Clarice: The Visitor

by Idra Novey, Erica Baum (Illustrator)

Overview

In this cahier, American poet Idra Novey explores several notions of translation through two sequences of poems. In the first sequence, “Letters to C,” she addresses the figure and the words of a writer she has recently translated, Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector. In the second, “Regarding Marmalade, Cognates, and Visitors,” Novey looks at the connections between language, translation, and the hosting of visitors, including her newborn son. Idra Novey’s texts are in conversation with works by the artist Erica Baum—images of books that seem both to invite and resist attempts to read them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781909631076
Publisher:	Sylph Editions
Publication date:	07/15/2014
Series:	Sylph Editions - Cahiers Series , #23
Pages:	36
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.40(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Idra Novey is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently Exit, Civilian, and the translator of numerous volumes of poetry and fiction, including The Passion According to G. H. by Clarice Lispector. Erica Baum is an artist living in New York City.

Table of Contents

Preface
 
Letters to C
 
Regarding Marmalade, Cognates, and Visitors
 
Colophon

Editorial Reviews

"Novey engages in another kind of call-and-response, that of her own poetic letters to Clarice Lispector, echoing Lispector's letters to the novelist Fernando Sabino. Of her experience translating Lispector, Novey asks, 'What was I failing at / before this—and why is it / failure makes a person feel / so irremediably alive?' Indeed, why is the silence between places, between texts, between bodies, always a silence we want to fill? But silence matters as much as voice; and the why doesn't matter."

BOMB Magazine - Sarah Gerard