RETRATO DO ARTISTA QUANDO JOVEM

by James Joyce, José Geraldo Vieira (Translator)

Text in Portuguese. Durante a infância de Stephen, alguns acontecimentos o marcaram de tal forma que sua personalidade foi moldada com base neles. Certos temores e um fervor religioso passaram a se incitar no garoto. As causas disso provavelmente vinham de sua educadora Dante - uma espécie de freira -, ou dos rígidos métodos do colégio interno onde ele passou boa parte de sua juventude, ou das experiências difíceis e confusas com seus colegas de classe. Este primeiro romance de James Joyce, descreve a Irlanda do início do século XX, sua política e religião, e narra de forma fervorosa os ritos de passagem de Stephen entre a sua infância e a sua adolescência, até alcançar a fase adulta.

238 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1971

About the author

James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his pioneering mastery and popularization of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in the Rathgar suburb of Dublin in 1882, Joyce spent the majority of his adult life in self-imposed exile across continental Europe—living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris—yet his entire, meticulous body of work remained obsessively and comprehensively focused on the minutiae of his native city, making Dublin both the meticulously detailed setting and a central, inescapable character in his literary universe. His work is consistently characterized by its technical complexity, rich literary allusion, intricate symbolism, and an unflinching examination of the spectrum of human consciousness. Joyce began his published career with Dubliners (1914), a collection of fifteen short stories offering a naturalistic, often stark, depiction of middle-class Irish life and the moral and spiritual paralysis he observed in its inhabitants, concluding each story with a moment of crucial, sudden self-understanding he termed an "epiphany." This collection was followed by the highly autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a Bildungsroman that meticulously chronicled the intellectual and artistic awakening of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, who would become Joyce's recurring alter ego and intellectual stand-in throughout his major works.
His magnum opus, Ulysses (1922), is universally regarded as a landmark work of fiction that fundamentally revolutionized the novel form. It compressed the events of a single, ordinary day—June 16, 1904, a date now globally celebrated by literary enthusiasts as "Bloomsday"—into a sprawling, epic narrative that structurally and symbolically paralleled Homer's Odyssey, using a dazzling array of distinct styles and linguistic invention across its eighteen episodes to explore the lives of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus in hyper-minute detail. The novel's explicit content and innovative, challenging structure led to its initial banning for obscenity in the United States and the United Kingdom, turning Joyce into a cause célèbre for artistic freedom and the boundaries of literary expression. His final, most challenging work, Finnegans Wake (1939), pushed the boundaries of language and conventional narrative even further, employing a dense, dream-like prose filled with multilingual puns, invented portmanteau words, and layered allusions that continues to divide and challenge readers and scholars to this day. A dedicated polyglot who reportedly learned several languages, including Norwegian simply to read Ibsen in the original, Joyce approached the English language not as a fixed entity with rigid rules, but as a malleable medium capable of infinite reinvention and expression. His personal life was marked by an unwavering dedication to his literary craft, a complex, devoted relationship with his wife Nora Barnacle, and chronic, debilitating eye problems that necessitated numerous painful surgeries throughout his life, sometimes forcing him to write with crayons on large white paper. Despite these severe physical ailments and financial struggles, his singular literary vision remained sharp, focused, and profoundly revolutionary. Joyce passed away in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1941, shortly after undergoing one of his many eye operations. Today, he is widely regarded as perhaps the most significant and challenging writer of the 20th century. His immense, complex legacy is robustly maintained by global academic study and institutions such as the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, which ensures his complex, demanding, and utterly brilliant work endures, inviting new generations of readers to explore the very essence of what it means to be hum

Reviews

[Walter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tive um pouco de dificuldade com a leitura devido ao meu desconhecimento de muitas palavras e termos usados pelo autor, por ser um livro antigo e retratar um período da história que não conheço muito, tive que consultar o dicionário diversas vezes para poder criar uma imagem mental dos cenários e entender alguns diálogos. Não sei se em traduções mais atuais a linguagem é facilitada.

Em algum momento a leitura também se mostrou um pouco entediante e até meio confusa, principalmente nos momentos de diálogo com os colegas de escola do Stephen. Demorei um pouco para finalizar a leitura.

Mas isso não atrapalhou a minha identificação com Stephen, muitos dos sentimentos provindos das suas experiências, ainda na infância, e a forma como ele enxergava a vida também foram comuns a mim. Acredito que esta é uma ótima leitura para qualquer pessoa com um espírito sensível e que se sente deslocado em soceidade. A delicadeza e sensibilidade da escrita do James Joyce para descrever as percepções do espírito são belíssimas.