post-colonial_translation

Cixous, Lispector and fidelity 155
1979b) clearly show: ‘To make a smile beam just once on a beloved
mouth, to make a clarice smile rise one time, like the light burst of an
instant picked from eternity’ (p. 74); ‘It’s a matter of an unveiling,
clariseeing: a seeing that passes through the frames and toils that clothe
the towns’ (ibid.); ‘Where does the clarice radiance lead us – Outside.
Outside of the walls’ (p. 102); ‘How to call forth claricely: it’s a long
and passionate work for all the senses’ (p. 104).
If authority is ultimately a form of writing, as we can conclude with
Felman (1982, p. 8), in the textual affair that has brought Cixous and
Lispector together, it is Cixous who has had the upper hand, it is Cixous
who gets to keep a ‘proper’, authorial name and who has had the (also
academic) power to create authority and to write it her own way.
Ultimately, in this plot it is Cixous who is ‘the subject presumed to know’,
particularly for those who are blindly devoted to her texts and who
have transformed her into the author (and the authority) that she is
today within the broad area of cultural studies.
In her readings of Lispector, Cixous’s feminine approach to evade
the violence of translation and the mediation of patriarchal language
turns out to be just another instance of the same relationship between
subject and object that she so vehemently rejects. To use one of her
most recurrent metaphors, we could say that in Cixous’s handling of
Lispector’s work the translation process that takes place is radically
transformative, as if the ‘apple’ in Lispector’s texts had been
thoroughly transformed into an ‘orange’ – or, more precisely, into an
Oran-je – which betrays a reading which is first and foremost a
rewriting shaped by specific interests. It is not, however, a mere
instance of ‘miscommunication’, as Anna Klobucka puts it (Klobucka
1994, p. 48), nor of a ‘mistranslation’, as Sharon Willis might call it
(Willis 1992). In this context, the notions of ‘mistranslation’ or
‘miscommunication’ might imply that one could read Lispector
without intervening in her work, that a reading could actually avoid
transference and capture her supposedly original apple, as Cixous
herself set out to do. However, even though any act of reading
necessarily implies appropriation and the double bind of transference,
what is peculiar about Cixous’s readings of Lispector is the
circumstances which have brought together an influential,
academically powerful reader and an author who had hardly been
read outside the limits of her marginal context and language. One
could ponder, for instance, on the fact that Cixous does not turn
Kafka’s or Joyce’s proper names into common nouns as she does with
Lispector’s, or, to put it another way, one could consider that, since