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Tuesday
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 Tuesday evening: Respond
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Tuesday, June 22nd
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: 2 responses
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Friday, June 18th
 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 País obituary; it features some extravagantly beautiful pictures.)
posted afternoon of June 18th: 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: Respond
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Saturday, May 29th
At UCLA in 2002, Saramago reads from some of his work: 
Thanks to education blog Teach Our Children for the link.
posted morning of May 29th: Respond
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Tuesday, May 18th
How exciting! On the occasion of my birthday Saramago has posted a  cryptic and tantalizing note on his blog (which he has retitled "Saramago's Other Notebooks"):
Aside from the conversations of women, it is dreams that sustain our world in its orbit...
The piece is a quotation from Balthasar and Blimunda... I don't know why he picked today to post it but it fits in nicely with my frame of mind today. So I will consider this (until proven otherwise) my birthday gift from Mr. Saramago.
posted morning of May 18th: Respond
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Thursday, January 28th
 The Saramago Foundation announces that a new edition of The Stone Raft will be published, with all profits given to the Red Cross's relief efforts in Haïti.
 Update: no, I misread that. The foundation is not donating all profits to the Red Cross, but rather "the entire 15€ purchase price of the book" -- rather more substantial a commitment.
posted morning of January 28th: Respond
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Sunday, January 10th
I went over to Woody's house last night and watched The Passion of Joan of Arc, which I've seen a couple of times and loved for its visual beauty; I think I may be getting past the gawking and starting to be able to appreciate the tragic beauty of Joan's story. In particular I was noticing something in common between watching this movie and reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ -- how my understanding of the story is shaped by knowing the lead character will suffer martyrdom. It probably goes without saying (though I don't know if I would have made the connection myself before yesterday) that Joan is a Christ-like figure -- in her story as in Jesus' there is a sense of fatality, that he will go to his death on the cross and she to hers on the pyre because God has set in motion the course of events and it is not subject to change.
Something that had held me off from reading The Gospel According to Jesus Christ was the subliminal fear that it would be mocking Jesus -- I am not a religious man and indeed have been known to appreciate lampoons of religion and of Christianity, but the idea of a life story of Jesus which mocked him was rubbing me the wrong way. I am glad to find my worries were totally misplaced.
posted evening of January 10th: Respond
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Sunday, January third
I'm impressed again by Saramago's eye for the details of the story as he looks at Joseph and Mary's predicament -- they are in Bethlehem, 100 km from Joseph's shop and source of livelihood, they need to find a way to feed themselves for the 33 days Mary must remain in confinement following the circumcision of her son. My unresearched understanding of the Nativity sort of has the Magi showing up with their gifts immediately the night Jesus is born (and I am wondering whether the visit of the Magi will figure in Saramago's retelling*) -- I should go look at some source material and see how close this is to the accepted story. Joseph's taking work building the Temple has me thinking of Balthazar working on the Convent. Two passages from this section that I think illustrate the broad range of tone Saramago brings to this story. First a belly laugh:
On the eigth day Joseph took his firstborn to the synagogue to be circumcised. Using a knife made of flint, with admirable skill the priest cut the wailing child's foreskin, and the fate of that foreskin is in itself worthy of a novel, from the moment it was cut, a loop of pale skin with scarcely any bleeding, to its glorious sanctification during the papacy of Paschal I, who reigned in the ninth century of Christianity. Anyone wishing to see that foreskin today need only visit the parish church of Calcata near Viterbo in Italy, where it is preserved in a reliquary for the spiritual benefit of the faithful and the  amusement of curious atheists.
and only a few pages later, Joseph is walking back from the construction site where he has found employment; he passes by Rachel's Tomb, and we get deeply reverent, mournful introspection:
Without so much as a word or a glance, one body separates itself from another, as indifferent as the fruit that drops from a tree. Then an even sadder thought came to him, namely, that children die because their fathers beget them and their mothers bring them into this world, and he took pity on his own son, who was condemned to die although innocent. As he stood, filled with confusion and anguish, before the tomb of Jacob's beloved wife, carpenter Joseph's shoulders drooped and his head sank, and his entire body broke out in a cold sweat, and now there was no one passing on the road to whom he could turn for help. For the first time in his life he doubted whether the world had any meaning, and he said in a loud voice, like one who has lost all hope, This is where I will die.
 * No, it does not.
posted afternoon of January third: Respond
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Saramago's telling of the trek Joseph and Mary must make from Nazareth down to Bethlehem in the ninth month of Mary's pregnancy, is utterly gripping and fascinating. I had never thought much about this aspect of the Christmas story; Google Maps gives the distance they had to travel as either 155 km (taking the westward route) or 166 km (taking the eastward route) -- perhaps 2000 years ago, on donkey and foot rather than in a car, it would have been shorter to go due south, not sure what the geography is like there. This is a long way to be forced to travel in service of paying taxes to an occupying power! The four canonical gospels do not spend much time on it, I wonder if there is another biblical source for this. I'm moderately surprised to find this book (so far, at any rate) not strongly hostile to religion; prayer in particular is being treated as a vital source of comfort to the impoverished Nazarenes. There is a lot of hostility towards the villagers' patriarchal misogyny apparent, and this misogyny is encoded in much of the prayer; but it isn't seeming to me like this translates directly to an anti-religion stance. A little bit of beauty from the third night of the trek, as the travellers take refuge in a caravansary in Ramah:
That night there was no conversation, no prayers or stories around the fire, as if the proximity of Jerusalem demanded respectful silence, each man searching his heart and asking, Who is this person who resembles me yet whom I fail to recognize. This is not what they actually said, for people do not start talking to themselves like that, nor was this even in their conscious thoughts, but there can be no doubt that as we sit staring into the flames of a camp fire, our silence can be expressed only with words like these, which say everything. From where he sat, Joseph could see Mary in profile against the light of the fire. Its reddish reflection softly lit one side of her face, tracing her features in chiaroscuro, and he began to realize, with surprise, that Mary was an attractive woman, if one could say this of a person with such a childlike expression. Of course her body was swollen now, yet he could see the agile, graceful figure she would soon regain once their child was born. Without warning, as if his flesh was rebelling after all these months of enforced chastity, a wave of desire surged through his blood and left him dizzy.
posted morning of January third: Respond
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