JosephSaramago – author of prose, poetry and theater – he reinvented 20th century literature. Political militant, great defender of Human rights and perpetual provocative, his vast work, peculiar for its style of composition, occupies a central position in contemporary Portuguese publications. the writer is winner of the Camões Award, the most traditional award for literature in the Portuguese language, It's from Nobel Prize of Literature, the most famous international literary award.
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Biography of José Saramago
José Saramago was born in Azinhaga, Portuguese village in the province of Ribatejo, on November 16, 1922. His parents were landless peasants, and the family moved to Lisbon just before the author turned two years old. Grandson and son of illiterate peasants, Saramago had his first contact with the narrative by oral form. He was only able to buy a book for the first time at age 19, with money borrowed from a friend.
At difficulties
financial where the family lived prevented the author from completing his studies – at the age of 12, he enrolled in the mechanical locksmith course. Although it was a technical course, the schedule also included literature classes, and it was from this contact, provided by textbooks, that Saramago discovered poetry and literary taste, starting to assiduously attend one of the public libraries in Lisbon.
Worked How mechanical locksmith, designer and public agent, until joining the editorial career, which he pursued for a longer time. Was translator, journalist and editor. In 1947 he published his first novel, entitled land of sin. It remained unpublished until 1966.
He remained at the head of the Estúdios Cor publishing house for twelve years, acting as literary direction and production, working, in parallel, with translations. In 1971, he left the publishing house and went to work in newspapers, as a literary critic, deputy director and political commentator.
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THE political activism, in fact, became official in 1969, when it occurred his affiliation to the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). With the attempted military coup in November 1975, Saramago lost his job at the newspaper and found himself with no chance of getting another occupation, persecuted for his political position. He then decided to devote himself entirely to literature.
In 1980, with the publication of raised off the ground, Saramago's narrative style of novelistic fiction was born. Then came several works; among them, the best known is perhaps The gospel according to Jesus Christ, novel considered controversial and censored by the Portuguese government, which vetoed its participation in the European Literary Prize. It was at this time that Saramago moved to the island of Lanzarote, in the Canary archipelago, with Pilar del Rio, a Spanish journalist, his third and last wife.
received the Camões Prize in 1995 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. The visibility promoted by these awards made the author travel around the world, participating in conferences, congresses, and leading citizenship actions in favor of the defense of Human Rights. He passed away at his home in Lanzarote on June 18, 2010.
Literary Characteristics of José Saramago
José Saramago was a author of multiples genres – wrote poems, plays, chronicles, short stories, novels, novels and also maintained a blog. And it was the form of prose that consecrated him as a great writer of the 20th century.
The compositional style of Saramago's work is unique and revolutionized the literature of his time. The author was known for abolish the traditional use of punctuation: dialogues started without a dash or quotation marks indicating the change of turn of the speech; long periods written without a period or question mark; entire chapters without paragraph breaks, unnumbered and untitled. See an excerpt from The gospel according to Jesus Christ:
"The woman didn't answer right away, she looked at him, in turn, as if she were evaluating him, the person she was, who could clearly see that she wasn't the poor lad provided, and at last he said, Keep me in your remembrance, nothing more, and Jesus, I will not forget your goodness, and then, filling up with cheer, I won't forget you, Why, smiled the woman, Because you're beautiful, You didn't know me in the time of my beauty, I know you in beauty of this hour. Her smile faded, faded, You know who I am, what I do, what I live for, I know, You didn't have to look at me anymore and you found out Everything, I don't know anything, That I'm a whore, I know, That I sleep with men for money, Yes, So that's what I say, you know everything about me, I only know that."
(SARAMAGO, The gospel according to Jesus Christ)
This new formal aspect proposed by Saramago revolutionizes literature and refers to the rhythm of the spoken language. In addition to the flow of thought, in orality there are no punctuation marks – although there are inquiries and change of turn or subject. It is also a provocative invitation to the reader, who should adopt an active posture while reading, complementing the work with his reasoning, in a new exercise of appreciating the words and listening to the intonations of the missing score.
No less provocative is the content of his novels. Interested in greater reflection of the human condition, his fiction books narrate – with this new domain of narrative form – characters in situations of existential crisis, individuals in constant self-reflection and sociocultural clashes with the state of affairs. Saramago was a staunch critic of the capitalist system, and its fiction (sometimes mixed with historical fact, in the case of Convent memorial, for example) constantly reverberates to degradation of human life caused by the logic of unbridled profit.
À sharp political stance and the formal experimentation adds up the fantastic element, often present in his work. In The year of the death of Ricardo Reis, for example, the ghost of Fernando Pessoa lives haunting Ricardo Reis, the poet's heteronym; the year is 1936, and the ghosts of dictator Salazar and of Nazi-fascism surround Portugal and Europe, respectively.
In the stone raft, the Iberian Peninsula physically moves from the European continent and navigates through the Atlantic Ocean, as if adrift, while the characters begin to investigate explanations for this phenomenon. The plot recalls how close Portugal and Spain are to each other, physically and linguistically, and how dissimilar they are from the rest of Europe.
In the intermittents of death, tells the story of a country where people simply stop dying – terminally ill, injured, no one else dies. Death becomes a character in the novel, which unfolds suggesting an unresolved reflection on the theme of the cycle of life.
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Works by José Saramago
Poetry
the possible poems (1966)
Probably joy (1970)
the year 1993 (1975)
Affairs
land of sin (1947)
Painting and calligraphy manual (1977)
raised off the ground (1980)
Convent memorial (1982)
The year of the death of Ricardo Reis (1984)
the stone raft (1986)
History of the siege of Lisbon (1989)
The gospel according to Jesus Christ (1991)
Blindness essay (1995)
all names (1997)
The cave (2000)
the duplicated man (2002)
lucidity essay (2004)
the intermittents of death (2005)
the elephant's journey (2008)
Cain (2009)
Skylight (2011)
Dramaturgy
In the evening (1979)
What will I do with this book? (1980)
The Second Life of Francis of Assisi (1987)
In Name I (1993)
Don Giovanni or The Dissolute Absolved (2005)
Chronicles
of this world and the other (1971)
traveler's luggage (1973)
the notes (1976)
Poetics of the five senses – the ear (1979)
Moby Dick in Lisbon (1996)
political sheets (1976-1998)
Tales
object almost (1978)
The Tale of the Unknown Island (1997)
Films – film adaptations
Blindness essay (2008, right Fernando Meirelles)
the stone raft (2008, right George Sluizer)
Embargo (2010, dir. Antônio Ferreira)
Joseph and Pilar (2010, dir. Miguel Gonçalves Mendes)
the duplicated man (2014, right Denis Villeneuve)
José Saramago's main awards
![A banner with the author's portrait appears on the façade of the José Saramago Foundation, in Lisbon, a museum and cultural institution dedicated to the writer's memory. [2]](/f/bab02e01315cc4c86b43398e4a13cd8e.jpg)
José Saramago received a huge number of awards, university doctorates honoris causa, merit badges and government decorations. Below we highlight some of his literary awards:
- 1979 - Portuguese Critics Association Award — Best Theater Play, performed in 1979, by In the evening. Portugal.
- 1981 - City of Lisbon Award, for raised from the ground. Portugal.
- 1982 - Literary Prize of the Municipality of Lisbon, for Convent memorial. Portugal.
- 1984 - Critics Award from the Portuguese Center of the International Association of Literary Critics, for his work as a whole. Portugal.
- 1987 - Grinzane-Cavour Award, for The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Italy.
- 1993 - The Independent Foreign Fiction Award, for The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. UK.
- 1993 - Theater Grand Prize of the Portuguese Writers Association, for In Name I. Portugal.
- 1995 -Camões Award, for his work as a whole. Portugal.
- 1996 - Rosalía de Castro Prize from the Pen Clube Prize (Galicia), for her work as a whole. Spain.
- 1998 - Nobel Prize for Literature, for his work as a whole. Sweden.
- 2001 - Canary Islands International Award by the Government of the Canary Islands, for his work as a whole. Spain.
- 2006 - Dolores Ibárruri Prize, for her work as a whole. Spain.
- 2009 - Award to the CajaGranada International Cooperation, Granada, for his work as a whole. Spain.
Sentences by José Saramago
“Beginning to read was for me like entering a wood for the first time and suddenly finding myself with all the trees, all the flowers, all the birds. When you do that, what dazzles you is the whole. You don't say: I like this tree more than the others. No, every book he went into took him as something unique.”
“There is no punctuation when speaking. We speak in a flow modulated by our thoughts and emotions.”
“I tell a reader who is reading a novel of mine that he is able to hear inside his head the voice that is saying what he is reading. He's doing a silent reading, which is normal. What I ask, something I can ask readers, even in the sense of a more accurate understanding of what is written, is that you try to hear this voice inside your head.”
“I am so pessimistic that I think humanity is hopeless. We go from disaster to disaster and we don't learn from our mistakes.”
Image credits:
[1] JHC_photo / Shutterstock.com
[2] Philip. Machel / Shutterstock.com
by Luiza Brandino
Literature teacher