Depersonalization as the great objectification of oneself. The greatest exteriorization one can reach. Whoever gets to oneself through depersonalization shall recognize the other in any disguise: the first step in relation to the other is finding inside oneself the man of all men. Every woman is the woman of all women, every man is the man of all men, and each of them could appear wherever man is judged. But only in immanence, because only a few reach the point of, in us, recognizing themselves. And then, by the simple presence of their existence, revealing ours.
Whatever we live from — and because it has no name only muteness pronounces it — it is from that that I draw closer to myself through the great largess of letting myself be. Not because I then find the name of the name and the impalpable becomes concrete — but because I designate the impalpable as impalpable, and then the breath breaks out anew as in a candle’s flame.
The gradual deheroization of oneself is the true labor one works at beneath the apparent labor, life is a secret mission. So secret is the true life that not even to me, who am dying of it, can the password be entrusted, I die without knowing wherefrom. And the secret is such that, only if the mission manages to be accomplished shall I, in a flash, perceive that I was born in charge of it — every life is a secret mission.
The deheroization of myself is subterraneously undermining my building, coming to pass without my consent like an unheeded calling. Until it is finally revealed to me that the life in me does not bear my name.
And I too have no name, and that is my name. And because I depersonalize myself to the point of not having my name, I reply whenever someone says: I.
Deheroization is the great failure of a life. Not everyone manages to fail because it is so laborious, one first must climb painfully until finally reaching high enough to be able to fall — I can only reach the depersonality of muteness if I have first constructed an entire voice. My civilizations were necessary for me to rise to a point from which I could descend. It is exactly through the failure of the voice that one comes to hear for the first time one’s own muteness and that of others and of things, and accepts it as the possible language. Only then is my nature accepted, accepted with its frightened torture, where pain is not something that happens to us, but what we are. And our condition is accepted as the only one possible, since it is what exists, and not another. And since living it is our passion. The human condition is the passion of Christ.
Ah, but to reach muteness, what a great effort of voice. My voice is the way I go in search of reality; reality, before my language, exists like a thought that is not thought, but inescapably I was and am compelled to need to know what the thought thinks. Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but as the earth precedes the tree, but as the world precedes the man, but as the sea precedes the vision of the sea, life precedes love, the matter of the body precedes the body, and in turn language one day will have preceded the possession of silence.
I have to the extent I designate — and this is the splendor of having a language. But I have much more to the extent I cannot designate. Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it — and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognize. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But — I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve.
And it is no use to try to take a shortcut and want to start, already knowing that the voice says little, starting straightaway with being depersonal. For the journey exists, and the journey is not simply a manner of going. We ourselves are the journey. In the matter of living, one can never arrive beforehand. The via crucis is not a detour, it is the only way, one cannot arrive except along it and with it. Persistence is our effort, giving up is the reward. One only reaches it having experienced the power of building, and, despite the taste of power, preferring to give up. Giving up must be a choice. Giving up is the most sacred choice of a life. Giving up is the true human instant. And this alone, is the very glory of my condition.
Giving up is a revelation.
Giving up is a revelation.
I give up, and will have been the human person — it is only in the worst of my condition that that condition is taken up as my destiny. Existing demands of me the great sacrifice of not having strength, I give up, and all of a sudden the world fits inside my weak hand. I give up, and onto my human poverty opens the only joy granted me human joy. I know that, and I tremble — living strikes me so, living deprives me of sleep.
I climb high enough to be able to fall, I choose, I tremble and give up, and, finally, dedicating myself to my fall, depersonal, without a voice of my own, finally without me — then does everything I do not have become mine. I give up and the less I am the more I live, the more I lose my name the more they call me, my only secret mission is my condition, I give up and the less I know the password the more I fulfill the secret, the less I know the more the sweetness of the abyss is my destiny. And so I adore it.
With my hands quietly clasped on my lap, I was having a feeling of tender timid joy. It was an almost nothing, like when the breeze makes a blade of grass tremble. It was almost nothing, but I could make out the minuscule movement of my timidity. I don’t know, but with distressed idolatry I was approaching something, and with the delicateness of one who is afraid. I was approaching the most powerful thing that had ever happened to me.
More powerful than hope, more powerful than love?
I was approaching something I think was — trust. Perhaps that is the name. Or it doesn’t matter: I could also give it another.
I felt that my face in modesty was smiling. Or perhaps it wasn’t, I don’t know. I was trusting.
Myself? the world? the God? the roach? I don’t know. Perhaps trusting is not a matter of what or whom. Perhaps I now knew that I myself would never be equal to life, but that my life was equal to life. I would never reach my root, but my root existed. Timidly I let myself be pierced by a sweetness that humbled me without restraining me.
Oh God, I was feeling baptized by the world. I had put a roach’s matter into my mouth, and finally performed the tiniest act.
Not the maximum act, as I had thought before, not heroism and sainthood. But at last the tiniest act that I had always been missing. I had always been incapable of the tiniest act. And with the tiniest act, I had deheroized myself. I, who had lived from the middle of the road, had finally taken the first step along its beginning.
Finally, finally, my casing had really broken and without limit I was. Through not being, I was. To the ends of whatever I was not, I was. Whatever I am not, I am. All shall be within me, if I shall not be; for “I” is just one of the instantaneous spasms of the world. My life does not have a merely human meaning, it is much greater — so much greater that, as humanity goes, it makes no sense. Of the general organization that was greater than I, I had previously only perceived the fragments. But now, I was much less than human — and I would only fulfill my specifically human destiny if I handed myself over, as I was handing myself over, to whatever was no longer I, to whatever is already inhuman.
And handing myself over with the trust of belonging to the unknown. Since I can only pray to whatever I do not know. And I can only love the unknown evidence of things, and can only add myself to what I do not know. Only that is really handing myself over.
And such handing-over is the only surpassing that does not exclude me. I was now so much greater that I could no longer see myself. As great as a far-off landscape. I was far off. But perceptible in my furthest mountains and in my remotest rivers: the simultaneous present no longer scared me, and in the furthest extremity of me I could finally smile without even smiling. At last I was stretching beyond my sensibility.
The world independed on me — that was the trust I had reached: the world independed o
n me, and I am not understanding whatever it is I’m saying, never! never again shall I understand anything I say. Since how could I speak without the word lying for me? how could I speak except timidly like this: life just is for me. Life just is for me, and I don’t understand what I’m saying. And so I adore it. ——————
Translator’s Note
A friend in Brazil told me of a young woman in Rio who’d read Clarice Lispector obsessively and was convinced — as I and legions of other Clarice devotees have been — that she and Clarice Lispector would have a life-changing connection if they met in person. She managed to get in touch with the writer, who kindly agreed to meet her. When the young woman arrived, Clarice sat and stared at her and said nothing until the woman finally fled the apartment.
To translate an author who is no longer alive is always a bit like this woman’s encounter. You can ask a question but you don’t get an answer. The author just stares at you and says nothing and you wonder if the best thing to do would be to get up and run out of the room, especially if the work you’re translating is as mystifying as The Passion According to G. H.
I would have liked to ask about her curiously alternating use of “o Deus” (“the God“) and “Deus” (“God”) — how strange she intended that article to sound to the reader. I also would have liked to ask her about the various words that recur throughout the book like the subjects in a fugue, returning each time at a slightly different pitch. She uses the word preso, for example, to refer to a prisoner and then to the figures in a bas-relief on a wall and then to the narrator’s feeling as she stands inside the dry, hot room of her former maid where the entire novel takes place.
I knew one of my priorities as the translator of this novel had to be recreating the fugue-like repetitions of words like preso throughout the novel, but in several instances using “imprisoned” made the sentence sound odd in English in a way it didn’t in the original, as when she uses preso to describe the sensation of being pinned under a rock. I ultimately used “pinned” instead of “imprisoned” for that instance, but wish I could have asked her: was I right to go with “pinned” here, or should I have used “imprisoned” instead, as the lyrical use of repetition is so essential to what makes this novel such a hypnotizing book?
This dilemma came up with certain moments of wordplay as well, as when she says there are so many roaches that they “parece uma prece,” which literally means they “seem a prayer.” That literal rendering, however, fails to capture the sonic pleasure of the phrase in the Portuguese. I ultimately went with the phrase “they appear a prayer.” The repetition of the p’s and r’s offered some of the inventive lyricism of the phrase in the original, although seeming and appearing are not perfect matches sensewise. As I couldn’t ask Clarice when to prioritize the music and when the meaning in this book, I had to trust what I’d come to hear in my head rereading G. H. many times over the past decade. This was the first work of hers I encountered in college, and I was so riveted by it that I immediately read everything else she’d written. The following year, I learned Portuguese in part to learn how her voice sounded in the original.
Even after rereading this novel so often and so intently that I know a number of passages in it by memory, I still feel as if every hair on my head has caught on fire when I reach the end of it. The experience of translating G. H. has left me feeling bald, and not as if I lost my hair in the process so much as discovering that like G. H., like the roach, I am actually all cilia and antennae and would never have come to know this without gradually, painstakingly experiencing every word in this book. And so — as in the last line of this finest of novels — I adore it.
Idra Novey
Copyright © 1964 by the Heirs of Clarice Lispector
Translation copyright © 2012 by Idra Novey
Introduction copyright © 2012 by Caetano Veloso
Originally published as A Paixão segundo G. H. Published by arrangement with the Heirs of Clarice Lispector and Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells,
Barcelona.
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published by New Directions as ndp1224 in 2012
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited
Design by Erik Rieselbach
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lispector, Clarice.
[Paixão segundo G. H. English]
The passion according to G. H. / Clarice Lispector ; translated by Idra Novey ; edited by Benjamin Moser ; introduction by Caetano Veloso.
p. cm.
eISBN 978-0-8112-2069-9
I. Novey, Idra. II. Moser, Benjamin. III. Title.
PQ9697.L585P313 2012
869.342—dc23
2012005502
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue. New York 10011
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Soulstorm
Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
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