|
|
Monday, April 13th, 2009
 Last month, Saramago wrote a note about his dogs Camões and Pepe, and speculated that a Portuguese dog in the White House would be "an important diplomatic success, from which Portugal should work to get the maximum advantage in its bilateral relations with the United States..." -- today Bo is in the White House -- "the Great Danes and the hounds of Pomerania are dying of envy" -- but Saramago is critical:
In any case, allow me to say that I have a serious reservation that I must express: one cannot have any idea what a Portuguese Water Dog is, to put around his neck, to photograph him, a collar of flowers, as if he were a Hawai`ian dancer. At only six months of age, Bo is not yet fully aware of the respect that he owes the canine branch into which he had the luck to be born. ...
posted evening of April 13th, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Saramago's Notebook
|  |
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
Saramago posts today about how he came by his writing style. Interesting in the context of Edmond's calling it "Baroque":
This, what people call my style, arises from a great admiration for the language which was spoken in Portugal in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Let us look at the sermons of Father António Vieira and we'll see that in everything he wrote, there is a language filled with flavor and rhythm, as if this were not exterior to the language but rather something intrinsic.We do not know how people spoke in this epoch, but we know how they wrote. Language back then was an uninterrupted flow. Admitting that we could compare it to a river, we feel that it's like a great mass of water that slips along with weight, with splendor, with rhythm, including when at times, its course is interrupted by cataracts. Some days of vacation have arrived, a fine time for wading deep into these waters, into this language written by Father Vieira. I'm not advising anyone to do anything, just saying that I'm going to go swimming in the greatest prose and, for this reason, will be gone for a few days. Would anyone like to come along?
posted evening of April 7th, 2009: 1 response
➳ More posts about Readings
|  |
Friday, April third, 2009
Saramago writes today about the 1907 strike and massacre in Iquique, Chile, in which the Chilean army (under pressure from the government and from foreign mine-owners) murdered more than three thousand people, striking saltpetre miners and their families who had congregated at the school of Santa MarÃa to demand an 18¢ per day wage paid in currency rather than scrip. The event was memorialized in the 1970's when Luis Advis wrote his "Cantata de Santa MarÃa de Iquique" -- here it is performed by Quilapayun. Lyrics are transcribed here.
 (a year and a half later) This massacre is quite an important reference point in Hernán Rivera Letelier's work.
posted evening of April third, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Music
| |
Monday, March 23rd, 2009
By way of Saramago's Notebook,  I see that Mauricio Funes, of the FMLN, has been elected President of El Salvador; ARENA will leave office peacefully after 2 decades in power. This strikes me as fantastic news. In El PaÃs, MoÃses NaÃm speculates as to whether the new center of power in Latin America will be Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. It is natural to think an FMLN victory would give Chávez more influence; and Lula's recent meeting with Obama can be seen as the end of "a long period of disengagement between the US and Latin America."
Saramago notes that Mauricio Funes shares his surname with Funes the Memorious, and advises him:
...Thousands of men and women [have witnessed] at last, the birth of hope. Do not disappoint them, Mister President. The political history of South America breathes deception and frustration, whole peoples tired of lies and deceit; it is time, it is urgent that all that change.
posted morning of March 23rd, 2009: 1 response
➳ More posts about Politics
|  |
Sunday, March 8th, 2009
Saramago posts today about International Women's Day:
I've just been watching the TV news, demonstrations by women all over the world, and I'm asking myself one more time what disgraceful  world this is, where half the population still has to take to the streets to demand what should be obvious to everyone...
They say that my greatest characters are women, and I believe this is correct. At times I think the women whom I've described are suggestions which I myself would like to follow. Perhaps they are just models, perhaps they do not exist, but one thing I am sure of: with them, chaos could never have established itself in this world, because they have always known the scale of the human being.
I'm not completely sure about the translation in that last paragraph; it sounds pretty stilted the way I have written it. Possibly this is true of the original as well -- "chaos could never have established itself in this world" strikes me as a very strange thing to say, when the world is fundamentally chaotic -- and I don't see Saramago's women as imposers of order on natural chaos. This may be a clue into Saramago's understanding of the universe; I could see a reading of The Stone Raft in which the world is understood as an inherently ordered structure, and the characters (male and female, but particularly Joana) are keyed in to this natural order in opposition to humanity's chaos. Alternately I could be mistranslating, always a possibility.
posted evening of March 8th, 2009: Respond
➳ More posts about Translation
| |
Friday, March 6th, 2009
 I got in touch with the friend to whom I loaned Blindness; she sent me the authorized translation of the epigraph I've been wondering about for the past few days.
If you can see, look.
If you can look, observe. This is just right -- "If you can see" makes much better sense as an opening phrase than "If you can look"; and then on the second line, "If you can look" reads alright because you already have the structure set up to understand it in.
Saramago attributes this line to the "Book of Exhortations", which if I'm understanding right is Deuteronomy. It would be interesting to find out where it is in that book and see how e.g. the King James translation renders it. ...Looking further, it seems like "Book of Exhortations" is a pretty generic term -- it can refer to a lot of different prophetic writings. I wonder what Saramago's source for this line is. Update: Further investigation of the source here.
posted morning of March 6th, 2009: 2 responses
➳ More posts about Blindness
| |
Thursday, March 5th, 2009
Saramago takes another look at the epigraph, and makes me understand that I had been misreading it in a key way:
In a conversation yesterday with Luis Vázquez, closest of friends and healer of my ailments, we're talking about the film by Fernando Meirelles, just premiered in Madrid, even though we could not be in attendance, Pilar and I, as we intended to be, for a sudden bout of chills obligated me to retire to my chamber, or confined me to bed, in the elegant phrasing in use not so long ago. The conversation soon turned to the public's reactions during the exhibition and afterwards, highly positive according to Luis and to other trustworthy witnesses... We moved from there, naturally, to talking about the book and Luis asked me if we could look over the epigraph which opens it ("Si puedes mirar, ve, si puedes ver, repara"), for in his opinion, the action of seeing [ver] encompasses the action of looking [mirar], and therefore, the reference to looking could be omitted without bias to the meaning of the phrase. I could not come up with a reason to give him, but I thought that I should have other reasons to consider, for example, the fact that the process of vision occurs three stages, successive but in some manner autonomous, which can be stepped through as follows: one can look and not see, one can see and not observe, according to the degree of attention which we pay to each of these actions. We know the reaction of a person who, having just checked his wristwatch, returns to check it when, at that moment, somebody asks him the time. That was when light flooded into my head concerning the origin of the famous epigraph. When I was small, the word "observe", always supposing I already knew it, was not for me an object of primary importance until one day an uncle of mine (I believe that it is Francisco Dinis of whom I am speaking in this brief memoir) called my attention to a certain way of looking that bulls have, which almost always, he then demonstrated, is accompanied by a certain way of raising the head. My uncle said: "He has looked at you, when he looked at you, he saw you, and now it is different, he is something else, he is observing." This is what I told Luis, which immediately won the argument for me, not so much, I suppose, because it convinced him, but because the memory made him remember a similar situation. A bull looked at him as well, and again this movement of the head, again this looking which was not simply seeing, but observation. We were at last in agreement.
So, reparar is not "fix" as I had been thinking, but "observe" or "contemplate". The dictionary entry confirms that the word can be used in this sense. I'm still (like Luis) a bit dissatisfied with the relationship between mirar and ver in the first part of the epigraph.
posted evening of March 5th, 2009: 1 response
➳ More posts about Writing Projects
| |
Tuesday, March third, 2009
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 March third, 2009: 4 responses
➳ More posts about Projects
| |
Sunday, March first, 2009
Saramago recommends as "one of the most skilled and original" of Portugal's new generation of novelists, Gonçalo M. Tavares. Doesn't look like Sr. Tavares has any works published in English yet (this might be wrong -- his translations page lists rights for most of his works having already been bought for "English in India only" -- but it's not clear that those translations have been published) but definitely someone to keep an eye out for. When he received the Saramago Prize in 2005, Saramago said "Jerusalém is a great book, and truly deserves a place among the great works of Western literature. Gonçalo M. Tavares has no right to be writing so well at the age of 35. One feels like punching him!"
posted evening of March first, 2009: 5 responses
| |
Thursday, February 19th, 2009
Saramago writes today about Paco Ibáñez, and links to his web site --
Tomorrow, Saturday, Paco Ibáñez will sing at Argelès-sur-mer, on the coast of Provence, in homage to the memory of the Spanish republicans, among others his father, who there suffered torments, humiliations, evil treatment of all kinds, in the concentration camp erected by the French authorities.
Argelès-sur-mer is a village very close to the Pyrenees (about 10 miles north of Cerbère); in the final years of the Spanish Civil War, tens of thousands of republicans were interned there.
posted evening of February 19th, 2009: Respond
| Previous posts about José Saramago
Archives  | |
|
Drop me a line! or, sign my Guestbook.
•
Check out Ellen's writing at Patch.com.
| |
