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Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
I found a wonderful interview with José Saramago, published in the Spring 2002 issue of Mass Humanities. The interviewer is Anna Klobucka of U. Massachussets Dartmouth.
AK: The mainly historical novels you wrote in the
1980s, from Baltasar and Blimunda to The Gospel
According to Jesus Christ (published in 1991), form
the first grand narrative cycle in your work. Many
of your readers perceive a clear dividing line
between these narratives and your subsequent
works, the three allegorical novels from the 1990s:
Blindness, All the Names, and A Caverna. How do
you describe the balance of continuity and change
in your writing in the last two decades?
JS: The first narrative cycle you mention includes
also, as a starting point, Levantado do Chão, the
novel in which I articulated for the first time the
distinct “narrative voice†that from then on became
the hallmark of my work. And in the novels of the
second cycle there are clear echoes of my earlier
volume of short stories, Objecto Quase.
Furthermore, we must not forget my still earlier collections
of newspaper columns, Deste Mundo e do
Outro [From This World and the Other] (1971) and A
Bagagem do Viajante [The Traveler’s Baggage] (1973).
In my view, everything I have written in later years
is rooted in those texts. As for the definition of the
“dividing line†that separates the two novel cycles,
I explain it through the metaphor of a statue and a
stone: up to and including The Gospel According to
Jesus Christ, I was describing statues, insofar as a
statue is the external surface of
a stone; with Blindness and later
novels, I have moved inside the
stone, into that space where
the stone does not know whether
on the outside it is a statue
or, for example, a doorsill.
posted morning of October 19th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, October 9th, 2010
Here is a list of Saramago's works which I believe (based on the English and Spanish Wikipædia pages) have never been translated into English, in reverse chronological order. (I am not including his last novel Cain because I believe this is in the process of being translated by Margaret Jull Costa and will be published next year. I am not including his plays or his opera.)
- Cadernos de Lanzarote vol. 2 (2001): memoir
- A maior flor do mundo (2001): children's fiction (and magnificently animated (in Spanish translation) by Juan Pablo Etcheverry)
- Cadernos de Lanzarote (1997): memoir
- Levantado do chão (1980): historical fiction
- Poética dos cinco sentidos: O ouvido (1979): short stories (Update -- Poética dos cinco sentidos is a collection, Saramago has one story in it called "O ouvido".)
- Objecto quase (1978): short stories
- Os apontamentos (1976): columns
- O ano de 1993 (1975): poetry (Horácio Costa terms the contents of this book "fragments of prose-poetry")
- As opiniões que o DL teve (1974): columns
- O bagagem do viajante (1973): columns
- Deste mundo e do outro (1971): columns
- Provavelmente alegria (1970): poetry
- Os poemas possÃveis (1966): poetry
- Terra do pecado (1947): novel
posted afternoon of October 9th, 2010: 2 responses
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 So I started reading one of Saramago's early works in Spanish translation, because I believe it is not available in English*: Objecto Quase (1978) was translated by Eduardo Naval in 1983 as Casi un objeto (online as PDF at www.inabima.org). It is 6 longish short stories told in Saramago's magnificent, inimitable voice -- the same voice we see in Blindness 20 years later, the same voice we see in The Elephant's Journey 30 years later, and I'm surprised to see it so fully developed this far back, ten years before his breakthrough with Balthazar and Blimunda in 1987.
I have started working on an experimental translation of the third story, "Ebb-tide" -- possibly this is hubristic, I can't imagine the Saramago foundation giving me permission to publish it... but I can dream. Even if it goes unpublished, it is a great exercise in understanding his voice. It seems (most of it, so far) almost ridiculously easy to render nicely in English, makes me wonder if I'm missing something... There are to be sure a few passages where I am having trouble figuring out the meaning, but these are distinctly in the minority.
 *English Wikipædia has a stub page for it titled "Quasi Object" but there is no information about translator or publication, it seems like somebody just ran the Portuguese title through a mechanical translator. The page does contain the tasty information that a film adaptation of the second story, "Embargo", was released this year in Portugal. If I'm understanding Wikipædia's layout correctly, Saramago has a number of works of fiction, of poetry and of memoir which have not yet been translated, and I find this a bit surprising.
posted afternoon of October 9th, 2010: 2 responses
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Saturday, September 25th, 2010
Something you will occasionally see in books translated from a foreign language and published in America, is that metric units of measurement are rendered as English units*, with no conversion of the number next to the units, e.g. "cinco kilogramos" is rendered as "5 pounds". I'm not sure how often this happens, I have noticed it a couple of times and it's driven me just batty. (Also have seen it with monetary units, "cien francs" being translated as "100 dollars" which does not make much sense either.) I believe the thinking behind it is something on the order of, someone reading this story in the original language would get an immediate sense of what 5 kg means, where a US reader would need to pause and convert it mentally -- at the very least it seems to me every time I notice this that it at least ought to be rendered as "ten pounds" or whatever, to keep the meaning the same. Well: when Saramago was writing The Elephant's Journey he faced a similar issue in terms of translating archaic units of distance into metric, and he came up with a very tidy, winning solution. Check this out -- on the first day of the journey, Subhro is reckoning how far they have travelled:
How far have we traveled, a league, possibly two, he wondered. ...Let us consider the league, which was the word used by subhro, a distance that was also composed of paces and feet, but which has the enormous advantage of placing us in familiar territory. Yes, but everyone knows what leagues are, our contemporaries will say with an ironic smile. The best answer we can give them is this, Yes, everyone did in the age in which they lived, but only in the age in which they lived. The old word league, or leuga, which should, one would think, have meant the same to everyone at all times, has in fact made a long journey from the seven thousand five hundred feet or one thousand five hundred paces of the romans and the early middle ages to the kilometers and meters with which we now divide up distance, no less than five and five thousand respectively. It's the same with other measurements as well. ...Now, having presented the matter with such dazzling clarity, we can make an absolutely crucial, almost revolutionary decision, namely this, while the mahout and his companions, given that they would have no other means at their disposal, will continue to speak of distances in accord with the uses and customs of their age, we, so that we can understand what is going on in this regard, will use our own modern itinerary units of measurement, which will avoid constantly having to resort to tiresome conversion tables. It will be as if we were adding subtitles to a film, a concept unknown in the sixteenth century, to compensate for our ignorance or imperfect knowledge of the language spoken by the actors. We will, therefore, have two parallel discourses that will never meet, this one, which we will be able to follow without difficulty, and another, which, from this moment on, will remain silent. An interesting solution.
*Ooh and look! I did not know anything about this; but until the mid-19th C. there used to be an entirely separate Portuguese system of measurement units.
↻...done
posted afternoon of September 25th, 2010: Respond
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Friday, September 24th, 2010
Strange though it may seem to anyone unaware of the importance of the marital bed in the efficient workings of public administration, regardless of whether that bed has been blessed by the church or state or no one at all, the first step of an elephant's extraordinary journey to austria, which we propose to describe hereafter, took place in the royal apartments of the portuguese court, more or less at bedtime.
And so The Elephant's Journey opens in the marital chambers of John III of Portugal and his queen Catherine of Hapsburg -- John III is (IIUC) great-great-grandfather to John V, in whose marital chambers Baltasar and Blimunda will open two centuries later. And The Elephant's Journey is seeming in its first few chapters like it is very much going to be a masterpiece on the order of Baltasar and Blimunda and The History of the Siege of Lisbon. I could hardly imagine anything better...
posted evening of September 24th, 2010: Respond
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Saturday, September 11th, 2010
So a few weeks ago I had an idea for the beginning of a story... I've been working on it for a little while and am still not totally sure where it's going; if any of you would like to take a look at it and tell me your thoughts about it, I'd be glad to have your feedback on where to go with it. I'm not sure what it means that I am revising and reworking this piece more heavily than I have worked with any other writing I've done that I can think of, besides maybe the review of Death with Interruptions; this is already the third or fourth revision of the story's beginning. The story is going to be called "Silent Rain" -- I'm trying to capture the psychological/linguistic conditions and sensations created by absence and by the perception of absence. Comments welcome.
posted morning of September 11th, 2010: 3 responses
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Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
Fini Straubinger:
Saramago (in Pontiero's translation):The blind man had categorically stated that he could see, if you'll excuse that verb again, a thick, uniform white color, as if he had plunged his eyes into a milky sea. A white amaurosis, apart from being etymologically a contradiction, would also be a neurological possibility, since the brain, which would be unable to perceive the images, forms, and colors of reality, would likewise be incapable, in a manner of speaking, of being covered in white, a continuous white, like a white painting without tonalities, the colors, forms and images which reality itself might present to someone with normal vision, however difficult it may be to speak, with any accuracy, of normal vision.
Borges (and guess how excited I am to find the Seven Nights lectures online! At least one of them...):
...People picture the blind man enclosed in a world of black. There is a verse of Shakespeare's which would justify this impression: Looking on darkness which the blind do see; if we understand "darkness" to mean "black," this verse of Shakespeare's is mistaken.
One of the colors which the blind (in any case this blind man) are strangers to is black; another is red. "Le rouge et le noir" are colors we miss. For me, who was used to sleeping in total darkness, it was a great deal of trouble trying to sleep in this world of fog, a greenish fog or blue, vaguely luminous, which is the world of blindness.
↻...done
posted evening of August 31st, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
On my birthday last month, the Saramago Foundation started updating the man's blog a few times a week with quotations from his work, from his books and his articles and his speeches. I'm not sure how I feel about this -- the entries are worth reading and it's nice to be introduced to some of his work that I didn't know about (and it did seem like a nice birthday present), while OTOH I had been identifying the blog (naturally) closely with him, and it's unsettling for him to be in the ground and the blog to continue. They have retitled it Saramago's Other Notebooks, which could help in identifying it as a new blog. Today's entry comes from The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis:
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La palabra es lo mejor que se puede encontrar, la tentativa siempre frustrada para expresar eso a lo que, por medio de palabra, llamamos pensamiento. | | The Word
The word is the greatest thing you will ever meet, the always frustrated effort to express that which, by means of the word, we call thought. [Vastly improved translation contributed by Rick in comments] |
(Speaking of notebooks, I have ordered a copy of the Lanzarote Notebooks and am looking forward to reading it! though it will be my first posthumous Saramago...)
posted evening of June 22nd, 2010: 2 responses
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Friday, June 18th, 2010
 Saramago is the Portuguese name of the wild radish Raphanus raphanistrum. José Saramago's family name was de Sousa, but when he was born his birth certificate was mistakenly inscribed with his father's nickname. His parents were illiterate and did not discover the error until José enrolled in school.
Life is like a candle burning; when it comes to the end it blazes brightly before it goes out. I believe that I'm now in the period of blazing before I go out. I can see very clearly that I will not go on living much longer. Now I'm in a phase where if I believe that I can carry out some task and that I can do it well, I want to do it. After it all stops and my books remain, I think they will continue to be read.
(quoted in Francesc Relea's article on the national weekend of mourning in Portugal.)
 (Take a look at the slide show included in the El PaÃs obituary; it features some extravagantly beautiful pictures.)
posted afternoon of June 18th, 2010: 5 responses
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José Saramago, 87 years old, died early this afternoon, at home in Lanzarote. This man and his voice will be missed.
posted morning of June 18th, 2010: Respond
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