TEXTS BY JOSÉ SARAMAGO IN ENGLISH

TEXTS BY JOSÉ SARAMAGO IN ENGLISH

BALTASAR AND BLIMUNDA p. 19

Wind p. 20 The wind is now southeasterly. It blows vigorously. The earth below sweeps past like the mobile surface of a river that carries with it fields, woodlands, villages, a medley of green, yellow, ocher, and brown, and white walls, the sails of windmills, and threads of water over water. p. 183 Nebulous and obscure p. 26 (...) when something is expounded and counterpoised, it is nearly always nebulous and obscure and finishes up in a meaningless void. (...) There is silence after listening to music or a sermon. What does it matter if a sermon is praised or music applauded, for perhaps only silence truly exists. p. 146 Eternity p. 28 There are moments when time appears to be slow in passing. Like a swallow building its nest in the eaves, it enters and leaves, comes and goes, but always within sight, and both we and the swallow might think that we are bound to go on like this for all eternity, or at least half of it, which would be no bad thing. p. 303 Life p. 30 They saw no sign of unhappiness or misery; streams flowed over pebbles everywhere, and birds were singing. So perhaps life was simply to sit on the grass, holding a calendula without stripping off the petals, either because one already knew the answers or because they were so unimportant that to discover them would not be worth a flower's life. p. 249 Destined p. 32 When we get old, things that are destined to come about start to happen, and at last we are capable of believing those we once doubted, and even when we find it difficult to believe that such things can happen, we believe that they Will happen. p. 244 Signs p. 34 It is not true that tomorrow belongs only to God, that men must wait to see what each day brings, that death alone is certain and not the hour when it Will strike. These are the maxims of those who are incapable of understanding the signs pointing to our future (...) p. 104

THE YEAR OF THE DEARTH OF RICARDO REIS p. 37

Late p. 38 Already so late, this day has ended, what remains hovers in the remote distance over the sea and is fast escaping. p. 11 Light p. 40 (…) a man cannot wander about forever. It is not only the blind who need a walking stick to probe one step ahead or a dog to sniff out danger, ever a man with the sight of two eyes needs a light he can follow, one in which he believes or hopes to believe, his very doubts serving in the absence of anything better. p. 72 A man p. 42 It is nearly always like this, a man torments himself, frets, thinks the worst, believes that the world is about to demand a full explanation, when in fact the world has moved on, thinking about other things. p. 78 Loneliness p. 44 (…) loneliness is not living alone,

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loneliness is the inability to keep someone or something within us company, is not a tree that stands alone in the middle of a plain but the distance between the deep sap and the bark, between the leaves and the roots. (…) I don’t recall ever having felt myself to be truly useful. I believe that this is the first loneliness, to feel that we are useless. pp. 193, 194 Fate p. 46 (…) perhaps this is fate, we know what will happen, know it is inevitable, yet remain silent, onlookers only, watching the spectacle of the world even as we leave it. p. 348 Infinity p. 50 Who knows what star or kite holds them at that point, where, as the textbook informs us, parallel lines meet at infinity, an infinity that must be truly vast to accommodate so many thing, dimensions, lines straight and curved and intersecting, the trams, that go up there tracks and the passengers inside the trams, the light in the eyes of every passenger, the echo of words, the inaudible friction of thoughts. p. 60 Road p. 52 (...) a welcome break in the monotony of existence. We think we have arrived at the end of the road, but it is only a bend opening onto a new windows while the voile curtains, inside, sway ever so gently. A man surrounded by tall pieces of furniture is writing a letter, composing his text so that the absurd appears logical and the incoherent clear, so that weakness becomes strength, mortification dignity, and fear boldness, because what we would like to have been is as valuable as what we have been. p. 167 Rain p. 58 Here the sea ends and the earth begins. It is raining over the colorless city. The waters of the river are polluted with mud, the riverbanks flooded. p. 1 Remembrance p. 60 But everything is diffuse and hazy, the architecture nothing but blurred lines. It must be the weather, the hour of day, his failing eyesight. Only the eyes of remembrance remain, as sharp as those of a hawk. p. 22 Reality p. 62 (…) decides that the purpose of art is not imitation, (…) because reality does not tolerate its reflection, rather, it rejects it. Only a different reality, whatever it is, way be substituted for the reality one wishes to convey. The difference between them mutually demonstrates, explains, and measures them, reality as the

horizon and new wonders. p. 178 The place p. 54 (…) Innumerable people live within us. If I think and feel, I know not who is thinking and feeling, I am only the place where there is thinking and feeling, and, though they do not end here, it is as if everything ends, for beyond thinking and feeling there is nothing. (...) who will be thinking in the place where I am, because of thinking. Who will be feeling what I am feeling, or feel that I am feeling in the place where I am, because of feeling. Who is using me in order to think and feel, and among the innumerable people who live within me, who I am, Who, Quem, Quain, what thoughts and feelings are the ones I do not share because they are mine alone. Who am I that others are not nor have nor will come to be. p. 13 The letter p. 56 It is raining out there with such a deafening noise that it seems that the rain is falling throughout the world, that as the globe turns, its waters hum in space as if on a spinning top. The dense roar of the rain fills my mind, my soul is an invisible curve drawn by the sound of the wind that blows relentless, an unbridled horse rejoicing in its freedom, hooves clattering through these doors and

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invention it was, invention as the reality it will be. p. 89 The core p. 64 Time drags like a sluggish wave, it is a sphere of molten glass on whose surface myriad glints catch one's eye and engage one's attention, while inside glows the crimson, disquieting core. p. 329 The wall p. 66 (...) the wall that separates the living from one another is no less opaque than the wall that separates the living from the dead. p. 235

THE NOTEBOOK p. 69

Memory p. 70 In physical terms we inhabit space, but in emotional terms we are inhabited, by memory. A memory composed of a space and a time, a memory inside which we live, like an island between two oceans-one the past, the other the future. p. 4 The cry p. 74 (…) God is the silence of the universe and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence. p. 29 Humanity p. 76 Some would say that cynicism is an illness afflicting the elderly, (...) To this day the hopefulness of young people has never succeeded in making the world a better place, and old people's ever increasing acerbity has never been so bad that it has made it worse. (...) What we call the world is the state of ourselves, wretched humanity (...) p. 65

THE CAVE p. 79

Icebergs p. 80 (…) we are already driving through the Agricultural Belt, or Green Belt, as it continues to be called by those who simply love to disguise harsh reality with words, this slush colour that covers the ground, this endless sea of plastic where the greenhouses, all cut to the same size, look like petrified icebergs, like gigantic dominoes without the spots. p. 71 Nothing p. 82 (…) when he was on night patrol, and all the lights were dimmed and he walked along the deserted galleries, wend up and down in the lifts, as if he were keeping watch over nothing in order to en sure that it continued to be nothing. p. 215 Strangers p. 86 (…) from one hour to the next we've become like strangers in this world (…) p. 292 Stage presentiment p. 90 (...) there are things in life which define themselves, a particular man, a particular woman, a particular word, a particular moment, that is all we would have to say for everyone to understand what we meant, but there are other things, and it might even be the same man and the same woman, the same word and the same moment, which, viewed from a different angle, in a different light, come to signify doubts and perplexities, troubling sings, a stage presentiment (...) p. 83 Road p. 92 (…) and the road, which grows dirtier now, crosses the Industrial Belt, cutting a swathe through not only factory buildings of every size, shape and type, but also fuel tanks, both spherical and cylindrical, electricity substations, netwoks of pipes, air ducts, suspension bridges, tubes of every thickness, some red, some black, chimneys belching out pillars of toxic fumes into the atmosphere, long-armed cranes, chemical laboratories, oil refineries, fetid, bitter, sickly odours, the strident noise of drilling, the buzz of mechanical saws, the brutal thud of steam hammers and, very occasionally, a zone of silence, where no one knows exactly what is being produced. (…) Once past the Industrial Belt, the city finally begins, not the city proper, for that can be seen beyond, touched by the caress of the first,

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rosy light of the sun, and what greets one are chaotic conglomerations of shacks made by their ill-housed inhabitants out of whatever mostly flimsy materials might help to keep out the elements, especially the rain and the cold. It is, as the inhabitants of the city put it, a frightening place. pp. 3, 4 Soul p. 94 They say that landscape is a state of mind, that we see the outer landscape with our inner eye, but is that because those extraordinary inner organs of vision are unable to see these factories and these hangars, this smoke devouring the sky, this toxic dust, this never -ending mud, these layers of soot, yesterday's rubbish swept on top of the rubbish of every other day, tomorrow's rubbish swept on top of today's rubbish, here even the most contented of souls would require only the eyes in his head to make him doubt the good fortune he imagined was his. p. 71

SKYLIGHT p. 97

Beast p. 98 Life is a fight to the death, always and everywhere. It's a case of every man for himself. Love is the cry of the weak, hatred is the weapon of the strong. Hatred for their rivals and competitors, for candidates for the same piece of bread or land or the same oil well. Love is either just a joke or something that gives the strong a chance to make fun of the weakness of the weak. For them, the existence of the weak is useful as a pastime, an escape valve. p. 299 Ideals p. 102 We enter like lions and leave like broken old nags. It's in our blood. We were as overflowing with enthusiasm and energy as if a child had been born to us. But there were also plenty of people bent on destroying our ideals. And they didn't care how. Then the worst of it was that a few others turned up wanting, at all costs, to save the Fatherland. As if it needed saving. People no longer knew what they wanted. Men you were friends with yesterday became enemies the next day, without anyone quite knowing why. pp. 159, 160 Monotony p. 106 We all receive the daily dose of morphine that dulls our thoughts. Habits, vices, repeated word and hackneyed gestures, boring friends and enemies we don’t even really hate these are all things that dull our minds. (…) We all wear around our neck the yoke of monotony, we all have hopes, though heaven knows what for! (…) Morphine. A legal drug advertised in all the papers. A way of passing the time, as if we were all going to live for ever. pp. 205, 206 Hatred p. 110 If men hate each other, then there's no hope. We will all be the victims of that hate. We will slaughter each other in wars we don't want and for which we're not responsible. They'll put a flag in front of us and fill our ears with words. And why? To plant the seeds for a new war, to create more hatred, to create new flags and new words. Is that why we're here? To have children and hurl them into the fiery furnace? To build cities and then raze them to the ground? To long for peace and have war instead? p. 301 Crater p. 112 It was a dark night. He opened the window. All was shadows and silence, but there were stars in the sky. From horizon to horizon the Milky Way unfurled its luminous path. And from the city, rising up to the heavens, came a dull volcanic rumble. p. 165 Tick-tock p. 114 Time slipped slowly by. The ticktock of the clock kept nudging the silence, trying to shoo it away, but the silence resisted with its dense, heavy mass, in which all sounds drowned. Both fought unremittingly on, the ticking clock with the obstinacy of despair and the certain knowledge of

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death, while the silence had on its side disdainful eternity. p. 25 Past p. 116 On this side -or perhaps on the other side too- of the inevitable noises, lay a dense, painful silence, the inquisitorial silence of the past observing us and the ironic silence of the future that awaits us. p. 66

RAISED FROM THE GROUND p. 131

Plain p. 132 A mass of dense, towering clouds was heading towards them from the south over the straw-coloured plain. The path plunged downwards, barely distinguishable between the crumbling ditches planed almost flat by the winds sweeping in across the empty expanse. At the bottom, the path would join a wide road, a rather ambitious word to use in a place so ill served by roads. To the left, almost hugging the low horizon, a small settlement turned its white walls to face the west. As we said before, the plain was vast and smooth, interrupted only by a few holm oaks, alone or in pairs, and little else. From that modest vantage point, it was not difficult to believe that the world had no known end. And seen from there, in the yellowish light and beneath the great leaden sheet of the clouds, the settlement, their destination, seemed unreachable. p. 6

THE HISTORY OF THE SIEGE OF LISBON p. 135

Revelations p. 136 There was a full moon, one of those moons that transform the world into a ghostly apparition, when all things, living and inanimate, whisper mysterious revelations, each expressing its own, and all of them discordant, therefore we never come to understand them and we suffer the anguish of almost but never quite knowing. p. 132 Gods p. 138 (...) indifferent and ironic gaze of the gods who, having stopped fending with each other, and being immortal, distract themselves from eternal boredom by applauding those who win and those who lose, the former because they have killed, the latter because they have died. p. 309 Thinking p. 140 The difference is between an active thinking which goes burrowing around some fact, and this other form of thinking, if worthy of the name, which is inert and detached, when it looks it does not linger but passes on, convinced that what has not been mentioned does not exist, like the sick man who considers himself healthy because the nature of his illness has not yet been diagnosed. p. 82 Qualities p. 142 (…) to imagine a time in which all human behaviour will be artificial, disregarding without further thought sincerity, spontaneity, simplicity, those most excellent and shining qualities of character which were so difficult to define and put into practice in times long since past when, although conscious of having invented falsehood, we still believed ourselves capable of living the truth. p. 172 Intuition p. 144 (…) I simply observe the world and learn from those who know, ninety per cent of the knowledge we claim to possess comes to us in this way not from first-hand experience, and therein also resides the merest premonition, that nebulous information wherein occasionally shines that sudden light we call intuition (…) pp. 199, 200 "Pessoanly" p. 146 Raimundo Silva, thought to himself, in the manner of Fernando Pessoa, If I smoked, I should now light a cigarette, watching the river, thinking how vague and uncertain everything is, but, not smoking, I should

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simply think that everything is truly uncertain and vague, without a cigarette, even though the cigarette, were I to smoke it, would in itself express the uncertainty and vagueness of things, like smoke itself, were I to smoke. pp. 42, 43

THE GOSPEL ACCCORDING TO JESUS CHRIST p. 149

Night p. 150 Night is far from over. Hanging from a nail near the door, the oil lamp is burning, but the flickering flame, like a small, luminous almond, tremulous and unsteady, can barely impinge on the encroaching darkness which fills the house from top to bottom and penetrates the furthest corners where the shadows are so dense that they appear to form one solid mass. p. 7 Illusion p. 152 For no one can tell who will triumph tomorrow, some say God, others say nobody, one hypothesis is as good asthe other because to speak of yesterday, today and tomorrow is simply to give different names to the same illusion. p. 102 Flames p. 154 Were we humans as foolhardy or daring as those butterflies, moths and other winged insects, to throw ourselves all together on to the flames, then who knows, perhaps the blaze would be so fierce and the light so dazzling that God would open His eyes and be roused from His torpor, too late, of course, to recognize us, but in time to see the impending void once we had gone up in smoke. p. 122 World p. 156 (…) What other world awaits me, this one being what it is. p. 112 Wilderness I/I p. 158 Wind came playing between the stones, raised a cloud of dust which swept across the wilderness, and then nothing, silence the universe quietly watching men and animals, perhaps waiting to see what meaning they could find, recognize or attribute to those words (…) p. 178 The shadows p. 160 (…) I myself have caught glimpses, of the light and darkness ahead, I never realized the light was coming from the burning stakes and the shadows from innumerable corpses (...) p. 299 Evil p. 162 But the evil born with the world, and from which the world has learned everything it knows (…) is like that famous Phoenix no one has ever seen and which, even while appearing to perish in the flames, is reborn from an egg hatched from its own ashes. Good is fragile and BLINDNESS p. 165

Black well p. 166 Through the few windows that looked on to the inner courtyard entered the last glimmer of light, grey, moribund, as it rapidly faded, already slipping away into the deep black well of the night ahead. p. 195 Hell p. 168 (…) It had to be, the promised hell is about to begin. p. 64 Here and there p. 170 What's the world like these days, the old man with the black eyepatch had asked, and the doctor's wife replied, There's no difference between inside and outside, between here and there, between the many and the few, between what we're living through and what we shall have to live through (…) p. 229 Still p. 172 The doctor’s wife got up and went to the window. She looked down at the street full of refuse, at the shouting, singing people. Then she lifted her head up to the sky and saw

286 delicate. Evil need only blow the hot breath of venial sin on to the face of purity for it to become scarred for evermore, for the stalk of the lily to break and the flower of orange-blossom to wither. p. 267

everything white, It is my turn, she thought. Fear made her quickly lower her eyes. The city was still there. p. 309 Time p. 174 Time is coming to an end, putrescence is spreading, diseases find the doors open, water is running out, food has become poison (...) p. 281 Silence I/I p. 176 (…) the music has stopped, never has there been so much silence in the world (…) p. 228 Fear p. 178 (…) we were already blind the moment we turned blind, fear struck us blind, fear will keep us blind (…) p. 123 Streets p. 180 The streets are deserted, either because it is still early, or because of rain that is becoming increasingly heavy. There is litter everywhere, some shops have their doors open, but most of them are closed, with no sign of life inside, nor any light. p. 209 Whiteness p. 182 It was as if there were a white wall on the other side. (...) an impenetrable whiteness covered everything. (...) but at the same time it was as if all of this were already dissolving into a kind of strange dimension, without direction or reference points, with neither north or south, below or above. p. 7 All p. 184 Not so much a pale light in the windows, nor a warning reflection on the house fronts, what was there was not a city, it was a great mass of pitch which, on cooling, had hardened in the shape on buildings, rooftops, chimneys, all dead, all faded. p. 258 Meaning p. 186 (…) what meaning do tears have when the world has lost all meaning (…) p. 234 Hallucinations p. 188 (…) at that very moment she thought she had gone mad or that the lifting of the vertigo had given her hallucinations, it could not be true what her eyes revealed, that man nailed to the cross with a white bandage covering his eyes (…) p. 300 Absence p. 190 (...) a silence that seemed to occupy the space of an absence, as if humanity, the whole of humanity, had disappeared, leaving only a light and a soldier keeping watch over it. p. 147

THE DOUBLE p. 193

Certainty p. 194 The night was still clinging to the city’s rooftops, the streetlamps were still lit, but the first, subtle wash of early morning light was beginning to lend a certain transparency to the upper SEEING p. 199

Menace p. 200 What he feels, and he may be the only person amongst those passing by to feel this, is a kind of menace floating in the air, the kind that sensitive temperaments feel when the thick clouds covering the sky grow tense with waiting for the thunderbolt to fall, or as we might feel when a door creaked open in the darkness and a current of icy air brushed our cheek, when an awful feeling of foreboding opened the gates of despair to us, when a diabolical laugh sundered the delicate veil of the soul. p. 107

287 atmosphere. This was how he knew that world would not end today (…) p. 20 Metropolis p. 196 (…) inhabit the vast metropolis that extends over what were, long ago, hills, valleys and plains, and which is now a continuous labyrinthine duplication both horizontally and vertically, initially made more complicated by components we will term diagonals, but which, meanwhile, with the passing of time, have brought some measure of equilibrium to the chaotic urba mesh (…) p. 58

THE LIVES OF THINGS p. 203

Plain p. 204 Total silence spread over the plain. And suddenly the city disappeared. Things. p. 113

MANUAL OF PAINTING AND CALLIGRAPHY p. 207

Minutes p. 208 Life also consists of minutes which cannot be separated from each other, and time becomes a thick, dense and obscure mass in which we swim with difficulty, while overhead an unfathomable light begins to fade, a dawn withdrawing into the night from which it has just emerged. pp. 75, 76 Farewell p. 210 I have always been struck by the absurdity of farewell on station platforms. Everything has already been said and there is no time to start all over again, no sign of the train leaving as the clock ticks out those last few seconds. p. 227 Biography p. 212 What has yet to be, what has come and gone, what no longer is. The place nothing but space, and not a place, the place occupied and therefore designated, the place once more space and the sediment of what remains. This is the most straightforward biography of a man, of a world, and perhaps even of a picture. Or of a book. I insist that everything is biography. Everything is life, lived, painted and written: to be living, to be painting, to be writing: to have lived, to have written, to have painted. And the prelude to all this, the world still uninhabited, waiting or preparing for the arrival of man and the other animals, all the animals, the birds of tender flesh, of feathers and songs. A great silence over the mountains and plains. And then, very much later, the same silence over different mountains and plains and over deserted cities, loose sheets of paper still being blown through the streets by a questioning wind which moves off into the countryside without any response. Between the two imaginings, the one the before demands, and the other which the afterward threatens, there is biography, man, the book, the picture. pp. 112, 113 Markings p. 214 So many words written from the beginning, so many lines, markings, paintings, such a need to explain and understand and, at the same time, so much effort, for we have still not finished explaining or reached any real understanding. (…) The world is old and sorrowful. p. 91 Instant p. 216 Even as I write, the world outside is ALL THE NAMES p. 237

Darkness p. 238 (…) the darkness you’re in is no greater than the darkness inside your own body, they are two darknesses separated by a skin (…) you have to learn to live with the darkness outside just as you learned to live with the darkness inside (…) p. 149 Happen p. 242 It's only because we live so sunk in ourselves that we don't notice that what is actually happening to us leaves intact, at every moment, what might happen to us (...) p. 34

SMALL MEMORIES p. 245

Flashes p. 246 We often forget what we would like to remember, and yet certain images, words, flashes, illuminations

288 changing. No image can capture it, the instant does not exist. The wave that came rolling has already broken, the leaf has ceased to be a wing and will soon snap, withered under our feet. And there is the swollen belly which rapidly goes down, the stretched skin which contracts again, while a child struggles for breath and calls out. This is not the time for the desert. It is no longer time. It is not yet time. p. 114

repeatedly, obsessively return to us from the past at the slightest stimulus, and there's no explanation for that; we don't summon them up, they are simply there. p. 170

THE STONE RAFT p. 253

Dying p. 254 (…) and the clouded sky, the leaden atmosphere, the gloomy landscape were like the dying breath of a world at its end, desolate, expiring after so much sorrow and weariness, so much living and dying, so much resolute life and successive death. p. 172 Wilderness I/II p. 256 He walks on without looking back, at first as quickly as his strength permits, then as he begins to tire, he slows down. He does not feel the least bit nervous in this silence amidst the great walls formed by the mountains, he’s a man who was born and bred in a desert, in a land of dust and stones, where one is never surprised to find a horse’s skull, a hoof with the metal shoe still attached, there are some who say not even the horsemen of the Apocalypse could survive there, the Warhorse died in war, the infected horse died of infection, the starved horse of starvation, death is the supreme raison d’être of all things and their infallible conclusion, what deceives us is this line of the living in which we find ourselves, which advances to what we call the future simply because we had to give it a name, from where we constantly gather new beings while constantly leaving old ones behind which we were obliged to refer to as the dead lest they should emerge from the past. p. 149 Life p. 258 (…) all the more so since it is becoming extremely difficult, should such a thing ever be possible in life, to separate truth from fantasy. p. 24 Silence I/II p. 260 (…) the waters of the Irati retreated like the waves that ebb from the shore and vanish, leaving the riverbed exposed, nothing but pebbles, mud, slime, fishes that gasp as they leap and die, then sudden silence. p. 12 Deception p. 262 (...) the water is different, life transforms itself like this, it has changed and we haven’t even noticed, we were tranquil and thought we hadn’t changed, an illusion, pure deception, we were moving on with life. p. 101 Seed p. 264 (...) a word, once spoken, lasts longer than the sound and sounds that formed it, the word remains, invisible and inaudible, in order to be able to keep its own secret, a kind of hidden seed below the earth that germinates out of sight until suddenly it pushes the soil aside and emerges into the light, a coiled stem, a crumpled leaf slowly unfolding. p. 226 Man p. 266 (...) perhaps man is a creature who cannot and will not be consoled, but certain human actions, without any meaning other than that of being to all appearances meaningless, sustain the hope that man will one day come to weep on man’s shoulder, probably when it is too late, when there is no longer time for anything else. pp. 54, 55

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