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Monday, June 22nd, 2009
Alfonso Daniels of BBC prints an interview with Saramago today -- talking among other things about The Notebook, the blog-book which will be published this month, and a new novel which will be coming out in the fall, the one he mentioned at the end of last year.
posted morning of June 22nd, 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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