Hilda Hilst - With My Dog Eyes

Hilst understood her own work as partaking in a far more radical tradition of avant-garde expression. Beyond her worship of Beckett and Joyce, she regarded herself as the literary heir to D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Pierre Louÿs, and Georges Bataille: all practitioners, in her view, of the obscene as a literary aesthetic. In Hilst’s formulation, the obscene is differentiated from the erotic and the pornographic by its philosophical and spiritual elements, and also through its act of social provocation. When, some years after completing With My Dog-Eyes , she launched her obscene tetralogy, the quartet of works in which she undertook her own development of the aesthetic ( O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby , 1990; Contos d’escárnio, textos grotescos , 1990; Cartas de um sedutor , 1991; Bufólicas , 1992), Hilst lamented to interviewers that Brazil was a country where serious literature was not appreciated, that her forty years of writing had accomplished nothing, and that it was time to “wake people up.” As she grew older, Hilst was increasingly saddened by the widespread prevalence of hunger, misery, and cruelty in the world. Her obscene works unleash a damning satire of the traditional values and generalized apathy that underwrite the commonplace poverty and violence of modern life.

The tetralogy began with Lori Lamby’s Little Pink Notebook , narrated by an eight-year-old sex worker whose surname is a play on the verb “to lick.” Although the tetralogy was meant as “an act of aggression” toward an arriviste literary community with middlebrow tastes and bourgeois morals, it was consistently misunderstood as pornography, and the minor scandal surrounding the works gained Hilst further notoriety as a “pornographic” writer. Hilst herself did little to dispel these misconceptions, responding to interviewers with mordant sarcasm when questioned about the book’s alleged pornography. Though a work of devious genius, the Brazilian literary community confused Lori Lamby’s Little Pink Notebook with a cheap last-ditch attempt at fame, and some of the same critics who had extolled her previous works condemned Lori Lamby as trash. In these late years, Hilst was also becoming a legendarily volatile persona, known for her prickly treatment of the journalists who bored her and the writers who discounted her work. Erstwhile members of her elective family were excommunicated from Hilst’s inner circle. Once, in a rare appearance at a book launch, she broke a glass and threatened to stab another writer who had publicly disapproved of her unorthodox love life.

In the 1990s she began drinking heavily, from seven o’clock onward each evening. It was her way, friends say, of confronting age and mortality. Yet despite immoderate indulgence in whiskey, Hilst was never out of sorts the next day, ready to keep her usual hours of reading and writing. It was only in the final years of her life, when she had stopped writing, that Hilst began to overcome the hindrance of her reputation as a “hermetic” writer of arcane philosophical concerns and forbidding difficulty. Editora Globo, a large commercial publishing house, began reissuing her work in special critical editions in 2000, and her books are now available in shops across Brazil.

The task of translating Hilda Hilst has also faced intransigences, but her work is finally being made available to an English-reading public. In undertaking this translation of With My Dog-Eyes , I was aided by the opportunity to consult Hilst’s immense personal library at the Casa do Sol; her marginalia and annotations were illuminating guides to the literary, philosophic, mathematical, and occult allusions embedded everywhere in her prose. Since it would be nearly impossible to comment upon them all, notes to the text are kept to a minimum, and I will not address their many potential interpretations here.

One exception, however, is called for: the title of With My Dog-Eyes is a mystery. The book was originally titled “The Obscure”; Hilst’s notes show that this was in part to anagrammatically spell “TAO” with the titles of three consecutive books ( Tu não te moves de ti , 1980; A obscena senhora D , 1982; and O Obscuro ). It is unclear why Hilst changed the title to With My Dog-Eyes , though it is obviously related to her own extraordinary love of dogs. Her dogs accompanied her at the dinner table, watched over her while she wrote, and crowded around her as she moved through the Casa do Sol. In nearly every photo of Hilst, there are dogs and more dogs. Though they were extravagantly numerous, she always knew all of their names. Hilst disdained those who disliked dogs, and the first question she asked visitors and new acquaintances brought to her house by friends — before proceeding to ask them about their zodiac sign and the details of their sex life — was whether or not they liked dogs. Anecdotes about Hilst’s strange ability to communicate with dogs abound. One resident of the Casa do Sol recalled the way her dogs rushed to break Hilst’s fall when she fainted upon hearing the telephone ring one day, having correctly intuited that someone was calling to tell her a friend had succumbed to AIDS. Though she kept hundreds of dogs throughout her life, her diary entries record the deep pain she felt when any of them died. When euthanasia was required, Hilst sometimes administered the injection herself.

The title of With My Dog-Eyes might have been inspired by Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” in which a dog gives voice to some of the same philosophical, scientific, and existential concerns that preoccupied Hilst. Or it may be that the title derives from a verse in book 11 of The Odyssey , one which Faulkner was believed to be quoting in the title of As I Lay Dying . The verse is spoken by Agamemnon, who when visited by Odysseus in the underworld, explains his murder by his unfaithful wife Clytemnestra. “As I lay dying,” he tells Odysseus, “the woman with the dog’s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.” The villainous Clytemnestra is too evil to perform this death rite for her husband as she dispatches him into the underworld. A Portuguese translation of The Odyssey in Hilst’s library refers to Clytemnestra as a cachorra , the Brazilian Portuguese word for a bitch or she-dog, reminiscent of the one that appears near the end of With My Dog-Eyes . Perhaps it is the gaze of Clytemnestra herself that Hilst invokes as she sends her readers, open-eyed, into the depths of madness.

Adam Morris

Special thanks are due to the Susan Sontag Foundation, the Instituto Hilda Hilst, Olga Bilenky, Daniel Bilenky Mora Fuentes, Jurandy Valença, Caroline Nascimento, Lyris Wiedemann, Marília Librandi Rocha, and Aaron Joseph.