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''Near to the Wild Heart'' (''Perto do coração selvagem'') is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday in December 1943. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers on the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: "''Madame Bovary, c'est moi''", Lispector said, quoting Flaubert, when asked about the similarities. The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazilian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize. It has been translated into English twice, the first by Giovanni Pontiero in 1990,〔Giovanni Pontiero (Translator), ''Near to the Wild Heart'', New Directions (September 17, 1990). ISBN 978-0-8112-1140-6〕 and again by Alison Entrekin in 2012.〔Alison Entrekin (Translator), Benjamin Moser (Preface). ''Near to the Wild Heart'', New Directions (May 8, 2012). ISBN 978-0-8112-2002-6〕 ==Background and publication== When Lispector began writing, in March 1942, she was still a law student at the Faculdade Nacional de Direito (''National Law School''), and was also working as a journalist. In February, she had transferred to the newspaper A Noite (''The Night''), once one of the glories of Brazilian journalism but by then under the direction of the dictatorial Getúlio Vargas government. She had published some stories and journalism, and turned to one of her colleagues, Francisco de Assis Barbosa, for help with the novel she had begun writing. She pieced the book together by jotting down her ideas in a notebook whenever they occurred to her. To concentrate, she quit the tiny maid’s room in the apartment she shared with her sisters and brother-in-law and spent a month in a nearby boardinghouse, where she worked intensely. At length the book took shape, but she feared it was more a pile of notes than a full-fledged novel. Her great friend Lúcio Cardoso, a slightly older novelist, assured her that the fragments were a book in themselves. Barbosa read the originals chapter by chapter, but Clarice vividly rejected his occasional suggestions: “When I reread what I’ve written,” she told him, “I feel like I’m swallowing my own vomit.” Cardoso suggested a title, borrowed from James Joyce’s ''Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'': “He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.” This became the book’s epigraph, which, together with the occasional use of the stream-of-consciousness method, led certain critics to describe the book as “Joycean.” The comparison annoyed Lispector, who had not read Joyce; instead, the book bears the much more distinctive mark of Spinoza, whom she had been reading at the time she wrote it. Barbosa, who together with Cardoso was one of the book’s first readers, recalled his amazement. “As I devoured the chapters the author was typing, it slowly dawned on me that this was an extraordinary literary revelation,” Barbosa said. “The excitement of Clarice, hurricane Clarice.” He steered it to the book-publishing wing of their employer, A Noite, where it appeared with a bright pink cover, typical for books by women, in December 1943. It was not a lucrative arrangement for the new author. “I didn’t have to pay anything (have it published ), but I didn’t make any money either. If there was any profit, they kept it,” Lispector said. A thousand copies were printed; in lieu of payment, she got to keep a hundred. As soon as the book was ready, she began sending the book out to critics. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Near to the Wild Heart」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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