![]() ![]() My head is already swimming, and we haven’t even arrived at the chicken yet. ![]() When one sees the egg it is too late: an egg seen is an egg lost. The egg can only be seen by one who has already seen it. At the very instant of seeing the egg it is the memory of an egg. Seeing an egg never remains in the present: as soon as I see an egg it already becomes having seen an egg three millennia ago. Immediately I perceive that one cannot be seeing an egg. I look at the egg with a single gaze.” Yet as with most of Lispector’s writing, what begins as a concrete, objective thing slips from your grasp: The opening is simple enough - a woman looks at an egg on the kitchen table: “In the morning in the kitchen upon the table I see the egg. ![]() ![]() I wanted to understand one of her most puzzling stories, “O ovo e a galinha” (The Egg and the Chicken). The first time I tried to translate the work of the beloved Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector was as a new graduate student in UC Berkeley’s Department of Comparative Literature. Translation is a way of deep reading, another point of entry after you’ve read a text more times that you can count. ![]()
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