Hilda Hilst (1930β2004) was one of the greatest Brazilian writers of the twentieth century, but her books have languished untranslated, in part because of their formally radical nature. This translation of With My Dog-Eyes brings a crucial work from her oeuvre into English for the first time.
With My Dog-Eyes is an account of an unravelingβof sanity, of language . . . After experiencing a vision of what he calls βa clear-cut unhoped-for,β college professor AmΓ³s Keres struggles to reconcile himself with his life as a father, a husband, and a member of the university with its βmeetings, asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous talk, megalomanias.β
A stunning book by a master of the avant-garde.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Review
"Like her friend and admirer Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst was a passionate explorer of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the obscene."
βBENJAMIN MOSER
*Praise for THE OBSCENE MADAME D *
"May just be the literary miracle of 2012...The Obscene Madame D stands at only 57 pages and yet manages to offer the reader a truly immersive experience unlike any of the classic tomes that brim with words."
βALEX ESTES, Full Stop
About the Author
HILDA HILST was born in 1930 in JaΓΊ, Brazil. Hilst was a prolific author whose work spans many different genres, including poetry, fiction, drama and newspaper columns. Born the heiress to a coffee fortune, she abandoned Sao Paolo and promising law career in the 1960s, moved to the countryside, and built herself a house, Casa do Sol, where she lived until the end of her life with a rotating cast of friends, lovers, aspiring artists, bohemian poets, and dozens of dogs. She received many major literary prizes over the course of her career, including Brazil's highest honor, the Premio Jabuti. Her work has been translated into French, German, and Italian. She died in 2004, at the age of 73.
ADAM MORRIS is a PhD candidate in Latin American literature at Stanford University. An excerpt from his translation of With My Dog-Eyes won the 2012 Susan Sontag Foundation Prize for Literary Translation.