Should I do it? Should I do a blog post on a novel by Brazilian poet Hilda Hilst (1930-2004) that I have begun to read but don't yet know how to understand?
Hilst's novel, With My Dog-Eyes, newly translated by Adam Morris (Melville House, 2014), attracted my attention because its narrator is a mathematician and a poet. Here are the lines with which the novel begins:
from With My Dog-Eyes by Hilda Hilst
The cross on my brow
The facts of what I was
Of what I will be:
I was born a mathematician, a magician
I was born a poet.
The cross on my brow
The dry laughter
The scream
I discover myself a king
Sequined in darkness
Knives striking
Time and wisdom.
The narrator/math professor, Amòs Kères, likes the work of Bertrand Russell and is given a leave of absence by his dean because students have complained of fifteen-minute disconnects that have been occurring in his classes.
I am in a tug-of-war -- wanting to read more of Hilst's experimental prose and yet annoyed that "mathematician" is once again chosen by a writer as the profession of weirdness. But I will read on, and report more later.
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