
with Kafka, Rilke, Rimbaud, Joyce, Heidegger, Derrida and even
Freud, among other writers that she has, nevertheless, ‘surpassed’ since
she had the advantage of writing ‘as a woman’ and has presented
Cixous with an exemplary illustration of a feminine approach in her
dealings with difference (Cixous 1991a, p. 132). In a recent interview,
Cixous even compares Lispector’s use of ‘Brazilian’ (Portuguese) to
Shakespeare’s use of English. As her argument goes, even though
Lispector may be difficult to read, her privileged style, like
Shakespeare’s, makes her work ‘infinite’ and ‘inexhaustible’ (Castello
1996). Obviously, owing to her allegedly meticulous devotion to the
letter and the style of Lispector’s work, Cixous plainly rejects any