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Friday, December 5th, 2008
This passage, at the beginning of the fifth chapter, is really striking: They have spoken about stones and starlings, now they are speaking about decisions taken. They are in the yard behind the house, José Anaiço is seated on the doorstep, Joachim Sassa in a chair since he is a visitor, and because José Anaiço is sitting with his back to the kitchen where the light is coming from, we still do not know what he looks like, this man appears to be hiding himself, but this is not the case, how often have we shown ourselves as we really are, and yet we need not have bothered, there was no one there to notice.
I can picture exactly how this would look in a movie. Sort of deep reds and shadow, with a light yellow incandescence coming from the kitchen door and window (I sort of think the door is ajar), when the camera (which starts with the two of them in profile, with shadows across them and the starry night behind) pans past Sassa at one point the window will be a frame of light around his head. (For some reason I am thinking of this as set at the back yard of the house of one of the Great Whatsiteers, who posted pictures of her back yard a few months ago -- if I can remember where that post is, I'll add the image to this post.*) This passage shows almost perfectly the ideal form of how Saramago structures his thoughts. The first sentence (the first sentence of the chapter) draws in the whole story so far, has an elegant, quick rhythm. Then period -- a moment to collect your thoughts. And charge into the second sentence, the long glissando with ups and downs, repetitions, speeding up and slowing down, and delivering you to another quick chord.
 *(Aha! Found it.)
posted evening of December 5th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, December 4th, 2008
People cannot hide their secrets even though they may say they wish to keep them, a sudden shriek betrays them, the sudden softening of a vowel exposes them, any observer with experience of the human voice and human nature would have perceived at once that the girl at the inn is in love.
It seems to me like Saramago walks a very fine line in his fiction. It is the stories of his characters that carry the books, that make you interested in the outlandish plots he is weaving. And I don't mean to say that the plots are dull -- they aren't, they are wild to imagine and the complications he touches on bear a lot of thinking about -- but it is the characters that engage me as a reader, that make the books real. That was the real failing of Death with Interruptions, the reason it seemed so mechanical and flat was the lack of any fully realized characters in the first half of the book. I am glad to see The Stone Raft does not suffer from any such failing. The primary characters -- who we have known by name since the first chapter and are really starting to come to the fore in the fourth chapter -- are fully human almost from the first mention; and even many minor characters mentioned only in passing are rendered well enough to give a sense of their humanity.
posted evening of December 4th, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, December third, 2008
Saramago writes a quick note to say that a new book has started walking around in his head. ¡Uff!
posted evening of December third, 2008: Respond
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Monday, December first, 2008
My review of Saramago's Death with Interruptions is published in the December issue of Scott Esposito's literary journal, The Quarterly Conversation. Happy! I like having written an article and developed it to the point of publishability. Looking at it I see some minor quibbles with wording, edits I'd like to make; but it's done! It's also not a rave review -- fairly negative indeed -- which gives me a sort of perverse pleasure. Like I'm glad to see I was able to write something other than a glowing review of Saramago, like it validates my having a critical eye, that I'm able to point out the faults of this book, and lends a kind of credibility to any rave reviews I write in the future. Which, well, time to go read some new books and look for a subject!
posted afternoon of December first, 2008: Respond
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Sunday, November 30th, 2008
 Saramago writes today about the Livraria Cultura, a giant bookstore in the Conjunto Nacional shopping mall in São Paulo. (He and Pilar have been travelling in Brazil for the last few weeks and are now returning to the Canary Islands.)
The last image that we bring with us from Brazil is of a beautiful bookstore, a cathedral of books, modern, efficient, lovely. It is Livraria Cultura, in the Conjunto Nacional. It is a bookstore to be sure, a place for buying books, but it is also a place for enjoying the impressive spectacle of so many titles organized in such an attractive form, as if it were not a store, as if we were speaking of a work of art. The Livraria Cultura is a work of art. So: kind of funny and cute to think about old man Saramago digging the lovely new bookstore. Especially nice to think about that, when I've got in mind pictures of young Pamuk seeking out books in the antiquarian shops of Istanbul.
posted evening of November 30th, 2008: Respond
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The first chapter of The Stone Raft is pretty dreamy. Saramago has got me wondering though, with his silent dogs of Cerbère, whose barking will herald the end of the world -- this seems like a weird detail to invent, but I'm not finding any reference to it with Google. I want to know if this is a real folk tale or a creation of Saramago's. And a couple of things to do with translation: what is referenced by "And to all appearances definitive," at the beginning of the last sentence of the long paragraph on pp 2-3? There is no obvious subject for the modifier. And on page 1, "a dog with three heads and the above-mentioned named of Cerberus," ("named" clearly a typo for "name") makes me do a double-take -- the name Cerberus has not been mentioned, although the French form of that name is Cerbère, the same as (though etymologically unrelated to) the village where the dogs are barking. Is Saramago counting on the reader to know this? Or is the Portuguese form of Cerberus the same as the French?... This chapter consists mainly of introducing some characters by name and discussing what they were doing at a particular moment in time, the moment (as I know from reading the blurb on the back cover*) when Iberia breaks away from the continent of Europe. It is cute and whimsical -- but there are some passages that pull the reader below the surface to look at the underpinnings of the structure that this novel will build. José Anaiço is walking through a field at the fateful moment, when a flock of starlings rises into the sky and wheels around.
...birds don't have reasons, just instincts, often vague and involuntary as if they were not part of us, we spoke about instincts, but also about reasons and motives. So let us not ask José Anaiço who he is and what he does for a living, where he comes from and where he is going, whatever we find out about him, we shall only find out from him, and this description, this sketchy information will have to serve for Joana Carda and her elm branch, for Joaquim Sassa and the stone he threw into the sea, for Pedro Orce and the chair he got up from, life does not begin when people are born, if it were so, each day would be a day gained, life begins much later, and how often too late, not to mention those lives that have no sooner begun than they are over, which has led one poet to exclaim, Ah, who will write the history of what might have been.
(And what poet was that? Google gives no results except from this book. Perhaps an invention of Saramago's, perhaps something that has not yet been translated to English in this precise wording.)A beautiful passage a few pages before this one is the first point where Saramago addresses the audience, asks us to consider what we are doing when we sit down and start reading the story he has composed:
Writing is extremely difficult, it is an enormous responsibility, you need only think of the exhausting work involved in setting out events in chronological order, first this one, then that, or, if more conducive to the desired effect, today's event before yesterday's episode, and other no less risky acrobatics, presenting the past as if it were something new, or the present as a continuous process with neither beginning nor end, but, however hard writers might try, there is one feat they cannot achieve, and that is to put into writing, in the same tense, two events that have occurred simultaneously,... The people who come off best are the opera singers, each with his or her own part to sing, three, four, five, six in all among the tenors, basses, sopranos and baritones, all singing different words, the cynic mocking, the ingénue pleading, the gallant lover slow in coming to her aid, what interests the operagoer is the music, but the reader is not like this, he wants everything explained, syllable by syllable, one after the other, as they are shown here.
And I think oh gosh, this beautiful prose! It washes pleasantly over me but gets even better when I pause and examine it more closely. The rhythm of phrases and commas and repetitions and the power of the period.
* A mildly funny thing about the blurb: it was written in ’96 and says Saramago is "Winner of the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize" -- I'm used to thinking of Saramago as the winner of the prestigious Nobel prize for literature but of course he was not always that.
posted morning of November 30th, 2008: 2 responses
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Monday, November 17th, 2008
Sr. Saramago é 86 anos.
posted morning of November 17th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
I'll try my hand at translating another entry from Saramago's blog. (I am working from the Spanish translation.) Today he is writing about skepticism.
Some people say that skepticism is an infirmity of old age, an ailment of recent times, a sclerosis of the will. I don't dare to say this diagnosis is completely wrong, but I will say that it would be too comfortable to try to escape all difficulties through this door, as if the actual state of the world were a simple consequence of the old being old... The dreams of the young have never succeeded, at least until now, in making the world any better, and the rejuvenated bile of the old has never been enough to make it worse. Clearly the world -- poor world -- is not to blame for the evils afflicting it. That which we call the state of the world is the state of the unlucky humanity that we are, inevitably composed of old people who were young, young people who will be old, others who are not young and are not yet old. Whose fault? I hear it said that everyone bears the blame, that nobody can be presumed innocent, but I find that these sort of declarations, which appear to distribute justice evenly, are no more than spurious recurring mutations of the so-called original sin, which serve only to dilute and obscure, in an imaginary collective guilt, the responsibilities of the authentically culpable. The state, not of the world, but of life.I write this on a day in which there have arrived in Spain and in Italy hundreds of men, women and children in the fragile vessels which are used to reach the imagined paradise of a wealthy Europe. On the island of Hierro, in the Canaries, for example, there arrived such a boat, carrying inside it a dead child, and some castaways who declared that during the journey, twenty shipmates died and were cast into the sea in martyrdom... So do not speak to me of skepticism, please.
 Saramago links to Sara Prestianni's web site (in French) documenting migrants' stories, and to the NoBorders gallery on Flickr.
posted evening of November 11th, 2008: 2 responses
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Sunday, November second, 2008
Saramago posts today on the subject of politics. On the eve of the presidential elections in the United States, this brief observation does not seem out of place. Some time back, a Portuguese politician*, who at that time bore the responsibilities of prime minister, declared for whomever would like to hear it that politics is, in the first place, the art of not speaking the truth. The problem is that since he said that, there has not been, to my knowledge, a single politician, from the left to the right, who would correct him, who would say no sir, the truth is going to be the sole and ultimate objective of politics. For the simple reason that only in this manner can the two be saved: truth by politics, politics by the truth. (I'm pretty uncertain about the translation of the last sentence: I'm translating the preposition "con", which usually means "with", as "by", because I'm not sure how else to make sense of the sentence.** Please let me know in comments if you know better.)
* The politician in question is António Guterres, as near as I can tell (based on a reference in this editorial from Lusopresse). I am tentatively translating Saramago's "governo" as "prime minister", since that was Guterres' position.
** Update -- Never mind, now I looked at the Portuguese source of the post (which I had been reading in Spanish) -- the preposition translated as "con" is "pela", which is Portuguese for "by". This makes me more confident in my translation of the Spanish.
posted evening of November second, 2008: Respond
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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
Saramago posts today about current abuse of Judge Baltasar Garzón, asking "Do executioners have a soul?" It is a long post and beyond my limited translating ability; but it did get me to look up Garzón and find out what the context is. Garzón has ordered exhumation of a number of mass graves containing the bodies of people slaughtered by the fascist militias during the Spanish Civil War, and has furthermore declared that these massacres were crimes against humanity and thus prosecutable -- his conservative critics reply that the war crimes are covered by an amnesty that was declared "during the transition", which I think refers to the transition from Franco's dictatorship to democracy. I guess declaring something a crime against humanity would supercede a declared amnesty.
posted evening of October 22nd, 2008: Respond
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