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| José Saramago | |
|---|---|
| File:Josesaramago.jpg | |
| Occupation | Playwright, novelist |
| Nationality | Portuguese |
| Period | 1947–2010 |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Literature 1998 |
| Spouse | Pilar del Rio (m. 2007) |
| Website | |
| http://www.josesaramago.org/saramago/ | |
José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE (Portuguese pronunciation: [ʒuˈzɛ sɐɾɐˈmaɣu]; (16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Nobel-laureate Portuguese novelist, playwright and journalist. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor.
Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. His books have been translated into 25 languages. He founded the National Front for the Defence of Culture (Lisbon, 1992) with Freitas-Magalhães and others. In 1992, the Portuguese government, under Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva, ordered the removal of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from the European Literary Prize's shortlist, claiming the work was religiously offensive. Saramago complained of censorship and moved to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain, where he resided until his death.
An outspoken proponent of libertarian communism, Saramago politically antagonized some, including the Catholic Church.
He was married to Spanish journalist Pilar del Rio, and had a daughter from a previous marriage.
Early and middle life
Saramago was born in 1922 into a family of landless peasants in Azinhaga, Portugal, a small village in the province of Ribatejo some hundred kilometers northeast of Lisbon. His parents were José de Sousa and Maria de Piedade. "Saramago", a wild herbaceous plant known in English as the wild radish, was his father's family's nickname, and was accidentally incorporated into his name upon registration of his birth. In 1924, Saramago's family moved to Lisbon, where his father started working as a policeman. A few months after the family moved to the capital, his brother Francisco, older by two years, died. He spent vacations with his grandparents in Azinhaga. When his grandfather suffered a stroke and was to be taken to Lisbon for treatment, Saramago recalled, "He went into the yard of his house, where there were a few trees, fig trees, olive trees. And he went one by one, embracing the trees and crying, saying good-bye to them because he knew he would not return. To see this, to live this, if that doesn't mark you for the rest of your life," Saramago said, "you have no feeling." Although Saramago was a good pupil, his parents were unable to afford to keep him in grammar school, and instead moved him to a technical school at age 12. After graduating, he worked as a car mechanic for two years. Later he worked as a translator, then as a journalist. He was assistant editor of the newspaper Diário de Notícias, a position he had to leave after the political events in 1975. This is the darkest period of his life. While assistant editor, he fired 24 journalists that demanded more pluralism in the editorial line of the Diário de Notícias.
After a period of working as a translator he was able to support himself as a writer. Saramago married Ilda Reis in 1944. Their only child, Violante, was born in 1947. From 1988 until his death in June 2010 Saramago was married to the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río, who is the official translator of his books into Spanish.
Later life and international acclaim
José Saramago didn't achieve widespread recognition and acclaim until he was in his mid-fifties, when his publication of Baltasar and Blimunda brought him to the attention of an international readership. This novel won the Portuguese PEN Club Award.
He became a member of the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969 and remained so until the end of his life. Saramago was also an atheist and self-described pessimist. His views have aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Members of the country's Catholic community were outraged by Saramago's representation of Jesus as a fallible human being. Portugal's conservative government would not allow Saramago's work to compete for the European Literary Prize, arguing that it offended the Catholic community. As a result, Saramago and his wife moved to Lanzarote, an island in the Spanish Canaries.
Saramago learned he was to be made a Nobel Laureate in October 1998 when he was about to fly to Germany ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair. This came as a surprise to him and his Portuguese editor, Zeferino Coelho, recalled: "When he won the Nobel, Saramago said to me, 'I was not born for all this glory.' I told him, 'You may not have been made for this glory, but I was!'". He used his Nobel lecture to call his grandfather Jerónimo "the wisest man ever knew". Despite the award, though, he remained a divisive character in Portugal, both criticised and praised.
Literary themes
Saramago's novels often deal with fantastic scenarios, such as that in his 1986 novel The Stone Raft, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the rest of Europe and sails around the Atlantic Ocean. In his 1995 novel Blindness, an entire unnamed country is stricken with a mysterious plague of "white blindness". In his 1984 novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (which won the PEN Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Award), Fernando Pessoa's heteronym survives for a year after the poet himself dies. Additionally, his novel Death with Interruptions (also translated as Death at Intervals) revolves around a country in which nobody dies over the course of seven months beginning on New Year's Day, and how the country reacts to the spiritual and political implications of the event.
Using such imaginative themes, Saramago addresses the most serious of subject matters with empathy for the human condition and for the isolation of contemporary urban life. His characters struggle with their need to connect with one another, form relations and bond as a community; and also with their need for individuality, and to find meaning and dignity outside of political and economic structures.
Style
Saramago's experimental style often features long sentences, at times more than a page long. He uses periods sparingly, choosing instead a loose flow of clauses joined by commas. Many of his paragraphs extend for pages without pausing for dialogue, which Saramago chooses not to delimit by quotation marks; when the speaker changes, Saramago capitalizes the first letter of the new speaker's clause. His works often refer to his other works. In his novel Blindness, Saramago completely abandons the use of proper nouns instead choosing to refer to characters simply by some unique characteristic, an example of his use of style to enhance the recurring themes of identity and meaning found throughout his work.
Political views
Saramago was a proponent of libertarian communism, and a member of the Communist Party of Portugal. As a member of his PCP he stood for the 1989 Lisbon Local election in the list of the Coalition "For Lisbon" and was elected Aldermen and presiding officer of the Municipal Assembly of Lisbon. Saramago was also a candidate of the Democratic Unity Coalition to the European Parliament in all the elections from 1989 to 2009, usually in positions with no possibility of being elected. Saramago was a critic of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.
During a visit to Ramallah in March 2002, Saramago compared the blockaded city to the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Holocaust survivors and intellectuals, including some who were themselves highly critical of Israel, condemned Saramago's statement as false and antisemitic. The statement was included in a study on antisemitism commissioned by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, but not released by the European Union, and in a report by the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University. The former study categorized the statement as verbal aggression/hate speech, and the latter as demonization of the Jews and Israel.
On the same occasion, Saramago opined that "the Jews are unworthy of any more sympathy for their sufferings during the second World War". The Anti Defamation League called the statement antisemitic. Saramago later told writer Ilan Stavans that he was not an antisemite. He was a supporter of Palestinians and Western Sahara.
During a speech in Brazil on October 13, 2003, Saramago stated, with regard to the Jews that “Living under the shadows of the Holocaust and expecting to be forgiven for anything they do on behalf of what they have suffered seems abusive to me. They didn’t learn anything from the suffering of their parents and grandparents.
During the 2006 Lebanon War, Saramago signed a statement together with Tariq Ali, John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, Naomi Klein, Harold Pinter, Arundhati Roy and Howard Zinn, condemning what they characterized as "a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation".
Death and funeral
Saramago died on 18 June 2010, aged 87, having spent the last few years of his life living in Lanzarote, Spain. He was reported to have consumed breakfast and chattered with his wife for a time before ill health overcame him and killed him. The Guardian described him as "the finest Portuguese writer of his generation", while Fernanda Eberstadt of The New York Times said he was "known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction". Saramago's translator, Margaret Jull Costa, paid tribute to him, describing his "wonderful imagination" and calling him "the greatest contemporary Portuguese writer". Saramago had continued his writing until his death. His most recent publication, Cain, was published in 2009, with an English translation expected in late 2010. Saramago had suffered from pneumonia a year before his death. Having been thought to have made a full recovery, he was scheduled to attend the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2010.
Portugal declared two days of mourning. There were verbal tributes from senior international politicians: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Brazil), Bernard Kouchner (France) and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (Spain), while Cuba's Raúl and Fidel Castro sent floral tributes. l'Osservatore Romano, a newspaper run by the Vatican, used its Sunday editorial to label Saramago "an anti-religious ideologue" and "populist extremist".
Saramago's funeral was held in Lisbon on 20 June 2010, in the presence of more than 20,000 people, many of whom had travelled hundreds of kilometres, but also notably in the absence of right-wing President of Portugal Aníbal Cavaco Silva who holidayed nearby as the ceremony took place. Silva, the Prime Minister when Saramago's name was removed from the shortlist of the European Literary Prize, said he did not attend Saramago's funeral because he "had never had the privilege to know him". Mourners, who questioned Silva's absence in the presence of reporters, held copies of the red carnation, symbolic of Portugal's democratic revolution. Saramago's cremation took place in Lisbon, with his ashes being scattered in his birthplace of Azinhaga and in his home until his death, Tias in Lanzarote.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | English title | Year | ISBN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Terra do Pecado | 1947 | |||
| Os Poemas Possíveis | 1966 | |||
| Provavelmente Alegria | 1970 | |||
| Deste Mundo e do Outro | 1971 | |||
| A Bagagem do Viajante | 1973 | |||
| As Opiniões que o DL teve | 1974 | |||
| O Ano de 1993 | 1975 | The Year of 1993 | ||
| Os Apontamentos | 1976 | |||
| Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia | 1977 | Manual of Painting and Calligraphy | 1993 | ISBN 1857540433 |
| Objecto Quase | 1978 | |||
| Levantado do Chão | 1980 | |||
| Viagem a Portugal | 1981 | Journey to Portugal | 2000 | ISBN 0151005877 |
| Memorial do Convento | 1982 | Baltasar and Blimunda | 1987 | ISBN 0151105553 |
| O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis | 1986 | The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis | 1991 | ISBN 0151997357 |
| A Jangada de Pedra | 1986 | The Stone Raft | 1994 | ISBN 0151851980 |
| História do Cerco de Lisboa | 1989 | The History of the Siege of Lisbon | 1996 | ISBN 015100238X |
| O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo | 1991 | The Gospel According to Jesus Christ | 1993 | ISBN 0151367000 |
| Ensaio sobre a Cegueira | 1995 | Blindness | 1997 | ISBN 0151002517 |
| Todos os Nomes | 1997 | All the Names | 1999 | ISBN 0151004218 |
| O Conto da Ilha Desconhecida | 1997 | The Tale of the Unknown Island | 1999 | ISBN 0151005958 |
| A Caverna | 2001 | The Cave | 2002 | ISBN 0151004145 |
| A Maior Flor do Mundo (children's picture book) | 2001 | |||
| O Homem Duplicado | 2003 | The Double | 2004 | ISBN 0151010404 |
| Ensaio sobre a Lucidez | 2004 | Seeing | 2006 | ISBN 0151012385 |
| Don Giovanni ou o Dissoluto Absolvido | 2005 | |||
| As Intermitências da Morte | 2005 | Death with Interruptions | 2008 | ISBN 1846550203 |
| As Pequenas Memórias | 2006 | Memories of my Youth | ||
| A Viagem do Elefante | 2008 | The Elephant's Journey | ISBN 9789722120173 | |
| Caim | 2009 | Cain | ISBN 9786071103161 |
See also
References
- "Nobel Writer, A Communist, Defends Work". The New York Times. 12 October 1998. Retrieved 18 June 2010.
- ^ "President defends Jose Saramago funeral no-show". BBC News. BBC. 21 June 2010. Retrieved 21 June 2010.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=(help); Cite has empty unknown parameter:|1=(help) - ^ Quoted in: Eberstadt, Fernanda (August 26, 2007). "The Unexpected Fantasist". The New York Times. Retrieved August 14, 2009.
{{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter:|coauthors=(help) - ^ Nobel-winning Portuguese novelist Saramago dies, Associated Press 18-06-2010
- ^ "Portugal mourns as Nobel laureate's body returned". The China Post. 21 June 2010. Retrieved 21 June 2010.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=(help) - "Nobel Prize citation, 1998". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2010-06-20.
- The God Factor
- "Langer, Adam. "José Saramago: Prophet of Doom." ''Book Magazine'' November/December 2002". Web.archive.org. 2002-10-31. Retrieved 2010-06-20.
- "Austin, Paige. "Shadows on the Wall." ''The Yale Review of Books'' Spring 2004". Yalereviewofbooks.com. Retrieved 2010-06-20.
- ""José Saramago: Autobiography." 1998". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2010-06-20.
- Communist Party of Portugal: Short Biographical note on Jose Saramago
- Communist Party of Portugal: Short Biographical note on Jose Saramago
- No Hero by David Frum, National Post June 19, 2010.
- Bigotry in Print. Crowds Chant Murder. Something's Changed by Paul Berman, The Forward (available online here) May 24, 2002.
- Portuguese Nobel Laureate's Remarks on Jews and the Holocaust Are "Incendiary and Offensive", Anti-Defamation League (ADL) - Press release, October 15, 2003.
- ADL Outraged by Nobel Laureate Comparison of Ramallah to Auschwitz, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) - Press release, March 26, 2002.
- De las piedras de David a los tanques de Goliat by José Saramago, El Pais 21/Abril/2002 (in Spanish).
- Manifestations of Anti-Semitism in the European Union - Portugal, Jewish Virtual Library (released by the European Jewish Congress)
- Antisemitism and Racism, Stephen Roth Institute, Tel Aviv University, annual report 2002-2003
- Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago dies at 87, Haaretz 18-06-2010
- Ilan Stavans, A Critic's Journey, University of Michigan Press 2010, p. 89
- David Frum: Death of a Jew-hater, National Post 19-06-2010
- "Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine" statement, July 19, 2006
- ^ Lea, Richard (18 June 2010). "Nobel laureate José Saramago dies, aged 87". The Guardian. Guardian Media Group. Retrieved 18 June 2010.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=(help) - "Nobel-wiining(sic) novelist Saramago dies aged 87". The Hindu. 18 June 2010. Retrieved 18 June 2010.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=(help) - Eberstadt, Fernanda (18 June 2010). "José Saramago, Nobel Prize-Winning Writer, Dies". The New York Times. The New York Times Company. Retrieved 18 June 2010.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=and|date=(help) - ^ "Portuguese Nobel laureate Saramago's funeral held". Xinhua News Agency. 21 June 2010. Retrieved 21 June 2010.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=(help)
Bibliography
- Baptista Bastos, José Saramago: Aproximação a um retrato, Dom Quixote, 1996
- T.C. Cerdeira da Silva, Entre a história e aficção: Uma saga de portugueses, Dom Quixote, 1989
- Maria da Conceição Madruga, A paixão segundo José Saramago: a paixão do verbo e o verbo da paixão, Campos das Letras, Porto, 1998
- Horácio Costa, José Saramago: O Período Formativo, Ed. Caminho, 1998
- Helena I. Kaufman, Ficção histórica portuguesa da pós-revolução, Madison, 1991
- O. Lopes, Os sinais e os sentidos: Literatura portuguesa do século XX, Lisboa, 1986
- B. Losada, Eine iberische Stimme, Liber, 2, 1, 1990, 3
- Carlos Reis, Diálogos com José Saramago, Ed. Caminho, Lisboa, 1998
- M. Maria Seixo, O essential sobre José Saramago, Imprensa Nacional, 1987
- "Saramago, José (1922–2010)." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Ed. Tracie Ratiner. Vol. 25. 2nd ed. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005. Discovering Collection. Thomson Gale. University of Guelph. 25 Sep. 2007.
External links
- José Saramago Foundation Template:Pt icon
- José Saramago at IMDb
- The Unexpected Fantasist, a portrait of José Saramago, written by Fernanda Eberstadt and published August 26, 2007, in The New York Times Magazine
- Introduction and video of Saramago from "Heroes de los dos bandos" – Spanish Civil War –
- Interviews with Saramago in video
- José Saramago from Pegasos
- Translation of interview with Saramago in El País – 12-Nov-2005
- Saramago's Nobel Lecture
- Societies of Mutual Isolation, an essay on Saramago by Benjamin Kunkel from Dissent
- Jose Saramago's blog
| Works by José Saramago | |
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