“Agua viva” by Clarice Lispector, story of an instant – Libération

New translation of “Agua viva” by the Brazilian writer. It’s like a letter or a monologue from a narrator, a painter before being a writer, who offers herself to multiple incarnations.

If it were a story, it would be one of joy, of pain, of separation, of a moment. But “it’s a thing devoid of history“. It is, in a bilingual edition and in a new translation, living waterwhose first title was Shouting objecta book by Clarice Lispector published in 1973, four years before the death of the Brazilian born in what is now Ukraine in 1920. It is like a letter or a monologue from a narrator, a painter before being a writer, who offers multiple incarnations. “But I am kaleidoscopic: my sparkling mutations that I record kaleidoscopically here fascinate me.” “I am also a slow evolution which launches itself like a drawbridge towards a future whose milky mists I already breathe.” “And I walk like a tightrope walker to the limit of my dream.” It is the very state of this voice, which is also intended to be a gesture, that the reader perceives in perpetual change, as the moments follow one another without having grasped the previous one being of help when it comes to tackling to the next one. “I think now I’m going to have to ask permission to die a little.” “What a fever: I can’t stop living.” “Dying must be a silent internal explosion. The body can no longer be body. What if dying tasted like food when you’re very f