Clarice Lispector

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Clarice Lispector (1969)
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Clarice Lispector [kla'risi lispek'tor] (* 10. December 1920 in Chechelnyk , Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic , as Haya Pinkussowna Lispektor ; † 9. December 1977 in Rio de Janeiro , Brazil ) was a Brazilian writer . She wrote novels, short stories, children's books, and columns for newspapers and magazines.

Life

Clarice Lispector was the youngest of three daughters of Russian-Jewish parents. It was given the Hebrew name Chaya ('life'). Her mother was raped by a Russian soldier. As a result, and in view of the pogroms that flared up again and again , the parents Pedro and Marietta Lispector emigrated with Chaja and their two sisters Elisa and Tanya two months after Chaja's birth. They first came to Hamburg , where their father looked in vain for work, and in 1922 to Maceió , Brazil. There the family adopted Brazilian first names. She later used to postpone her year of birth by five years to 1925.

She grew up in Recife in the poor north-east of the country, but moved with her family to Rio de Janeiro in 1934, where she completed school and from 1937 a law degree and worked as a teacher and for two newspapers. If her parents spoke and wrote almost exclusively Yiddish , she was the first in the family to learn Portuguese .

In 1943, against her parents' reservations, she married the Catholic Maury Gurgel Valente, who joined the Brazilian diplomatic corps. In the same year she began writing her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem ( Near the Wild Heart) , which was published in 1944. The 23-year-old novel, which describes the social reality of Brazil, especially the Northeast, immediately caught public interest and became a literary sensation at a time when regionalism was the predominant trend in literature.

When her husband was sent to other countries as an ambassador, she had to follow him. She lived with him from 1945 to 1949 in Naples , Bern and from 1952 to 1959 in Washington . Their son Pedro was born in 1949, and their son Paulo was born in 1953. In the USA she published in the Brazilian magazine Senhor. After the divorce in 1959, she settled in Rio de Janeiro with her sons and worked as a journalist and translator . She wrote her own columns, for example for the Correio da Manhã and the Jornal do Brasil. This was followed by other novels and volumes with short stories and scripts for several films. With the novel The Apple in the Dark (1961) and as a writer of articles in magazines she finally rose to fame.

When a fire broke out in her apartment on the 13th floor in the Leme district of Rio de Janeiro in 1967, which she had started herself when she fell asleep in bed with a cigarette and tranquilizers, she was still trying to rescue manuscripts and books. She was injured by falling ceiling joists and was badly burned. Since then, she has been in pain when using her right hand.

In 1968 she interviewed well-known personalities for the Manchete magazine, including Antônio Carlos Jobim, in the series “Diálogos possíveis com Clarice Lispector” (Possible dialogues with Clarice Lispector) . In the same year on June 26th she took part in the "Passeata dos cem mil" (demonstration of the hundred thousand) against the military dictatorship.

Clarice Lispector died on December 9, 1977 one day before their 57th birthday, in Rio de Janeiro to cancer . She was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Sāo João Bastista.

effect

As a “post-regionalist” author, Clarice Lispector was influenced by existentialism as well as by the artists Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield , whom she admired . The title of her novel Perto do coração selvagem (Eng: Near the Wild Heart) , a quote by James Joyce from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which she puts in front of this novel as a motto, shows just like her role models the literary tradition in which she stands. Her work revolves again and again around the dismaying reality that lurks behind the facade of everyday life. Poor in external action, as it describes the inner life of the characters in an "expressive language down to the smallest, barely detectable ramifications" ( Suhrkamp , old spelling).

She is referred to as the “Brazilian Virginia Woolf” ( Rowohlt ), her novel A paixão segundo GH, in its 33 chapters based on the passion story , as “one of the most disturbing in world literature”. The New York Times wrote in 2005 that it was the equivalent of Franz Kafka in Latin American literature. Lispector "was already a legend during his lifetime, famous, admired, capricious, depressed and incomprehensible to most people."

How the mood of a narrator can completely change within a sentence, Lispector traces with psychological accuracy and a feeling for the power differences between men and women. In her stories, the female ego splits into a bourgeois existence and an animal existence, shaped by obstinacy and cruelty. Feelings of guilt, substitute gratifications and (auto) aggressiveness are common consequences of their female characters, who experience a mysterious misfortune while worrying about their husband, household and children.

Her novel A hora da estrela ( Eng : the great moment) tells the story of Macabéa, a starving, poor typist from Alagoas (the state where Lispector's family first set foot on Brazilian soil) who found herself in the rough The port area of ​​the metropolis of Rio de Janeiro breaks through. With Macabéa, Clarice Lispector has created one of the most important female characters in Brazilian literature. The novel, which is also available in a German radio play version, was filmed in 1985 by the Brazilian director Suzana Amaral .

Awards (selection)

  • 1945: Graça Aranha Prize of the Brazilian Academy of Arts for Perto do coração selvagem
  • 1976: Culture Prize of the Brazilian Federal District for her life's work

Works (selection)

  • Perto do coração selvagem. Romance, Ficções u. a., Lisbon 2000 (1944), ISBN 972-708-574-1
  • O luster, Livraria Agir Editora, Rio de Janeiro (1946)
  • A cidade sitiada, Alves, Rio de Janeiro 1992 (1949), ISBN 85-265-0274-3
    • From dream to dream. Translated by Sarita Brandt. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1992, ISBN 9783499128356
  • Laços de família (1960)
  • A maçã no escuro (1961)
    • The apple in the dark. Translated by Curt Meyer-Clason, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 9783518018262
  • A paixão segundo GH 1963
    • The Passion according to GH Übers. Christina Schrübbers. Lilith, Berlin 1984
    • The Passion according to GH Übers. Christiane Schrübbers and Sarita Brandt, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1990
  • A Legião Estrangeira (1964)
  • O mistério do coelho pensante e outros contos (1967–1978)
    • The Secret of the Thinking Rabbit and Other Stories. Translated by Marlen Eckl, Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-95565-010-0
  • A mulher que matou os peixes. 1968
  • Uma aprendizagem ou o livro dos prazeres. 1969
    • A teaching or the book of lusts. Translated by Christiane Schrübbers, Lilith, Berlin 1982, ISBN 9783922946014
    • A teaching or the book of lust. Translated by Sarita Brandt, Rowohlt, Reinbek 1988, ISBN 9783499123283
  • Felicidade clandestina . 1971
  • A imitação da rosa . 1973
    • The imitation of the rose. Translated by Curt Meyer-Clason, Claassen, Hamburg 1966
  • Água viva (1973)
    • Aqua viva. A dialogue. Translated by Sarita Brandt. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-518-22162-0
  • A vida íntima de Laura . 1974
  • Via crucis do corpo . 1974
  • Onde estivestes de noite? . 1974
  • A hora da estrela . 1977
  • Daydream and drunkenness of a young woman. (Complete stories I) Translated by Luis Ruby. Penguin, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-328-60094-7
  • But it will rain. (Complete Tales II) Translated by Luis Ruby. Penguin, Munich 2020, ISBN 978-3-328-60095-4

literature

  • Bernadete Grob-Lima: O percurso das personagens de Clarice Lispector. Garamond Universitária, Rio de Janeiro 2009, ISBN 978-85-7617-170-6 (Portuguese)
  • Ana Miranda: Clarice Lispector. The treasure of my city. Sans Soleil Edition, Bonn 1999, ISBN 3-88030-033-X
  • Benjamin Moser: Why This World. A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Oxford University Press 2009, ISBN 978-0-19-538556-4
    • Translated by Bernd Rullkötter: Clarice Lispector. A biography. Schöffling, Frankfurt 2013, ISBN 978-3-89561-622-8
      • Johanna Adorján: The South American Sphinx . Review. Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, December 13, 2009, page 32
  • Heike Schmitz: From storm and Geisteswut: mystical traces and the dress of art with Ingeborg Bachmann and Clarice Lispector (= Frankfurt feminist texts, literature and philosophy ). Helmer Verlag , Königstein 1998, ISBN 3-89741-001-X (= Diss. Phil. University of Frankfurt am Main, 1997)
  • Leonie Meyer-Krentler: Clarice Lispector. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin 2019 (with 20 illustrations)
  • Vojin Saša Vukadinović : "Speak from the grave." The writer who died in 1977 ... , in "Dschungel." Supplement to jungle world , 44, October 31, 2019, pp. 1 - 5 (with several images)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nádia Gotlib Battella: Clarice fotobiografia . Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo 2008, ISBN 978-85-7060-689-1 , p. 494 (Brazilian Portuguese, google.de [accessed March 30, 2020]).
  2. ↑ a b Marie Schmidt : The hen or the egg? Her stories prove that the Brazilian mystic Clarice Lispector, born in 1920, knew which came first. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, February 6, 2020, p. 12.
  3. ↑ a b “Outside of any comparison: Clarice Lispector. To write about life ” , Felix Philipp Ingold in the NZZ of December 28, 2013, accessed on December 31, 2013
  4. ↑ “He was alone. He was abandoned, happy, near the wild heart of life. James Joyce "
  5. ^ "In the beyond what can be said", a portrait of the writer by Stefan Fuchs, DLF
  6. ↑ "Legende zu Lebzeiten" , Katharina Döbler in Deutschlandradio Kultur on October 14, 2013 on Benjamin Moser's Lispector biography, last accessed on April 8, 2020
  7. ^ Eva Paulino Bueno, María Claudia André: The Woman in Latin American and Spanish Literature: Essays on Iconic Characters . McFarland, 2014, ISBN 978-0-7864-9081-3 ( google.de [accessed December 16, 2018]).
personal data
SURNAME Lispector, Clarice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lispector, Chaja (maiden name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION Brazilian writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 10, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Chechelnyk , Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic ,
DATE OF DEATH December 9, 1977
Place of death Rio de Janeiro