Carina del Valle Schorske on Feminist Potential of Poetic Voice(lessness), Literary Circuit's Treatment of Translators, More

Carina del Valle Schorske's "On the Perilous Potential of Feminist Silence" discusses Clarice Lispector, Alejandra Pizarnik, and "poetic voice(lessness)." Believe it or not, this essay starts with Ben Lerner and Pablo Neruda. "Both [Neruda and Lerner] speak a language in which a woman’s silence serves as the occasion for a man’s literary utterance," she writes. Latina expressivity, thinking through the work of Audre Lorde, and, eventually, a "conflicted curiosity about the feminist potential of silence" lead del Valle Schorske to Lispector and Pizarnik. An excerpt:

Here I have to be careful not to confuse silence as a trope within their writing for silence as the absence of expression. Just because Lispector and Pizarnik write about silence in mystical tones does not mean that they themselves are silent. Susan Sontag reminds us that “as a property of the work of art itself, silence can exist only in a…nonliteral sense”; even the work of art that strains towards silence is a “form of speech (in many instances, of complaint or indictment) and an element in a dialogue.” Lispector and Pizarnik of course communicate through their writing, but they also withhold. Lispector famously resisted extensive dialogue with the literary public. When the rare interviewer asked her about “the role of the Brazilian writer today,” she responded: “to speak as little as possible.” And neither woman wrote explicitly—which is to say, in a realist mode—about their personal lives. Pizarnik kept notebooks that were published posthumously, but as her editor Ana Becciu notes in their Spanish edition, “the idea of writing a diary as a record of life is almost totally absent for her.”

It’s a forbidding pose. I first read a little Pizarnik in Spanish when I studied abroad in Buenos Aires, but she frightened me away: “only thirst / silence / no encounter // beware of me, my love” (Poem 3 in Diana’s Tree). I tried to forget about her troubling seductions. Perhaps it is because Clarice Lispector came to me more recently that I was able to receive her more warmly. I was encouraged, no doubt, by the note of invitation in the first line of her last novella, The Hour of the Star: “all the world began with a yes.” But The Hour of the Star remains, as Helene Cixous describes it, “a text of great pity: one should really have paid for the right to write such a text.” Far from being an ecstatically “open book,” it exacerbates ethical anxieties about who writes and who gets written about—and the power at work between these two inseparable positions.

After a close read of both Lispector and Pizarnik, del Valle Schorske brings her topic into the real:

As I’ve struggled with the silences of these two South Americans, I’ve also struggled with their English-language reception. Even though Clarice Lispector has been translated into English for decades, Benjamin Moser’s 2009 biography Why This World and this year’s Collected Stories (edited by Moser and translated by the wonderful Katrina Dodson) have ignited a fresh fever on the literary circuit. Alejandra Pizarnik, on the other hand, has only been translated into English here and there in magazines, anthologies, and cultish PDF’s. Yvette Siegert’s work in rendering Diana’s Tree (Ugly Duckling), A Musical Hell (New Directions), and Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 (also New Directions) calls a whole new audience into being. My first moment of true rage in response to the reviews came when I noticed that Joshua Cohen’s review at Harper’s failed to credit Yvette Siegert as the translator at all. But this inexcusable error (Benjamin Moser, I notice, is never disappeared) speaks to the broader sense in which American reviewers have tended to treat both Pizarnik and Lispector as lonely, “sphinx-like” figures. Their silence—about their personal lives, in relation to the press—has not protected them from being “bruised” and “misunderstood” by today’s criticism. I don’t imagine that writing or speaking differently would have set things straight, but I can imagine coping with a whole different discourse about their work: one that emphasizes their ardent attachments and manic mysticism rather than their refusal and restraint.

Read on at Literary Hub. At top: Clarice Lispector.