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Saturday, February 12th, 2011
It might seem peculiar to go to Saramago seeking reverence -- he is rather famously atheistic, maybe even intemperately so; he was notoriously denounced by the Catholic church heirarchy after publication of his final novel, CaÃn, when he said humanity would be better off without the Holy Bible. (And who am I, no Christian myself, to be seeking or discussing reverence? We'll leave that question by the side for now.) But: I found The Gospel According to Jesus Christ to be a superlatively reverent book, that quality was one of my favorite things about the book; and I am hoping as I start CaÃn that it will share that quality.
Things are looking a little dodgy starting with the epigraph -- Saramago quotes chapter 11, verse 4 of St. Paul's letter to the Hebrews, and attributes it to the Libro de los disparates, roughly the "Book of Nonsense". I agree with Rafael RodrÃguez Hernández that this is a lousy opening: it seems to me like Saramago ought to treat his source text with more respect...
Be that as it may, I'm enjoying the first few chapters. Eve and Adam are coming through nicely as characters, Saramago seems really to be interested in their humanity and their hardships. It looks like it will be a fun game to figure out which of Saramago's details are canonical and which are not -- for instance he has only a single Cherub guarding the gates of Eden, whom he identifies as Azael*; tradition assigns this role to two angels, Metatron and Melchisadec. But I will probably spend less time on this kind of thing as I get deeper into the story. Eve's flirtation with and implicit seduction of Azael is very strongly non-canonical/blasphemous, but it is rendered so lovingly that I am going to go along with it -- it is one of the high points of the first few chapters.
 *Gustav Davidson's Dictionary of Angels identifies Azael as "one of 2 fallen angels (Aza is the other) who cohabited with Naamah, Lamech's daughter, and sired the sedim, Assyrian guardian spirits." Cool! I knew vaguely (based on Genesis 6:1-2) that there was angel-human cohabitation in the Abrahamic tradition but did not have any specifics.
posted afternoon of February 12th, 2011: Respond
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Monday, December 27th, 2010
Teresa's Christmas post is very much worth checking out: Luke 2, 1-14 in a plethora of different translations. Read about Mary's revelation in Dutch, Portuguese, Lowland Scots, Greek, Slavonic, various Englishes...
posted afternoon of December 27th, 2010: 1 response
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Monday, November 22nd, 2010
1Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, 2 where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.
3 The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread."
4 Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Man shall not live on bread alone.'"
-- Luke 4 (NIV, 2010)
After he had walked he knew not how many hours, thirst and weariness were defeating him. He thought to himself that his destination could not be so far away now. He felt he was lost. The only thing that he could do was to let himself fall onto the sand. He sat in a lotus position, his little paper sack between his legs. As always in such difficult emotional times he commenced to pick his nose. He looked about himself: it was as if he were in the dead center of a circle composed of the horizon on all sides, a circle as if it had been traced by some celestial hand, perfect, round, endless. The silence, the solitude were of such divine purity, they moved him, they were tangible. He removed his sandals. He wanted to take communion with the land.
He sat there, listening, for a long time.
Evening's flame lit the horizon. Red. Impressive. Overwhelming. It made him think of dusk, of Golgotha. His surroundings swam before his eyes into a great ring of fire. "The fiery ring of a lion-tamer," he said. He sensed suddenly, and with divine clarity, that the lion-tamer was God; he, the lion, tamed. That his master was ordering him to jump. Yes; to jump. Highest glory to the Eternal Father!
He jumped.
He closed his eyes and jumped.
-- The art of resurrection ch. 4
The art of resurrection is reminding me a bit of reading The Gospel according to Jesus Christ (and I ought to track down Saramago's take on the temptation in the desert passage...) in the degree of sympathy each author expresses for his imperfect messiah.
 Update: ...And also SFAM is getting in on the Messianic action.
posted evening of November 22nd, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, January third, 2010
Saramago's telling of the trek Joseph and Mary must make from Nazareth down to Bethlehem in the ninth month of Mary's pregnancy, is utterly gripping and fascinating. I had never thought much about this aspect of the Christmas story; Google Maps gives the distance they had to travel as either 155 km (taking the westward route) or 166 km (taking the eastward route) -- perhaps 2000 years ago, on donkey and foot rather than in a car, it would have been shorter to go due south, not sure what the geography is like there. This is a long way to be forced to travel in service of paying taxes to an occupying power! The four canonical gospels do not spend much time on it, I wonder if there is another biblical source for this. I'm moderately surprised to find this book (so far, at any rate) not strongly hostile to religion; prayer in particular is being treated as a vital source of comfort to the impoverished Nazarenes. There is a lot of hostility towards the villagers' patriarchal misogyny apparent, and this misogyny is encoded in much of the prayer; but it isn't seeming to me like this translates directly to an anti-religion stance. A little bit of beauty from the third night of the trek, as the travellers take refuge in a caravansary in Ramah:
That night there was no conversation, no prayers or stories around the fire, as if the proximity of Jerusalem demanded respectful silence, each man searching his heart and asking, Who is this person who resembles me yet whom I fail to recognize. This is not what they actually said, for people do not start talking to themselves like that, nor was this even in their conscious thoughts, but there can be no doubt that as we sit staring into the flames of a camp fire, our silence can be expressed only with words like these, which say everything. From where he sat, Joseph could see Mary in profile against the light of the fire. Its reddish reflection softly lit one side of her face, tracing her features in chiaroscuro, and he began to realize, with surprise, that Mary was an attractive woman, if one could say this of a person with such a childlike expression. Of course her body was swollen now, yet he could see the agile, graceful figure she would soon regain once their child was born. Without warning, as if his flesh was rebelling after all these months of enforced chastity, a wave of desire surged through his blood and left him dizzy.
posted morning of January third, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
 Excellent news today -- R. Crumb has announced the completion of his new book, which is a retelling of Genesis. I can't imagine anything better than R. Crumb's take on Genesis, unless maybe it were R. Crumb's take on Samuel -- since he has not done that yet this will surely suffice.
Speaking of the Old Testament, this Passover Haggadah is just hilarious.
 Crumb has been working on this for a long time: he talks about it in this four-year-old Time interview, which has a sample page:
A couple of other sketches from the book are available at on-panel.com and at Yale University Press.Crumb tells the NY Times, "It's lurid. Full of all kinds of crazy, weird things that will really surprise people."
posted evening of March 31st, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, January third, 2009
Genesis 12: 5 Abram Tomó a Sarai su mujer, a Lot su sobrino y todos los bienes que HabÃan acumulado y a las personas que HabÃan adquirido en Harán; y partieron hacia la tierra de Canaán. Después llegaron a la tierra de Canaán,
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y Abram Atravesó aquella tierra hasta la encina de Moré, en las inmediaciones de Siquem. Los cananeos estaban entonces en la tierra.
Interesting -- the KJV translation has "the plain of Moreh" at the text I've emphasized; RSV has "the oak of Moreh". But this Spanish translation is calling it "encina", which means "holm oak", more specific than either of these. Blue Letter Bible's concordance doesn't show "holm oak" occurring in any English translation. Now I'm wondering what the source term is -- is encina a common tree in Spain as oak is in England, and the reference is just to a generic tree?I remember in The Stone Raft there were a couple of references to "holm oak", which I skipped over without really getting. I think Joana Carda's stick was described as being witch-hazel rather than "even" holm oak; I took this vaguely to be a way of minimizing how strong of a wood it was. Possibly a reference to this passage was intended here, though if the tree is common in Spain and Portugal, probably not.
 A bit wrong -- "Holm oak" appears four times in The Stone Raft; the one I was thinking of is on p. 106: Joana Carda responded with silence, after all, there is no law to prohibit guests from taking even a branch of holm oak into their room, much less a thin little stick, not even two meters long... At the beginning of the book there is a suggestion that Joana's branch was elm, or possibly wych-elm.
posted morning of January third, 2009: 2 responses
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Friday, January second, 2009
The last time I read Genesis must be about ten years ago now, around the time I read the books of Samuel. This time around I am a bit surprised by how much is happening in so little space -- my memory is of quite a bit more filler material like patrilineages -- and by how familiar I am with the material. (This familiarity is a very good thing as I'm reading the text in Spanish -- knowing the story is most helpful for understanding the words.) I am finding it much easier to read attentively when the words are foreign to my ears. My method has been to read verse by verse and chapter by chapter: read the line for its sense, then look up any words I'm unfamiliar with, then go back and read it over until I really understand it. At the end of the chapter, go back and reread until I've got the whole thing well in hand. I'm figuring I'll keep with this for another week or two, probably til the end of Genesis, and then start on some Spanish text I'm more interested in for itself. Cien Años de Soledad? That might be a good pick -- I'm pretty familiar with it in translation and I don't remember the grammatical constructions being difficult. Every time I look at the Garden of Eden story I have a similar reaction, which is to feel outraged, initially, at the way Adam and Eve are treated, angry at Jehovah; and then to remember this is a parable created by humans to describe and justify their position in the world; and to go off on a tangent trying to figure out what made them want to view the world this way.* (Also, "Damn! If only they would have eaten from the other tree first!")
* (Step 4 in this dialectic is, Remember that this worldview is my own cultural heritage, and feel disatisfied.)
posted afternoon of January second, 2009: Respond
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