We celebrated the complete set of new Clarice Lispector translations published by New Directions—an enormous two-decade project spearheaded by Benjamin Moser (the translator of the just-published The Apple in the Dark).
John Keene, Rivka Galchen, and Lucas Iberico Lozada joined us for a discussion about the stunning new translation of The Apple in the Dark—a chiefly metaphysical book about the nature of existence and creation—and the great Brazilian legend Clarice Lispector, who is widely considered to be one of the greatest writers of the twentieth-century, “a penetrating genius” (Donna Seaman, Booklist).
Presented in partnership with the Consulate General of Brazil in New York.
Featured Book
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The Apple in the Dark
By Clarice Lispector
Published by New Directions
Translated by Benjamin Moser
“It’s the best one,” Clarice Lispector remarked on the occasion of the publication of The Apple in the Dark: “I can’t define it, how it is, I can only say that it’s much better constructed than the previous ones.” A book in three chapters, with three central characters, The Apple in the Dark is in fact highly sculpted, while being chiefly a metaphysical book, and in this stunning new translation, the novel’s mysteries and allegories glow with a fresh scintillating light.
Martim, fleeing from a murder he believes he committed, plunges into the dark nocturnal jungle: stumbling along, in a state of both fear and wonder, eventually he comes to a remote, quiet ranch and finds work with the two women who own it. The women are tranquil enough before his arrival, but are affected by his radical mystery. Soaked through with Martim’s inner night (his soul is in the darkness where everything is created), the novel vibrates with his perpetual searching state of vigil. Often he feels close to an epiphany: “for the first time he was present in the moment in which whatever is happening is happening.” Yet such flashes flicker out, so he’s ever on the watch for “life to take on the dimensions of a destiny.”
In an interview, Lispector once said: “I am Martim.” As she puts it in The Apple in the Dark: “All I’ve got is hunger. And that unstable way of grasping an apple in the dark—without letting it fall.”
In conversation
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Rivka Galchen
Rivka Galchen
Rivka Galchen is an award novelist and a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. She is the author of five books: Atmospheric Disturbances (Novel, FSG, 2008), American Innovations (Short Stories, FSG 2014) and Little Labors (Essays, New Directions, 2016), Rat Rule 79 (Novel for Children, Restless Books, 2019) and Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch (Novel, FSG, 2021.) She has received numerous prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Fellowship, The Berlin Prize and The William J Saroyan International Prize in Fiction, and her work has been widely anthologized. In 2010, she was named to the New Yorker’s list of 20 Writers Under 40. Galchen also holds an MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Photo Credit: Nina Subin
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John Keene
John Keene
John Keene is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including Annotations (1995) and Counternarratives (2015), both published by New Directions. Counternarratives received an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, a Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK), and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His most recent publication, Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021), received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is a Distinguished Professor and serves as department chair at Rutgers University-Newark.
Photo Credit: Nina Subin
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Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector
Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States, until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959; she died there in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil’s greatest modern writer.
Photo Credit: Paulo Gurgel Valente
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Lucas Iberico Lozada
Lucas Iberico Lozada
Lucas Iberico Lozada is a writer and critic who lives in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. A PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, he is at work on a novel and an essay collection about the many journeys of Christopher Columbus’s corpse.
Photo Credit: Kelly Giarrocco
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Benjamin Moser
Benjamin Moser
General editor of the new translations of Clarice Lispector’s complete works at New Directions, Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: The Biography of Clarice Lispector, and Sontag: Her Life and Work, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His new book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, will be published in October.
Photo Credit: Philippe Quaisse
