So Mysterious Poem by gershon hepner

“I’m so mysterious, I do not understand
myself, ” Clarice Lispector wrote.
Such gals are usually in great demand,
and ones on whom I tend to dote.
Most happily my wife is one of them:
she understands herself less well
than I, and that’s why she’s my fatal femme,
undeconstructed demoiselle.

Chaya Pinkhasovna was Clarice’s
first name, and my wife’s is Leah
Rivkah, Hebrew names that fell to pieces,
covered by an alien layer
concealing from the world their origin,
to which my wife has always been
so close that, quite originally, on sin
she is, though tempted, rarely keen.

After marriage, said Clarice, there’s death,
with nothing much left in between.
A thought like that would take away the breath
of Leah Rivkah, Sabbath queen
who welcomes life each week: lekha dodi
mysterious song sung both to me
and all the world. There is no “not to be”
in her life, played in Major C.

Inspired by Dwight Garner’s review of Benjamin Moser’s “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, ” in the NYT, August 12,2009 (“Writer’s Myth Looms as Large As the Many Novels She Wrote”) :
The avant-garde Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920-77) is little known in America, where only a handful of her many books have been issued in translation, but back home she is literary royalty — she burns in the collective memory like a slightly sinister eternal flame. Lispector’s face stares from Brazilian postage stamps, and her name adorns luxury condominiums. Countless books have been written about her there, and dozens of theatrical performances have been based on her work. You can buy her books in subway vending machines. “Her first name is enough to identify her to educated Brazilians, ” Benjamin Moser writes in “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector.” Lispector’s myth looms as large as anything she has written. Her unusual name made her sound like a spy. Her green almond eyes and high cheekbones led people to liken her to a she-wolf or a panther. To the translator Gregory Rabassa, Lispector “looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.”
Because Lispector shunned the spotlight, and because she married a diplomat at 22 and spent nearly two decades outside of Brazil, rumors about her sprang up to fill the void. Some thought she was a man writing under a pseudonym. Her interest in the occult (she had a lifelong habit of consulting astrologers and card readers) led people to refer to her as “the great witch of Brazilian literature.” She was also called a monstre sacré. Later in life she burned her right hand in an apartment fire, and it came to resemble a black claw. Lispector’s writing was as unconventional as she was. Her novels and stories lack easily discernible plots, and are related in simmering, impressionistic language. They have a haunted, interior quality that cut against the grain of contemporary Brazilian literature. The poet Elizabeth Bishop, who translated a few of Lispector’s stories, wrote to friends: “I think she is better than J. L. Borges — who is good, but not all that good! ”
This is rich biographical material that gets only richer as Mr. Moser, a translator and a book critic for Harper’s Magazine, begins to unpeel the layers of her complicated life. “Why This World” sucks you — for long stretches, anyway — into its subject’s strange vortex. Clarice Lispector was actually born in Ukraine to Jewish parents. Her birth name was Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector. Her family fled Russia’s pogroms in the wake of World War I, when Clarice was a baby. They were lucky to escape, but they hardly emerged unscathed. Lispector’s mother was raped by Russian soldiers and contracted syphilis. The family immigrated to Recife, a town in northeastern Brazil. When Lispector was 9, her mother died from syphilis. Lispector and her two sisters were raised by their father, who eventually moved the family to Rio de Janeiro. He was a kind and intelligent man with zero talent for making a living. He earned money by peddling cheap goods on the street, and by making and selling soap.
At 13, after reading Hermann Hesse’s novel “Steppenwolf, ” Lispector decided that she wanted to be a writer. After graduating from a prestigious Brazilian law school, she worked as a journalist and began to publish short stories in small magazines. Her first novel, “Near to the Wild Heart, ” was issued in 1943 and became a critical sensation. One critic called it “the greatest novel a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language.” The novel’s stream-of-consciousness style led critics to compare Lispector to Joyce and Woolf, writers she had yet to read. “Near to the Wild Heart” was, in part, a fractured complaint against marriage. After your wedding, one of its female characters says, “all you can do is wait for death.” But by the time the novel came out, Lispector herself had married Maury Gurgel Valente, a young Brazilian diplomat. His postings over the next two decades would take them, and later their two sons, across the world, to Naples, Bern and Washington.


8/12/09