---------------------------------------------------------------------------
**** http://www.GOANET.org ****
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
5th Annual Konkan Fruit Fest
Promenade, D B Bandodkar Road, Panaji, Goa
16-18, May 2008
http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/2008-May/073789.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
JOSE SARAMAGO - PROPHET OF OUR TIMES
-Brian Mendonça
Portuguese writer José Saramago is considered today one of the most outstanding
writers in the world. Not only for his commitment to his art but also because
of his espousal of social causes and of the amelioration of the condition of
the human being in this world.
Awarded the Nobel prize for Literature the first writer in Portuguese to do
so -- Saramago has been undeterred by fame or fortune and remains the person he
always was. He says -I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel
Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have
the same friends.
This nonchalance was however not shared by his Portuguese editor Zeferino
Coelho. When the Nobel announcement came in October 1998 Saramago was just
about to board a plane out of Germany after the Frankfurt Book Fair. With his
characteristic wryness he said, I was not born for all this glory. Zeferino
however replied brightly You may not have been made for this glory, but I
was! Since then Saramagos work has been translated widely from the Portuguese
into English and several other languages giving him a globalized following.
Born in 1922 in the village of Azinhaga in the province of Ribatejo about 60
miles north-east of Lisbon, Saramago had to abandon his high-school studies to
earn a living as a mechanic. But he never forgot his land, his roots, nor,
sometimes on hot summer nights, after supper, sleeping under the fig tree with
his grandfather. With sleep delayed, night was peopled with the stories . . .
my grandfather told: legends, apparitions, terrors, unique episodes, old
deaths, scuffles with sticks and stones, the words of our forefathers, an
untiring rumour of memories that would keep me awake while at the same time
gently lulling me.
In his Nobel lecture he says, If my grandfather had been a rich landowner and
not an illiterate pig breeder, I wouldnt be the man I am today. If I could
choose my own background even with the cold of the winters, the heat of the
summers, sometimes going hungry I wouldnt change a thing.
It is difficult to define Saramagos work - because he is so polyvalent,
playful and creative. He has published plays, short stories, novels, poems,
libretti, diaries, and travelogues. Almost always, the backdrop is Portugal.
Saramagos first book was a collection of poems Os Poemas Possiveis / Possible
Poems (1966) when he was 44. His first novel was published 11 years later. In
this novel, Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia /Manual of Painting and Calligraphy
(1977) he spans the canvas of a painter as well as a writer, unfolding the
genesis of art.
Italian composer Azio Corghi based his opera Blimunda on Saramagos novel
Memorial do Convento / Baltasar and Blimunda (1982). With sounds from Domenico
Scarlattis harpsichord, the story is about three Portuguese fools from the
18th century in a time and country where superstition and the fires of the
Inquisition flourished.
In O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis / The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
(1984) he resurrects the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) and uses
the aliases of Pessoa to comment on historical events of the time, viz.
Francos crushing of Spains Republican government, Mussolinis conquest of
Abyssinia, Hitlers invasion of Czechoslovakia all this while under the
dictatorship of Antonio Salazar in Portugal, a regime which lasted 48 years
since 1926.
Portugals exclusion from Europe is the subject of Saramagos next novel A
Jaganda de Pedra / A Stone Raft (1986). A series of supernatural events results
in the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) breaking free so that it starts
to float into the Atlantic initially heading for the Azores. Saramago is not
bound by traditional conventions of the novel as one can see, The novel is not
so much a literary genre, he says, but a literary space, like a sea filled by
many rivers.
Saramagos writing is sometimes referred to as magic realism. This is because
he has combined in his work, myths, the history of Portugal and a surrealistic
imagination. Consider his delightfully bizarre opening of Viagem a Portugal /
Journey to Portugal (1990). Almost in the mock-heroic vein of Cervantes Don
Quixote, Saramago stands exactly on the Spanish-Portuguese border over the
river Douro, to address the fish beneath, and he, being atheist asks for
their blessings for his travels:
'This was the first traveler ever to pull up in his car, with the engine
already in Portugal but the petrol tank still in Spain . . . Then across the
deep dark waters . . . the travelers voice could be heard preaching to the
fish in the river:
"Gather round, fishes, those of you to the right still in the River Douro and
those of you to the left in the River Duero, come closer all of you and advise
me what language you speak when you cross the watery frontiers beneath, and
whether down there you also produce passports and visas as you enter and
depart"
The subtitle of the novel Journey to Portugal is A Pursuit of Portugals
History and Culture. It was nevertheless a curious turn of fate that forced
Saramago to leave Portugal in protest in 1992 and settle in the Canary Islands
of Spain. This when the Portuguese government, apparently under pressure from
the Catholic Church, scuttled attempts to nominate his controversial novel The
Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991) for a European literary prize. Some
feel his exile has made him less relevant, but to others he is now the voice of
a more universal conscience.
He does have a foothold in Portugal, so to speak -- an apartment lined with the
books he has written -- in Lisbon, which he visits occasionally with his
Spanish wife, and official Spanish translator, Pilar del Rio. 30 years younger
than Saramago they married in 1988. Ilda Reis was his first wife. Their only
child, Violante, was born in 1947.
Saramago has always been in the forefront of political struggles, be it Spain,
Portugal or Latin America. I cant imagine myself outside any kind of social
or political involvement he said. A member of Portugals communist Party
since 1969, he has been an impassioned espouser of the Palestinian cause and
sees eye to eye with the views of Venezulean President Hugo Chavez.
In a speech in Paris entitled For Whom the Bell Tolls (2002) he castigated
the bureaucratised trade unionism which he said is largely responsible for
the social torpor that has accompanied economic globalisation. Unless we
intervene in time, he continued, and that time is now the cat of economic
globalisation will inevitably devour the mouse of human rights. Saramago
believes, As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become
involved its the citizen who changes things. Even some of his poetry
espouses this cause, inspite of a streak of the surreal:
POEMA A BOCA FECHADA
Não direi:
Que o silêncio me sufoca- e amordaça.
Calado estou, calado ficarei,
Pois que a língua que falo é de outra raça.
Palavras consumidas se acumulam,
Se represam, cisterna de águas mortas,
Ácidas mágoas em limos transformadas,
Vaza de fundo em que há raízes tortas.
Não direi:
Que nem sequer o esforço de as dizer merecem,
Palavras que não digam quanto sei
Neste retiro em que me não conhecem.
Nem só lodos se arrastam, nem só lamas,
Nem só animais bóiam, mortos, medos,
Túrgidos frutos em cachos se entrelaçam
No negro poço de onde sobem dedos.
Só direi,
Crispadamente recolhido e mudo,
Que quem se cala quando me calei
Não poderá morrer sem dizer tudo.
[POEM TO THE SHUT MOUTH
I shall not say:
That the silence suffocates me -- and gags.
Silent I am, silent I shall be
Because the language I speak is of another kind.
Words consumed, accumulate,
They stagnate, a cistern of dead waters,
Acid anguish turns to lime
Leaks below where crooked roots lie.
I shall not say:
That it deserves the effort to name them,
Words that do not say how much I know
In this retreat where no one knows me.
Not only mud is dragged, also sludge
Not only animals float, dead, fears
Turgid fruits in branches entwine themselves
In the dark well where fingers climb.
I shall only say
Crisply, secluded and mute
that whoever keeps silent when I was silent
Cannot die without saying everything.]
(Translated from the original Portuguese by Blanche Mendonça)
Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles has made a film of Saramagos novel
Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira / Blindness (1995). An epidemic of blindness starts to
spread in a nameless city. People are forced to rely on each other when their
natural faculties have left them. The ensuing experience of quarantine and the
subsequent degradation leads the reader to a concept of blindness, allegorical,
if not misleading.
This slow elliptical style of Saramagos narrative sucks the reader into the
vortex of the novel. It demands much from the reader. Long sentences often with
no punctuation or paragraphs stretch into pages. The process of the making of
meaning is as important as where the narrative leads us. This
self-referentiality makes the novels many-layered, and virtually an exercise in
epistemology or the theory of knowledge. In both form and content this is a
master at work.
In a weekend interview last year Saramago (84) angered the Portuguese by
predicting that Portugal would become Spains 18th semi-autonomous region.
There was, he felt, everything to gain from a territorial, administrative and
structural integration. Portuguese poet and Socialist Party founder Manuel
Alegre said Saramago had won the 1998 Nobel Prize by writing in the Portuguese
language which is part of our soul and will never be integrated into Spain.
The issue has been resolved thanks to the European Union, wrote Pedro on a
Spanish website.
The Portuguese government is now considering a standardization of the
Portuguese language which would require hundreds of words to be spelled the
simpler Brazilian way. The debate has been passionate between the erstwhile
colonizer (Portugal) and the erstwhile colonized (Brazil), but Saramago (85)
nimbly commented We have to get over this idea that we own the language. The
language is owned by those who speak it, for better or for worse. For a person
who preached the sermon of the fishes on the river Douro this was
unremarkably astute.
At 84 Saramago was planning his next novel. Maybe it is my last book he had
said. When I wrote Pequenas Memorias (2006) I wondered if the cycle was now
complete. I had for the first time in my life a sense of finitude, and it was
not a pleasant feeling. Everything seemed little, insifignicant. Im 84. I
could perhaps live another three, four years. The worst that death has is that
you were here and now you are not. And later I cant complain. The things you
think are a big deal are not so big. Ive won the Nobel prize. And so?
In autobiographical mode, in his last novel Pequenas Memorias / Little Memories
Saramago returns to his childhood. I have written memoirs of my youth, he
says, and I felt young as I was writing them; I wanted readers to know where
the man I am today came from. So, I focused on the years from four to fifteen.
Almost 10 years before that Saramago, in his Nobel Laureate speech recalled his
childhood and the final moments with his grandmother and grandfather who were
dying. It used to be so cold that they used to sleep with the piglets to keep
them warm. It is a world which redeemed itself simply because in it lived
people who could sleep with piglets as if they were their own children, people
who were sorry to leave life just because the world was beautiful; and this
Jeronimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to
arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by
one, embracing them and crying because he wouldnt see them again.
Throughout his life Saramago looked to see that vision of humanity in the
world. There were many times when he had to open his mouth against what he felt
was wrong. It could have been a still small voice in the wilderness but it is
the voice of the prophet for our times who with parables sustained by
imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to
apprehend an elusory reality (Nobel Prize citation).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Recorded at studios of All India Radio, New Delhi on 15 May 2008 for broadcast
on 21 May 2008 on national programme of talks on AIRs Rajdhani Channel, 450.5
MW / 666 Khz. Also uploaded with photos on www.lastbustovasco.blogspot.com
