In the summer of 1963, Elizabeth Bishop was translating three short stories from Portuguese, which she described in a letter to Robert Lowell as the work of “the most non-literary writer I’ve ever known.” “She’s never read anything that I can discover,” Bishop said of the Brazilian writer’s “self-taught” approach, “and ‘never cracks a book’ as we used to say.” If Clarice Lispector, the author of the stories, had overheard Bishop’s remarks, she likely would have agreed with them, because she had so often spoken similarly of herself. “This is not a book,” she announced at the beginning of her 1973 work Água Viva, “because this is not how one writes.”
Bishop was not the first translator, or reader, to have been mystified by the enigma that Lispector represented, on…
