🦋 Notebooks
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 Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010
➳ More posts about Saramago's Notebook
➳ More posts about José Saramago
➳ More posts about Readings
➳ More posts about Cuadernos de Lanzarote
➳ More posts about The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
➳ More posts about Translation
➳ More posts about Writing Projects
➳ More posts about Projects
The last lines may be closer to: "... to express that which, through the word, we call thought. "
posted evening of June 22nd, 2010 by Rick
Ah -- thank you! I spent some time last night puzzling about pronouns and antecedents, could not get them to match up in a satisfactory way. It seems blindingly obvious now that you say it.
posted morning of June 23rd, 2010 by Jeremy
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