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José Saramago

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José Saramago
File:Josesaramago.jpg
OccupationPlaywright, novelist
NationalityPortuguese
Period1947–2010
Notable awardsNobel Prize in Literature
1998
SpousePilar del Rio (m. 2007)
Website
http://www.josesaramago.org/saramago/
In this Portuguese name, the first or maternal family name is de Sousa Saramago.

José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE (Portuguese pronunciation: [ʒuˈzɛ sɐɾɐˈmaɡu]; (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.[1] He founded the National Front for the Defence of Culture (Lisbon, 1992) with Freitas-Magalhães and others. In 1992, following a public spat with the Portuguese government, he moved to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, Spain, where he resided until his death.[2][3]

Saramago was an outspoken supporter of communism. He was accused of antisemitism for his criticism of Israel.[3]

He was married to Spanish journalist Pilar del Rio, and had a daughter from a previous marriage.[3]

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.[2] 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.[2] 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.[2] 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.[2] 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.[2]

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.[2] 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.[4] Saramago was also an atheist[5] and self-described pessimist.[6] His views have aroused considerable controversy in Portugal, especially after the publication of The Gospel According to Jesus Christ.[7] 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,[2] arguing that it offended the Catholic community. As a result, Saramago and his wife moved to Lanzarote, an island in the Spanish Canaries.[8]

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.[2] 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!'".[2] He used his Nobel lecture to call his grandfather Jerónimo "the wisest man [he] ever knew".[2] Despite the award, though, he remained a divisive character in Portugal, both criticised and praised.[2]

Politics

Saramago was an unflinching supporter of communism.[3] He was a critic of both the European Union and the International Monetary Fund;[2] however, he stood (unsuccessfully) as a candidate for the European Parliament in the 2009 election.[9]

Jews and Israel

During a visit to Ramallah in March 2002 during the second intifada, Saramago compared the Palestinian city, which was blockaded at the time by the Israeli army, 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.[3][10][11][12][13][14] On the same occasion, he 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.[15]

In an article in the Madrid newspaper El Pais (as translated by Paul Berman in The Forward) on April 21, 2002, Saramago wrote that:

"Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted 'certitude' that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner."

In a speech in Brazil on October 13, 2003, Saramago stated, regarding 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.[16]

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".[17]

Literary themes

File:Jose Saramago-Sep2006.jpg
Saramago at San Sebastián International Film Festival (holding the Persian translation of his book, Blindness)

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, in clear disrespect of grammar rules. Many of his paragraphs extend for pages without pausing for dialog, which Saramago chooses not to delimit by quotation marks; when the speaker changes, Saramago capitalizes the first letter of the new speaker's clause. 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.

Death

Saramago died on 18 June 2010, aged 87, having spent the last few years of his life living in Lanzarote, Spain.[18] The Guardian described him as "the finest Portuguese writer of his generation",[18] while Fernanda Eberstadt of The New York Times said he was "known almost as much for his unfaltering Communism as for his fiction".[19] Saramago's translator, Margaret Jull Costa, paid tribute to him, describing his "wonderful imagination" and calling him "the greatest contemporary Portuguese writer".[18] 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 Festival in August 2010.[18]

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 Trip of the Elephant ISBN 9789722120173
Caim 2009 Cain ISBN 9786071103161

See also

References

  1. ^ "Nobel Writer, A Communist, Defends Work". The New York Times. 12 October 1998. Retrieved 18 June 2010.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m 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)
  3. ^ a b c d e Nobel-winning Portuguese novelist Saramago dies, Associated Press 18-06-2010
  4. ^ "Nobel Prize citation, 1998". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2010-06-20.
  5. ^ The God Factor[dead link]
  6. ^ "Langer, Adam. "José Saramago: Prophet of Doom." ''Book Magazine'' November/December 2002". Web.archive.org. 2002-10-31. Retrieved 2010-06-20.
  7. ^ "Austin, Paige. "Shadows on the Wall." ''The Yale Review of Books'' Spring 2004". Yalereviewofbooks.com. Retrieved 2010-06-20.
  8. ^ ""José Saramago: Autobiography." 1998". Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 2010-06-20.
  9. ^ "Européennes: les people à l'assaut de Strasbourg", Le Matin, June 6, 2009
  10. ^ No Hero by David Frum, National Post June 19, 2010.
  11. ^ Bigotry in Print. Crowds Chant Murder. Something's Changed by Paul Berman, The Forward (available online here) May 24, 2002.
  12. ^ Portuguese Nobel Laureate's Remarks on Jews and the Holocaust Are "Incendiary and Offensive", Anti-Defamation League (ADL) - Press release, October 15, 2003.
  13. ^ ADL Outraged by Nobel Laureate Comparison of Ramallah to Auschwitz, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) - Press release, March 26, 2002.
  14. ^ De las piedras de David a los tanques de Goliat by José Saramago, El Pais 21/Abril/2002 (in Spanish).
  15. ^ Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago dies at 87, Haaretz 18-06-2010
  16. ^ David Frum: Death of a Jew-hater, National Post 19-06-2010
  17. ^ "Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine" statement, July 19, 2006
  18. ^ a b c d 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)
  19. ^ 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)

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.

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