«Just to give you an idea of one of the problems that keeps coming up in translating [Lispector], there are words in Portuguese that are [difficult to] translate. A good example is nada … Lispector says something like, “I am going to think of, literally, the nothing.” Now, as an English speaker, I have to think, “Do I say, literally, ‘the nothing’? Do I say ‘nothingness’? Do I say just ‘nothing’?” But I can’t say just “nothing,” because if I say, “I’m thinking of nothing,” that’s not what she’s saying. She’s thinking of something, but she’s thinking of the nothing. But I have to say that when I think of “the nothing,” I think of The Neverending Story. Do you remember this film? There’s a sinister force in the universe and it’s “The Nothing” and it destroys the realm of the imagination so that people don’t have fantasies or dreams anymore. But that’s a weird peculiar thing to me because maybe I was really moved by that movie as a child and so when I say “the nothing,” I’m thinking, “Oh, The Neverending Story, I wonder if my reader’s going to think The Neverending Story. Maybe I should go with ‘nothingness’.” But then “nothingness” is a little bit too abstract, “the nothing” sounds a little bit more forceful».
Sarah Gerard, the translator of Lispector’s last novel, "A Breath of Life"
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