By Josey Foo
Hilda Hilst wrote With My Dog-Eyes when she was in her fifties. Translator Adam Morris writes in his introduction that as she aged, Hilst increasingly felt that serious provocative literature, literature to “wake people up,” was absent in Brazil, including in her own writing. She felt there was no writing brave enough to properly treat the banalities of modern life with its traditional values, apathy, commonplace poverty, and violence in a way that would, if not enlighten anyone, then provide a means to leave it.