post-colonial_translation

156 Rosemary Arrojo
Kafka and Joyce are undoubtedly recognized as internationally
canonical writers, it would not be feasible to completely ignore their
long-established authority as writers, or the authority of the readership
that has been developed around it.
In this sense, the structure which Cixous’s power and influence have
been able to weave in her relationship with Lispector’s texts can also
remind us of another well-known narrative. We might say that Cixous’s
‘discovery’ of Lispector’s work, which coincidentally took place on an
anniversary of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the new continent, also repeats
the basic strategies and reasoning of the European conquest of America.
First of all, as in the so-called ‘discovery’ of America, Cixous’s encounter
with Lispector’s work is a ‘discovery’ between quotation marks, a
‘discovery’ that is also an invasion, a taking-over which has to ignore,
disregard or even destroy whatever was already there. Secondly, it is a
‘discovery’ which is also a transformation and, of course, a renaming
that is done primarily in the interest of those who are in a position to
undertake such an ambitious enterprise. From this perspective, we could
say that Cixous’s reading of Lispector is also a form of ‘colonization’,
in which whatever or whoever is subject to foreign domination not only
has to adopt the interests of the colonizer but also comes under the latter’s
complete control.
As the main scenes of the encounter between Cixous and Lispector
illustrate the impossibility of treating otherness ‘delicately, with the
tips of the words’, or with ‘extreme fidelity’, particularly in asymmetrical
contexts, this is a lesson which we can appropriately find in Lispector
herself. In one of her most impressive, complex narratives, A Paixão
segundo G.H. (1964), we are invited to follow the narrator G.H.’s
tortured reflection on herself and the human condition the morning
after her maid leaves her post. A middle-class, sophisticated, financially
independent sculptor, G.H. lives ‘in cleanliness’ and in ‘semi-luxury’ in
an elegant, spacious penthouse, from where ‘one can overpower a city’.
As the narrative begins, we find her dressed in white, having breakfast,
and planning to visit the maid’s room – something she had not done in
the six months the woman had worked for her – in order to make sure
that everything is in order before the new maid arrives. It is in this small
room – ‘the portrait of an empty stomach’, ‘the opposite’ of that which
she created in her own home, conveniently separated from the main
living area and close to the service entrance, and which has the ‘double
function’ of squeezing in the maid’s skimpy bed and her mistress’s
discarded ‘rags, old suitcases, old newspapers’ – that Lispector’s G.H.