Katrina Dodson with Translations of Clarice Lispector

"Clarice Lispector's The Complete Stories, released last year (the author died in 1977), is full of thematic detail about life in Brazil in the middle of the 20th century—the restrictiveness of gender roles, harsh class distinctions, roses—but I couldn't stop thinking about how hard the book must have been to translate. She writes in so many modes, yet the charmingly detached tone carries through all the stories. I wrote to Katrina Dodson, who translated the book for New Directions, and our conversation about the translation of the Portuguese word 'galinha' will give you an idea of just how big and complex of a project it was to bring forth this gorgeous brick of short stories to the English-speaking world." RICH SMITH

Tonight, Dodson, a recent Ph.D. in comparative literature at UC Berkeley, will talk about the project.