MM: Portuguese is a language that makes extensive use of a form of the past tense that resembles our remote past. What approach does this aspect require from the translator?
RF: Those who know the Portuguese language well (very well), both in the Portuguese and Brazilian variants, have now perfectly introjected this reverb full of nuances.
Things, among other things, get complicated with certain forms of subjunctive which imply sometimes ambiguous and unfathomable shifts in the dimension of time.
The tendency is to decide at the beginning which past to opt for and then simply continue to “feel” it.
MM: Every great author has a music, which his translators must learn to recognize by ear, so to speak, so that they can recognize it by impression and master its nuances. What is Clarice Lispector’s music?
RF: Clarice often refers to great composers.
She herself, in many of her books, “suggests” what to listen to or informs us about what this or that character in a novel is listening to.
This indicates a close relationship with musicality, a relationship that is reflected in his writing and even in the voice that the translator hears as the words transform from his Portuguese into another language. Clarice’s music is difficult and it takes time and patience to capture it.
But it’s as if it were an initiatory journey: once we have penetrated that world, it manifests itself to our hearing in all its originality and in every minimal nuance of identity.
When I translated Living Water (Adelphi) I lived the (very tiring, intimately dense) experience of the “Clarician” initiatory journey.
Today that music accompanies meI don’t have to look for it anymore.
MM: Born in Ukraine, her family emigrated to Brazil when she was one year old. Having then married a diplomat, Clarice spent long periods in Switzerland, Naples and then Washington, before returning to her beloved Rio de Janeiro, where she would remain until her premature end.
Is this cosmopolitan vocation, however painful, legible in Lispector’s use of language?
RF: Clarice was translator in turn.
In addition to Portuguese and Yiddish, he studied French and English. The diplomatic environment annoyed her and was a sort of cross that she had decided to bear in silence for the sake of the quiet life of her marriage (while it lasted).
But the positive side of that partly nomadic existence (despite the deep Brazilian roots and the love for its city-navel, Rio de Janeiro) was the fact that being the wife of a diplomat offered her the opportunity to travel from her early youth, often frequenting cultured and stimulating environments. Just think about thefriendship with Ungaretti (who loved Brazil, where he had taught Italian literature for a long time) whom he met during the difficult period at the end of the Second World War spent in Naples and with whom he planned a translation into Italian of his first novel.
