post-colonial_translation

Cixous, Lispector and fidelity 151
Cixous had propagated. [ . . . ] Like Lispector, Cixous wants to
reject the constraining masks of social identity in favor of a
Heideggerian notion of the multiple and temporal experience of
Being.
(Sarap 1993, pp. 113, 114)
It is certainly revealing that the only dissenting voices among
commentators of Cixous’s singular ‘collaboration’ with the Brazilian
writer so far have come from those whose readership of Lispector’s
texts is not limited to an interest in French theories of feminine
writing. Marta Peixoto and Anna Klobucka, for instance, effectively
point to the basic contradictions between Cixous’s conception of
feminine research and her own readings of Lispector. Most of all,
they point to the paradoxical circumstances which have turned
Lispector into an emblem of the care with which one is supposed to
handle difference while in fact she has been violently absorbed by
the French feminist’s powerful reading and writing. Both Peixoto
and Klobucka convincingly argue that for those who have read
Lispector outside the theoretical grounds of French feminine writing,
Cixous’s alleged ‘extreme fidelity’ to Lispector’s otherness cannot
stand even the most superficial exam. This peculiar brand of ‘fidelity’
turns out to be a true intervention, a rewriting, in which what belongs
to the author and to the reader is literally shaded by omissions and
misquotations, and in which Lispector’s Portuguese is often
disregarded or taken to be a perfect translation of French. As Peixoto
points out, in Vivre l’orange, which is precisely about the importance
of Lispector’s text for Cixous’s own work, there are ‘a number of
blurred quotations, in which Cixous paraphrases recognizable
passages from Lispector without acknowledging her move, and what
might be called simulated quotations, in which the words set off in
italics might seem to be Lispector’s, but are Cixous’s own
paraphrases and conflations of several Lispector texts’ (Peixoto
1994, p. 44). This ambivalent handling of Clarice Lispector’s work
often affects the very language in which she wrote her texts. As
Peixoto has shown, Cixous’s apparent knowledge of Portuguese does
not exactly entrust her to make specific comments on Lispector’s
use of words and grammatical structures. In her comments on
Lispector’s omission of the first-person subject pronoun we can find
a clear example of Cixous’s contradictory ‘dedication’ to the
Brazilian author’s originals, as the following fragment shows:
‘Clarice writes in order to dissolve through a certain chemistry,