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People are mad at me. Friends who stood by me through thick and thin, called me a true Brazilian and a wunderkind, they’re all abandoning me. I’ve burned all my bridges now, without even trying.

Because I’m taking half a week off to travel, I could go anywhere in Brazil (or South America, for that matter), from the peaks of Machu Picchu to the beaches of Cancún to Iguaçú Falls, and I’m going to… drumroll… Brasília.

“That is the last place I would ever go in Brazil.”

“Ugh, it’s awful. Nobody walks on the streets.”

“Why would you ever go there.” (It wasn’t an interrogative so much as a disbelieving declarative.)

 

“Just bring lots of books.”

“If someone put a gun to my head and told me I had to move away from Rio, I might go to Brasília.”

That last one was the highest praise I’ve heard, actually. People seem genuinely offended that I’m choosing to see the nation’s capital. They think it’s ugly, boring, and full of politicians. (They may be right on that last count.)

So why am I going, you ask? Surely I’m not that contrary. (Or am I?) No, I’m pretty sure I’m not that contrary yet. The fact is that I’ve genuinely wanted to go for quite some time now. When I won an academic prize from my university, the first thing I did was write to the endower and thank him, because now I’d be able to see Brasília. The explanation, as usual, is simple: Clarice Lispector.

Now, I’m aware that not everyone feels the same way about Clarice as I do. (One of the most furious discussions I saw around one of my posts was a group of commenters alternately defending and excoriating my appreciation of A Hora da Estrela. It remains stunning, for the record.) But I think that her crônicas on Brasília – one written in 1962, one written in 1974 – should be required reading for any carioca or paulista who dismissively declares the capital “the last place” they’d ever go in Brazil. I would have translated one or both of them by now, except I got tripped up on an untranslatable object. In Brasília, Clarice writes, se mora mas não se vive. In colloquial English the distinction between the words vanishes. (“In Brasília, you live, but you don’t live.”) Viver is to live in the sense of existence; morar for us is to live in a building, a house, an apartment; it’s inhabit, but we don’t use that word commonly enough to preserve the poetry of the original.

The crônicas are rich and disorienting and hallucinatory, in any case, and Clarice neither condemns nor praises the city.

Se eu dissesse que Brasília é bonita, veriam imediatamente que gostei da cidade. Mas de digo que Brasília é a imagem de minha insônia, vêem nisso uma acusação; mas a minha insônia não é bonita nem feia – minha insônia sou eu, é vivida, é o meu espanto.

If I said that Brasília is beautiful, then you’d see right away that I liked the city. But if I say that Brasília is the image of my insomnia, you see an accusation in that; but my insomnia is neither beautiful nor ugly – I am my insomnia, I live it, it is my espanto.

Damn that word, it’s too multifaceted; it overflows the English and resists conciseness. Espanto is shock, fright, astonishment, but also with a tinge of wonder. And it’s that, in the high temple of Brazilian modernist architecture that is the Planalto Central, that I want to find. Sorry, guys, but I am Brasília-bound.