José Saramago

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José Saramago (2008)

José Saramago (ʒuˈzɛ sɐɾɐˈmaɣu) (born November 16, 1922 as José de Sousa Saramago in Azinhaga , Portugal ; † June 18, 2010 in Tías on Lanzarote ) was a Portuguese novelist , poet , essayist , narrator , playwright and diary author. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature .

Life

Early years

Saramago was born on November 16, 1922 in the center of Portugal in the village of Azinhaga in Ribatejo . His parents José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade and their families were landless farm workers who worked in the latifundia of the large landowners . On his own initiative, the registrar added the nickname “Saramago” to his actual name “José de Sousa”, through which his father's family was known in the village. Saramago is the field radish that served the poor in Portugal as food, similar to the wild rocket in earlier times in Germany. When José was four years old, the Portuguese constitution was suspended by the military, and a dictatorship began which he could only see the end of when he was over fifty. It was only when Saramago was seven years old and had to show ID in elementary school that the family realized that his full name was José de Sousa Saramago .

In 1924 the family moved to Lisbon as rural refugees , where the father found a job as a police officer. A few months after moving, his eldest brother Francisco died. Time and again, Saramago spent long periods of his childhood with his maternal grandparents in the countryside in Azinhaga. He had excellent grades, but after two years at high school (Liceu Gil Vicente), his family could no longer finance their school attendance. The only option he had was to go to a technical college, he became a mechanic and worked in a car workshop for two years. During his visit to the industrial college, he came into contact with Portuguese literature for the first time, because the curriculum included literature as well as French. In 1936 his mother gave him his first book: "A Toutinegra do Moinho" (La Fauvette du Moulin) by Émile de Richebourg , a feature novel with a socially critical impact. Saramago's mother was illiterate and his father could string letters and read words. Saramago was 19 years old when he was able to buy his own books for the first time with money borrowed from a friend.

Over the next few years, Saramago regularly used the Palácio das Galveias public library in the evenings; his autodidactic studies soon enabled him to work in publishing houses and for newspapers before he became a freelance writer in 1976. In 1944 Saramago married the painter Ilda Reis , at the time he was employed by the Portuguese social welfare organization.

Saramago's first book: Terra do Pecado, Editorial Minerva, 1947. Was long considered lost and was not republished until 1997.

Literary beginnings during the dictatorship

In 1947 his only child Violante was born, and Saramago wrote his first novel , The Widow (A Viúva). The publisher changed the title to Land of Sin (Terra do Pecado), with which Saramago was not very happy. He wrote another unpublished prose text, Clarabóia . Further attempts at writing led him to the conclusion "... that I have nothing worthwhile to say". He then published nothing for the next nineteen years until 1966.

In 1949 Saramago was released for political reasons. At the end of the 1950s he began working in production for the publishing house Estúdios Cor , so that he met and made friends with many writers. He frequented the literary café "A Brasileira", which was a place for discussion groups during the dictatorship. These Tertúlias were tolerated by the dictator Salazar so that they could also be observed by the informants of the secret police PIDE .

From 1955 Saramago also worked as a translator for Colette , Pär Lagerkvist , Jean Cassou , Maupassant , André Bonnard , Tolstoi , Baudelaire , Étienne Balibar , Nikos Poulantzas , Henri Focillon , Jacques Roumain , Hegel , Raymond Bayer for various publishers. In 1966 he returned to the world of literature: he published his first volume of poetry Os Poemas Possíveis (The Possible Poems), in 1970 his second Provavelmente Alegria (Probably Happiness).

From 1967 he also worked as a literary critic and, as far as the censorship allowed, wrote political chronicles for various newspapers in Lisbon. His collected reviews were published in 1971 (Deste Mundo e do Outro) and 1973 (A Bagagem do Viajante: crónicas) as a book. In 1969, in the course of the growing resistance against the Salazar regime and the colonial war in Angola, he joined the then banned Communist Party of Portugal , in which he always took a critical stance and to which he, as a staunch and unorthodox leftist, was unwaveringly loyal Lasted until his death - also because the CP had no power in Portugal. He made his first trip abroad, which took him to Paris. After divorcing his wife in 1970, he entered into a relationship with the Portuguese writer Isabel da Nóbrega , which would last until 1986. In 1971 he left the publishing house Estúdios Cor and became a well-respected journalist and daily political commentator. In 1972 his first granddaughter was born and he worked for the Diário de Lisboa .

Carnation Revolution

When Portugal in 1974 with the Carnation Revolution in a peaceful military coup by replacing the decades-long dictatorship of the Estado Novo , the democracy attained, Saramago was working temporarily for the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Social Communication. From April to November 1975 he was deputy director of the daily Diário de Notícias . After the failed rebellion of communist units, the bourgeois camp emerged victorious and Saramago lost his post. With no prospect of employment, he finally decided to become a freelance writer.

Saramago gradually developed from columnist and poet to novelist: he was already 55 years old when his second novel The Handbook of Painting and Calligraphy was published in 1977 . The book shows autobiographical traits and deals with the Salazar period and the urge to write. His first dramatic work The Night (A Noite) can also be classified in this complex of themes , reminiscent of the night of April 24-25, 1974, the night before the Carnation Revolution, which sealed the end of fascism in Portugal. This was followed by a volume of stories, plays and the exploration of his country, which is decisive for his upcoming narrative work, The Portuguese Journey , which is the motto of all of his novels that have his homeland as the theme.

Working in the Third Portuguese Republic

In 1976, however, his change from journalist to writer marked his stay in the cooperative “Unidade Colectiva de Produção Boa Esperança” in Lavre, a small village in the Alentejo , which lasted a few months. His notes, studies and observations were incorporated into the 1980 novel Hope in the Alentejo (Levantado do Chão), "where the narrative style that characterizes my novels was born," as he himself said. The Alentejo is home to the cork oak , “which is in full bloom - although it doesn't seem so because of its bulkiness - when its skin is torn in shreds. With screams of pain. ”With this still very realistic rural family and revolutionary chronicle, Saramago had his national breakthrough, in which he describes the history of the farm workers of the Alentejo, their hardship and monotonous life, their rebellion against feudal structures of rule that have hardly changed in over 500 years had changed. The occupation of the latifundia by the farm workers after the Carnation Revolution marks the hopeful end of the clerical-fascist dictatorship: from now on there is no longer hope of living in bondage , but actually "raised from the ground" (levantado do chão) .

The airship Passarola by Bartolomeu de Gusmão , contemporary illustration

From the beginning of the eighties, further novels appeared at intervals of two to three years. In 1982 he achieved his international breakthrough with the blasphemous and humorous romance novel Das Memorial (Memorial do Convento), which critics unanimously declare to be the most saramagoesque of all of his novels. He describes the time of the Inquisition in the absolutist Portugal of the 18th century from the perspective of “the little man”, the building of the Palácio Nacional de Mafra , on which 50,000 workers worked under inhumane conditions and 2,000 people died. The utopia of a better, fairer and freer world appears faintly against this earthly gravity in the magical, real airship by Bartolomeu de Gusmão and the music of the composer Domenico Scarlatti . The memorial inspired the Italian composer Azio Corghi to write the opera Blimunda , which premiered in 1990 at La Scala in Milan . The great success of these two novels with readers enabled Saramago to gain financial independence as a writer. Since then he has been considered one of the most successful authors in Portugal, and his works have been translated into more than 20 languages. Saramago became the most famous contemporary writer of the Portuguese language, in which over 200 million people on four continents communicate.

Another work followed in 1984 with The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis). Saramago brings Ricardo Reis, one of Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms , to life. And Pessoa, who claimed throughout his life that he was the reincarnation of the long-awaited King Sebastião (1554–1578), returns to the world of the living for a few appearances. Saramago also criticizes fascism and the church.

Saramago was noticed as a lateral thinker in 1986 when he spoke out against the accession of Portugal and Spain to the EU . The novel The Stone Raft (A Jangada de Pedra), published in the same year, was the fitting, fantastic thought game for contemporary history: what would happen if the Iberian Peninsula were to tear itself away from the rest of Europe and drift out into the ocean like a raft. Saramago was one of the few Portuguese who advocated a union of Spain and Portugal .

In 1988 Saramago married the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río. His story of the siege of Lisbon (Historia do Cerco de Lisboa) appeared a year later . In this book, Saramago links a love story with the unbelievable deed of a corrector who inserts the word “no” in a history book and thus rewrites the story, because suddenly the crusaders are no longer helping to liberate the city from the Moors .

The three iron baskets on the tower of the Lambertikirche in Münster, in which the corpses of the heretics were hung.

Saramago's seventh novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ from 1991, is his anti- clergy and official church , but not irreligious, examination of the message of the New Testament, in which Saramago makes a self-critical Jesus question the faith of the Church. It was heavily criticized by the Vatican for its heretical interpretation of the salvation event and declared blasphemous. This reaction bothered Saramago little. Even when the Vatican expressed its disapproval of the award of the Nobel Prize to him, Saramago said only annoyed: "The Vatican should take care of its own business and not behave fundamentalist ." The cultural-political scandal hit him very differently than the one at that time Secretary of State for Culture of the Conservative Government, Pedro Santana Lopes , deleted the name Saramagos from the list of candidates for the European Literature Prize in 1992 on the pretext that the novel offends the religious feelings of the Catholic Portuguese, and so his new book refused to participate. Saramago and his wife went into exile and, as a protest against the government, moved their residence to the Canary island of Lanzarote , where he lived until his death: “If something like this had happened during the Salazar dictatorship, I could still have understood it . In a democracy, however, I found this censorship shameful, ” he later explained. But he always kept an apartment in Lisbon and continued to pay his taxes in Portugal.

In early 1993 Saramago published the poetic drama " In Nomine Dei " (In the Name of God), which he wrote while still in Lisbon, from which the libretto for the opera Divara - Water and Blood arose, the second collaboration with Azio Corghi. The opera, which at the time of the Baptist kingdom of Munster plays became the 1200th anniversary of the city founding to the Municipal Theater in Münster on 31 October 1993 premiere .

From Lanzarote, from the writer's workshop, his Lanzarote diaries were published annually .

With The City of the Blind (O Ensaio sobre a Cegueira) Saramago published one of his most famous novels in 1995, in which he describes in parabolic form a society that is thrown out of joint by an enigmatic and sudden epidemic of blindness in which almost everyone falls ill. The sick are crammed into ghettos and left to their own devices, a terrible hierarchy with oppression and rape is developing. In 2008 it was filmed for the cinema by the Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles .

In 1997, The Story of the Unknown Island (O Conto da Ilha Desconhecida) was published. City of the Blind is part of the inventory of the world at the end of the millennium, conceived as a novel trilogy , which Saramago pursued with the novel All Names (Todos os Nomes) in 1997.

In 2004 Saramago ran in the European elections for the Communist Party of Portugal, but on a hopeless list place. He was also a supporter of attac .

A time without death was published in 2005 and in 2006 in Portugal under the title As Pequenas Memórias (Little Memories), a kind of autobiography that describes his childhood and youth between urban and rural culture and ends at the age of 15.

Detail of the facade of the Casa dos Bicos.

Saramago was already known as a passionate provocateur when, in 2008, he particularly annoyed his compatriots with the suggestion that Portugal should become a territorial component of its large neighbor Spain.

With his most recent work, the religion-critical novel Kain , which appeared in late 2009 (German translation 2011), the avowed atheist and communist caused heated debates. Portugal's bishops and conservative newspaper columnists called him "heretic".

The older José Saramago became, the freer he felt, and the freer he felt, the more radical his political position. This only caused irritation shortly before his death, when Saramago in his internet blog, which he ran for five years and in which he let his anger run free over the circumstances and not only sharp criticism of globalized capitalism , of politicians like the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi or France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy or also practiced on the Pope, but also castigated Israeli occupation policy in many notes - and compared the Israeli army with the German armed forces . As in 2002, when he discovered the “spirit of Auschwitz ” in Palestinian refugee camps, this earned him accusations of anti-Semitism . In April 2010 it became known that Rowohlt Verlag , which had published Saramago's work in German for years, refused to publish the Israel-critical blog diary. The German editions of his last books were then published by Hoffmann and Campe .

José Saramago died on June 18, 2010 after a long illness at the age of 87 in his home in Tías on Lanzarote. The Portuguese government ordered a two-day state mourning on the occasion of his death . His ashes are to be buried in Portugal. Rua dos Bacalhoeiros (the street of the Bacalhau traders) leads to the burial site, the small tree-lined park Campo das Cebolas , opposite to which is the seat of the Saramago Foundation, which is located in the Casa dos Bicos is located, the house of peaks, so called because of the Italian-style diamond blocks on the facade. It is Lisbon's only early Renaissance secular building .

Style and choice of subject

Although Saramago called himself a pessimist and despite some situations in his novels that are reminiscent of Kafka , there are always hope , deep-rooted belief in the good in people and in the world, and appeals to humanity in his texts . His style is often compared to the Magical Realism of the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez , especially because of his technique of juxtaposing historical figures with fictional characters in his works.

His novels are set in different historical epochs in Portugal, but they are not historical novels in the strict sense. The focus is usually on the behavior and efforts of individuals or groups (mostly members of the lower classes) to cope with an environment or society that is hostile to them.

Some of his novels have surrealistic and fairytale traits, for example when in The City of the Blind all the inhabitants of a city are gradually struck with blindness . This situation forms the background for a description of general human behavior. His protagonists are thus both individual people who go through a development process and character masks that represent certain groups of people.

"Thank you José Saramago" - Lisbon, October 2010

Awards

Saramago has received many Portuguese and international literary prizes, such as the Prémio da Associação de Críticos Portugueses in 1979; 1980 the Prémio Cicade de Lisboa for Hope in the Alentejo ; 1982 the Prémio Literário Município de Lisboa for Das Memorial ; 1986 the Prémio da Crítica da Associação Portuguesa de Críticos (Prémio D. Dinis) for The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis ; In 1991 he was awarded the title Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture ; In 1992 Saramago received the Premio Internazoniale Ennio Flaiano (Italy). In 1993 the play In Nomine Dei received the Grande Prémio de Teatro da Associação Portuguesa de Escritores and the English translation of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis received the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize . In 1996 Saramago received the Prémio Camões and in 1998 - as the first Portuguese, as a Portuguese-speaking author - the Nobel Prize for Literature . He is named the adoptive son of Lanzarote.

He has held honorary doctorates from the Universities of Turin , Seville and Valencia , Manchester and Coimbra .

The important Portuguese literary prize Prémio José Saramago , which has been awarded since 1999, is named after him .

Works

Poetry

  • Os Poemas Possíveis . Portugália Ed. 1966, ed. Caminho, 1982.
  • Provavelmente Alegria . Livro's Horizons 1970, Ed. Caminho, 1985.
  • O Ano de 1993 . Ed. Futura 1975, Ed. Caminho, 1987.
  • German: About love and the sea . Poems: from the Portuguese by Niki Graça; Verlag Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-455-40320-6 .

Contemporary history

  • Deste Mundo e do Outro . Ed Arcádia 1971, Ed Caminho, 1985.
  • A Bagagem do Viajante: crónicas . Ed. Futura 1973, Ed. Caminho, 1986.
  • As Opiniões que o DL teve . Seara NovaEd. Futura, 1974.
  • Os Apontamentos: crónicas política . Seara Nova, 1976, Ed. Caminho, 1990.

Diaries

  • Cadernos de Lanzarote I . 1994.
  • Cadernos de Lanzarote II . 1995.
  • Cadernos de Lanzarote III . 1996.
  • Cadernos de Lanzarote IV . 1997.
  • Cadernos de Lanzarote V . 1998.

Travelogues

  • Viagem a Portugal . Círculo de Leitores 1981, Ed. Caminho, 1984
    (German: Die Portuguese Reise. ISBN 978-3-455-40416-6 )

Dramas

  • A noite . Ed. Caminho, 1979
    (German: Die Nacht. ISBN 978-3-940627-00-1 )
  • Que Farei Com Este Livro? Ed. Caminho, 1980.
  • A Segunda Vida de Francisco de Assis . Ed. Caminho, 1987.
  • In Nomine Dei . Ed. Caminho, 1993.
  • Don Giovanni ou o Dissoluto Absolvido . Ed. Caminho, 2005.
The Portuguese edition of "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ"

Novels and short stories

  • Terra do Pecado . Minverva, 1947.
  • Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia . Moraes Ed. 1977, Ed. Caminho, 1984
    (German: Handbook of Painting and Calligraphy. ISBN 3-499-22304-X )
  • Objecto Quase . Moraes Ed. 1978, Ed. Caminho, 1984
    (German: The chair and other things. ISBN 3-499-22301-5 )
  • Poética dos Cinco Sentidos - O Ouvido . 1979.
  • Levantado do Chão . Ed. Caminho, 1980
    (German: Hope in the Alentejo . ISBN 3-499-22302-3 )
  • Memorial do Convento . Ed. Caminho, 1982, Círculo de Leitores, 1984
    (German: Das Memorial. ISBN 3-499-22303-1 )
  • O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis . Ed. Caminho, 1984
    (German: The year of the death of Ricardo Reis. ISBN 3-499-22308-2 )
  • A Jangada de Pedra . Ed. Caminho 1986, Círculo de Leitores, 1987
    (German: Das Steinerne Floß . ISBN 3-499-22305-8 )
  • A Segunda Vida de Francisco de Assis , Ed. Caminho Lisbon, Caminho, 1987.

Movie

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.zeit.de/2008/44/Saramago Oh what, I have a thick skin! Portugal's Nobel Prize winner José Saramago talks about the film adaptation of his novel “The City of the Blind” and explains why he is still a communist, date October 24, 2008.
  2. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from June 21, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Cronobiografia @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.josesaramago.org
  3. ↑ NDR: The Gospel according to Jesus Christ (1/2). Retrieved May 14, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Volker Hage : On the death of José Saramago: "Man has ceased to respect himself". In: Spiegel Online . June 19, 2010, accessed June 9, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Fundação José Saramago  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.josesaramago.org  
  6. ^ Prémio José Saramago

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Saramago, José
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Saramago, José de Sousa
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Portuguese writer, Nobel Prize Winner in Literature
DATE OF BIRTH November 16, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Azinhaga , Portugal
DATE OF DEATH June 18, 2010
Place of death Tías , Lanzarote