On October 8, 1998, the Swedish Academy awarded José Saramago the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first in the Portuguese language, “for his ability to make an elusive reality comprehensible, with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony” .
These are also the features that characterize the writing of Miguel de Cervantes. Because Saramago is a writer of Cervantine lineage.
His imagination, without abandoning the real reference, makes us go further, in the creative flight that makes us more human.
Compassion is another of the nuclei of his political poetics, especially with the weakest, with those who need it most.
And lastly, irony provides the distance that enables a sense of humor and allows us to represent the harshest and bloodiest realities from the will to transform them.
In his work, ethics and aesthetics are strongly united, in the face of the baseness and abjection of the world.
lifted off the ground
The entire creation of José Saramago is, as the title of one of his works indicates, a monument “raised from the ground”.
Because, as he indicates, “from the ground we know that crops and trees rise, animals that run through the fields or fly over them rise, men and their hopes rise. A book can also rise from the ground, like an ear of wheat or a wild flower. Or a bird. Or a flag.
In this 2022 in which we celebrate the centenary of his birth, it is convenient to review his entire literary career.
His works erupted fed by the land and its people, by history and creative imagination: to the first-time novel land of sin (1947, now recovered in Spanish translation with its original title, The widow) and the books of verses possible poems (1966), Probably Joy (1970) and the year of 1993 (1975) (now released as complete poetry), follow them calligraphy manual (1977) and the book of stories almost an object (1978).
After a fruitful stage of beginning and literary maturation, it will reach a turning point with the great works of the eighties: lifted off the ground (1980), the play What will you do with this book? (1980) and the travel book Trip to Portugal (1981).
Below are the novels that begin to point him out as one of the great European storytellers of the moment: convent memorial (1982), The year of the death of Ricardo Reis (1984), the stone raft (1986), History of the siege of Lisbon (1989).
Nor should we forget in these 80s the publication of his play The second life of Francis of Assisi (1987) and his relationship with Pilar del Río, which would bring him even closer to Spain.
r2hox / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
The 1990s, which will close with the award of the Nobel Prize, sharpen his capacity for reflection and commitment in the splendid novels The gospel according to Jesus Christ (1991), essay on blindness (1995) and All the names (1997), while offering us the testimony of the vital forging of that creative universe in the Lanzarote notebooks (1993-1995).
“Letter by letter, word by word, page by page, book by book, I have successively implanted the characters I created in the man I was. I believe that without them I would not be the person I am today, without them perhaps my life would not have been more than a vague outline, a promise like so many others that did not manage to pass as a promise, the existence of someone who perhaps could have been and it did not come to be”, he will say in his Nobel speech.
An exemplary creation full of beauty
All great literature – José Saramago’s creation is such – combines a personal universe with an aesthetic way of communicating. Rarely is the synergy found between beauty in the ethical representation (sometimes painful) of a filthy world, with the nuances and delicacy of a style capable of raising before our eyes possibilities of greater consistency. It is a creative process in which one goes back to the past to understand the present, while never forgetting the future as an environment to build that utopia that allows us to walk towards the horizon, as Eduardo Galeano said.
Arturo Espinosa / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Saramago also adds his unique style to his creative process, nuanced and deployed at the same time. This style is characterized by the richness of his lexicon or the subtle nuances of semantics that he sometimes projects through metaphors, allegories, symbols.
A lively and dynamic syntax is also a sign of identity, enhanced by a unique way of using punctuation marks. In this way, he manages to print a reading rhythm characterized by euphony, which invites us to read his work aloud, and which is capable of resisting the difficulty that every translation entails. His language continues to vibrate in languages other than that Portuguese that he expanded and enriched.
The legacy of Jose Saramago
Saramago died as he had lived: respecting himself and respecting others, leaving a treasure of words in which to recognize ourselves. Thanks to his mastery of writing, his literature reaches the depths of being and appeals to the conscience. Through the wisdom with which he weaves the plot of his texts, he is capable not only of denouncing past, present or possible future situations, but also of connecting with the human condition, with the anthropological structures of our imaginary that in it find unsurpassed heights of expression.
In the conference he offered at the Prado Museum in 1992, Andrea Mantegna, an ethic, an aestheticSaramago ended by saying: “In his painting, Mantegna did not only put what he knew, he also put what he definitely was: a whole man in his hardness and in his sensitivity, like a stone that was capable of crying”.
We can paraphrase these words, change the name of the aforementioned and apply them to their own creator. Because for him aesthetics without ethics was not possible.
