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Saturday, February 12th, 2011
It might seem peculiar to go to Saramago seeking reverence -- he is rather famously atheistic, maybe even intemperately so; he was notoriously denounced by the Catholic church heirarchy after publication of his final novel, CaÃn, when he said humanity would be better off without the Holy Bible. (And who am I, no Christian myself, to be seeking or discussing reverence? We'll leave that question by the side for now.) But: I found The Gospel According to Jesus Christ to be a superlatively reverent book, that quality was one of my favorite things about the book; and I am hoping as I start CaÃn that it will share that quality.
Things are looking a little dodgy starting with the epigraph -- Saramago quotes chapter 11, verse 4 of St. Paul's letter to the Hebrews, and attributes it to the Libro de los disparates, roughly the "Book of Nonsense". I agree with Rafael RodrÃguez Hernández that this is a lousy opening: it seems to me like Saramago ought to treat his source text with more respect...
Be that as it may, I'm enjoying the first few chapters. Eve and Adam are coming through nicely as characters, Saramago seems really to be interested in their humanity and their hardships. It looks like it will be a fun game to figure out which of Saramago's details are canonical and which are not -- for instance he has only a single Cherub guarding the gates of Eden, whom he identifies as Azael*; tradition assigns this role to two angels, Metatron and Melchisadec. But I will probably spend less time on this kind of thing as I get deeper into the story. Eve's flirtation with and implicit seduction of Azael is very strongly non-canonical/blasphemous, but it is rendered so lovingly that I am going to go along with it -- it is one of the high points of the first few chapters.
 *Gustav Davidson's Dictionary of Angels identifies Azael as "one of 2 fallen angels (Aza is the other) who cohabited with Naamah, Lamech's daughter, and sired the sedim, Assyrian guardian spirits." Cool! I knew vaguely (based on Genesis 6:1-2) that there was angel-human cohabitation in the Abrahamic tradition but did not have any specifics.
posted afternoon of February 12th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, December 13th, 2010
 At Making Light, Teresa posts lyrics to a Swedish carol for this opening night of the Christmas season, along with descriptions of customs around Europe for observing the feast day. Marissa Lingen also has her annual Santa Lucia post.
 Update: Fantastic! Saint Lucy, the patron saint of the blind, is the woman in the Blindness church scene, who "did not have her eyes covered, because she carried her gouged-out eyes on a silver tray."
posted morning of December 13th, 2010: Respond
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Monday, November 22nd, 2010
1Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, 2 where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.
3 The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread."
4 Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Man shall not live on bread alone.'"
-- Luke 4 (NIV, 2010)
After he had walked he knew not how many hours, thirst and weariness were defeating him. He thought to himself that his destination could not be so far away now. He felt he was lost. The only thing that he could do was to let himself fall onto the sand. He sat in a lotus position, his little paper sack between his legs. As always in such difficult emotional times he commenced to pick his nose. He looked about himself: it was as if he were in the dead center of a circle composed of the horizon on all sides, a circle as if it had been traced by some celestial hand, perfect, round, endless. The silence, the solitude were of such divine purity, they moved him, they were tangible. He removed his sandals. He wanted to take communion with the land.
He sat there, listening, for a long time.
Evening's flame lit the horizon. Red. Impressive. Overwhelming. It made him think of dusk, of Golgotha. His surroundings swam before his eyes into a great ring of fire. "The fiery ring of a lion-tamer," he said. He sensed suddenly, and with divine clarity, that the lion-tamer was God; he, the lion, tamed. That his master was ordering him to jump. Yes; to jump. Highest glory to the Eternal Father!
He jumped.
He closed his eyes and jumped.
-- The art of resurrection ch. 4
The art of resurrection is reminding me a bit of reading The Gospel according to Jesus Christ (and I ought to track down Saramago's take on the temptation in the desert passage...) in the degree of sympathy each author expresses for his imperfect messiah.
 Update: ...And also SFAM is getting in on the Messianic action.
posted evening of November 22nd, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, November 21st, 2010
Three books I read this summer that I wanted to write about but didn't much of substance. Either of the first two would be great by itself, it was a real treat to read them both in succession.
- Stranger Here Below by Joyce Hinnefeld. This is Hinnefeld's second novel and seems like a real breakthrough. I liked In Hovering Flight a lot but it did not seem like a "masterpiece" the way I can picture talking about this book (once I get around to/figure out what to post about it).
- Out of the Mountains by Meredith Sue Willis.
I talk to Vashie on the phone and visit occasionally, but I never run her errands. I don't drive her to the doctor, and I don't pick up her groceries.
Her daughter Ruth doesn't either, but Ruth is a classic agoraphobic, a direct result of having Vashie as a mother, in my opinion. Vashie was even worse as a mother than as a third grade teacher. We're all widows now, Vashie, Ruth, me, and my friend Ursula Rose, who was having the tag sale in front of her late husband's mansion the day Vashie came lurching toward us on her walker, pausing to rest when she thought we were watching.
-- "The Scandalous Roy Critchfield"
Such a clear, genuine voice.
- The Elephant's Journey by José Saramago. This book seems almost the equal of Balthazar and Blimunda to me but I'm not sure how to back this up -- my plan was to write a review of it to submit to Quarterly Conversation or similar, but I got stuck on recommending it rather then writing about it. Really a sheer pleasure to read.
posted evening of November 21st, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
Another Saramago epigraph from El libro de los consejos -- at the front of his Small Memories is the line, "Déjate llevar por el niño que fuiste/(roughly) Allow the child you were to carry you." The first time I've been able to find a lead suggesting affirmatively that these quotations are actual quotations from somewhere else, not invented by Saramago -- this line takes me to Juan Pedro Villa-Isaza's blog
Casi un objeto, which gives some context for it:
Mientras no alcances la verdad, no podrás corregirla. Pero si no la corriges, no la alcanzarás. Mientras tanto, no te resignes.*
Déjate llevar por el niño que fuiste.
As long as you do not know the truth, you will not be able to alter it. But if you do not alter it, you will never be able to reach it. Still, do not resign yourself. Allow the child you were to carry you.
(Also, Googling for the original Portuguese rendering of this quote "Deixa-te levar pela criança que foste" leads me to a 2006 interview with Saramago, where he talks about his life and his writing process.) ..."llevar/levar" can also mean "to lead" -- indeed that appears to be the primary meaning in Portuguese; a better rendering of this line might be "Let yourself be led by the child you were." *... and now I am remembering that this line is the epigraph for The History of the Siege of Lisbon... and am back to thinking the whole thing is Saramago's invention.
posted evening of November 9th, 2010: 2 responses
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Tuesday, October 26th, 2010
Today's post at Saramago's Other Notebooks quotes one of his oldest novels.
La libertad no es mujer que ande por los caminos, no se sienta en una piedra esperando que la inviten a cenar o a dormir en nuestra cama el resto de la vida.
-- Levantado del suelo, Alfaguara, 2003, p. 422
Liberty is not a woman walking the streets, she is not sitting on a bench outside waiting for an invitation to dinner, to come sleep in our bed for the rest of her life.
-- Raised up from the soil, 1980
posted evening of October 26th, 2010: Respond
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Thursday, October 21st, 2010
Saramago seems almost to be picking at a linguistic scab in his consciousness in these first few sentences of "Chair", the first story in An Object, Almost. If I'm understanding right the chair he is talking about is to some approximation the government of Salazar, though I'm not sure how explicit he makes that.
The chair begins to fall, to come down, to capsize, but not, in the strictest sense of the term, to come unleashed. Speaking strictly, coming unleashed means losing one's bonds. And of course, one can't say that a chair is chained or in bonds, if it had for instance a couple of lateral arm rests, you would say the armrests of the chair are falling, not that they have been unleashed. But truthfully, storms can be unleashed, I would say, or better I remember having said, so as not to fall into my own traps: if cloudbursts can be unleashed, which is just another way of saying the same thing, could not, in short, chairs likewise be unleashed, even without having bonds? As at least a poetic liberty? At least as the simple artifice which proclaims itself style, voice? Let's accept that chairs can come unleashed, even if it ultimately proves preferable that they should only fall, should capsize, should come down.
I finished a couple of revisions of "Ebb-tide" and sent a copy of it to the editor who accepted my translation of "Requiem" -- I'm starting to fantasize about publishing a translation of this collection of stories, not sure if that means I have to learn Portuguese or if it's legit to translate from the Spanish translation -- what I have done so far sounds very nice to my ear so I am sticking to the Spanish for now.
posted evening of October 21st, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
In one beginning, for everything must have a beginning, even in the case where this beginning is the same as that terminal point from which it cannot, ultimately, be broken, and to say "cannot" is not the same as saying "will not" or "need not", it is the extremity of not being able, for if this breaking could take place, we know that the whole universe would crumble into its component bits, the universe is a fragile construction, it cannot bear interruption, in one beginning, then, four paths were laid out.
I'm really getting somewhere with this translation of "Ebb-Tide" -- I've got a rough draft nearly done and have been doing some revisions, I think it's going to come out very pleasant. In the first sentence you can already hear Saramago's unique rhythm and pacing.It's interesting to read Saramago talking about two cycles of his work, the narrative novels and the more allegorical novels he wrote after moving to the Canary Islands -- it makes a lot of sense to me that he named this book as the root source of the allegorical stories, I can hear Blindness and The Cave in it. I think Death With Interruptions will be worth rereading with this story in mind.
 (It occurs to me that "the extremity of not being possible" or "of impossibility" might be better English. I kind of like the sound of "the extremity of not being able". The Spanish is "el extremo no poder".)
posted evening of October 19th, 2010: 1 response
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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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