It was during a training course at the painter Antonio Gomide’s studio that the young Clelia – barely 17 years old – met Arthur Luiz. They married soon after, in 1949 and arrived in Paris in 1951, without any intention of settling in the city. “We stayed on, adapting ourselves and being adopted,” she liked to recall.
Clélia Pisa – spelled with an S, to better dissociate her professional career from that of her husband – is not the commun 1950’s housewife type.
In the 1960s, she works at the “O Estado de São Paulo” newspapers office in Paris. She moves on to consolidate an important career as a consultant for major French publishing houses and founded, alongside Alice Raillard (literary advisor at Gallimard and at Stock editors, translator for Jorge Amado, Raduan Nassar, Darcy Ribeiro, João Ubaldo Ribeiro) and Maryvonne Lapouge-Pettorelli (translator of Guimarães Rosa, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Mia Couto, among others), the literary agency ALIA.
Clelia prefaced works by Clarice Lispector, Mario de Andrade and Carolina de Jesus.
We find her as a translator in the proceedings of the symposium “Reciprocal images of Brazil and France” (Collection Works and Memories of IHEAL n ° 46, 1991) – or, alongside the journalist Rosa Freire d’Aguiar, in the acknowledgments of the book on the architect “Lucio Costa, witness and actor” (Jean-Loup Herbert, University of Saint Etienne Publications, 2001).
Clelia died in Paris on August 17, 2017, at the age of 86.