🦋 Si puedes mirar, ve
Saramago is looking back on writing the epigraph for Blindness: Si puedes mirar, ve.
Si puedes ver, repara.
I wrote this for Blindness, already a good couple of years ago. Now, when the film based on this novel is making its debut in Spain, I've encountered the phrase printed on the bags of the 8½ bookstore and on the inside front cover of Fernando Meirelles' making-of book, which this same bookstore's publishing arm has edited with skill. At times I have said that by reading the epigraph of any of my novels, one will already know the whole thing. Today, I don't know why, seeing this, I too felt a sudden impulse, felt the urgency of repairing, of fighting against the blindness. [links are my additions -- J]
I'm curious about how to translate that epigraph. (And surprised that I don't remember this epigraph from when I read Blindness, and annoyed that I cannot go check how Pontiero translated it, because I lent it to a friend...) The sense of it is, "If you can see, see. If you can see, repair." -- Obviously this does not sound good in English because the distinction between mirar and ver is missing, and the transitive structure is lost. The literal translation of the first sentence would be "If you can look, see" -- but I'm guessing the sense of Si puedes mirar is something more like "if you are able to see", i.e. if you are not blind. It seems like ve has a more transitive sense, "see something, some injustice" (although the object is omitted, as it is with repara) -- where mirar is intransitive.
 (There is an important misreading in this post, as regards the verb reparar -- see later post for the correction.)
posted evening of Tuesday, March third, 2009
➳ More posts about Saramago's Notebook
➳ More posts about José Saramago
➳ More posts about Readings
➳ More posts about Blindness
➳ More posts about Translation
➳ More posts about Writing Projects
➳ More posts about Projects
➳ More posts about Epigraphs
➳ More posts about O Livro dos Conselhos
I have to admit I had to check some grammar lessons to check about transitive and intransitive verbs, and found out that even if in spanish there's a distinction, it's not very rigid. I'd translate the text as "If you can look, see". While Mirar is more about things, Ver has a wider meaning, maybe more reflexive as well. So it's a bit like, if you can look at things, then do something about it by seeing.
Hope it makes any sense!
posted afternoon of March 5th, 2009 by Jorge López
"If you can look, see" doesn't really work that well because it doesn't make sense -- you can twist the reading to get approximately what Saramago's epigraph means, but at first reading "If you can look" doesn't seem to mean anything. Does "Si puedes mirar" make sense immediately? Is it something you could imagine hearing in conversation and knowing what was meant?
posted afternoon of March 5th, 2009 by Jeremy
It makes perfect sense.
posted afternoon of March 5th, 2009 by Jorge López
Yeah -- I figured it did. The only thing that makes equivalent sense in English is "If you can see", but then you're stuck with how to translate ve.
posted afternoon of March 5th, 2009 by Jeremy
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