Posts by Katrina Dodson

Translation Tuesday: “The Waters of the World” by Clarice Lispector

And that was what she’d been missing: the sea inside her like the thick liquid of a man. Now she’s entirely equal to herself.

There it is, the sea, the most unintelligible of non-human existences. And here is the woman, standing on the beach, the most unintelligible of living beings. As a human being she once posed a question about herself, becoming the most unintelligible of living beings. She and the sea.

Their mysteries could only meet if one surrendered to the other: the surrender of two unknowable worlds made with the trust by which two understandings would surrender to each other.

She looks at the sea, that’s what she can do. It is only cut off for her by the line of the horizon, that is, by her human incapacity to see the Earth’s curvature. READ MORE…