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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Sunday, May 24th, 2009
Saramago  has made his entry into animation! Juan Pablo Etcheverry animated "A flor máis grande do mundo" based on Saramago's book A maior flor do mundo, which doesn't seem to be in translation -- I had never heard of it before I saw Saramago's post about the cartoon just now. It is his only children's book, written in the 70's -- oops; not reading closely. The idea is from the 70's but the book was not written until 2000.
posted evening of May 24th, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, June second, 2009
 A statue of José Saramago has been erected in his childhood home, the small town of Azinhaga in Ribatejo, Portugal. Saramago was in Azinhaga this weekend for the unveiling of the statue; he writes:
There I am, sitting in the middle of the plaza, with a book in my hand, looking at the people passing by. They made me a little bigger than life-size, I suppose to make me look better. I don't know for how many years I will be there. I have always said that the destiny of statues is to be continually removed, but in this case, I like to imagine that they will leave me in peace, someone who in peace has returned twofold to his land, as a person and, starting now, as bronze also. Even if my imagination has at times caused me to fall into such absurd deliria, I never dared to think that they would one day erect a statue of me in the land where I was born. What have I done, that this might occur? I wrote some few books, I carried with me, for all the world, the name of Azinhaga, and more than anything I never forgot those who bore me and reared me: my grandparents and my parents. I spoke of them in Stockholm before an illustrious audience and was understood. That which we see as a tree is just a part of it, doubtless important, which would be nothing without its roots. Mine, the biological ones, are named Josefa and Jerónimo, José and Piedade, but there are others who are places, Casalinho and Divisões, Cabo das Casas and Almonda, Tajo and Rabo dos Cágados, and also others named olive, weeping willow, poplar and walnut, rafts sailing on the river, fig trees laden with fruit, pigs raised on the pasture, and some, still sucklings, sleeping in the bed with my grandparents so they would not freeze to death. Of all this I was made, all of this entered into the composition of the bronze into which they have transformed me. But look, it was no spontaneous generation. Without the willpower, strength and tenacity of Victor Guia and José Miguel Correia Noras, the statue would not be there. It is with the deepest gratitude that I give them here my embrace, extended to all the people of Azinhaga, into whose care I deliver this other child which is me.
posted evening of June second, 2009: Respond
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Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
Saramago is taking a few days off to go hiking:
Readers will recall that the names of two villages which the expedition passed through on its way to Figueira de Castelo Rodrigo were never mentioned by the narrator of the story.
These villages, as far as they were described, were simply invented to fill a need of the fiction and had no real-world correspondents. Thus it will appear appalling to lovers of historical ricor, that Salomón is preparing himself today for a journey that, while not being literally the one he took, surely could have been it, even if of that one there remains no precise record. Life carries many coincidences in her pockets and one can not exclude the possibility that, in some one or another case, the lyrics might fit with the music. It's certain that our story doesn't say Salomón crossed the lands of Castelo Novo, Sortelha or Cidadelhe, but nonetheless it is impossible to say that that didn't happen. We are making use of this tautology, we the José Saramago Foundation, to think up and organize a journey which will begin today in Belén*, in front of the monastery of the Jerónimos and which will bring us to the frontier, up there, where the Austrian cuirassiers wanted to transport the elephant to the archduke. But the itinerary is arbitrary, the reader will protest, but we prefer, if you will permit us, to consider it one of the innumerable possible routes. We will hike that way two days and we will tell the story of what happens to us. Who is coming? The Foundation will be there in full, a couple of staunch friends of Salomón are coming along, Portuguese and Spanish journalists, all good people. Stay well. Until we come back, farewell, farewell.
(I am extremely impressed by a man of his advanced years going off for a multi-day hike. Perhaps he should take as a nickname,
"Father William".)
* This is a kind of interesting question: should this be rendered as Belén or as Bethlehem? He is talking about Lisbon -- unless there is a neighborhood in Lisbon called Belén -- I'm not sure quite what he is doing by referring to it as Belén. It's probably something to do with Bethlehem being a generic starting point, a birthplace. Or it might have something to do with the novel, which I'm anxiously awaiting. Here are some pictures of the monastery they are starting from. ...Aw, forget all that -- a little more research reveals that adjacent to the monastery is a structure called "the Tower of Bethlehem," and the district around there is called Belém. That's all he meant by it. Probably the correct/best way of rendering this would be Belém, since that's what locals would call the neighborhood.
posted evening of June 16th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, June 21st, 2009
The proof-reader said, Yes, this symbol is called deleatur, we use it when we need to supress and erase, the word speaks for itself, and serves both for separate letters and complete words, it reminds me of a snake that changes its mind just as it is about to bite its tail, Well observed, Sir, truly, for however much we may cling to life, even a snake would hesitate before eternity...
What a great opening sentence! This is the beginning of The History of the Siege of Lisbon -- actually the opening sentence lasts for several pages, a conversation between a historian and his proof-reader. Sweet. (I never knew what dele stood for -- there is no deleatur in Unicode, but ₰ is the pfennigzeichen, which is the identical character.)
posted evening of June 21st, 2009: 4 responses
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