Written over the author's signature and translated into English by Fernando Rodrigues and Tim Crosfield
I was born in a family of landless
peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of
Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a
hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon. My parents were
José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade. José de Sousa would
have been my own name had not the Registrar, on his own
inititiave added the nickname by which my father's family was
known in the village: Saramago. I should add that saramago
is a wild herbaceous plant, whose leaves in those times served at
need as nourishment for the poor. Not until the age of seven,
when I had to present an identification document at primary
school, was it realised that my full name was José de Sousa
Saramago...
This was not, however, the only identity problem to which I was
fated at birth. Though I had come into the world on 16 November
1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later,
on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family
escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth
at the proper legal time.
Maybe because he had served in World War I, in France as an
artillery soldier, and had known other surroundings from those of
the village, my father decided in 1924 to leave farm work and
move with his family to Lisbon, where he started as a policeman,
for which job were required no more "literary qualifications" (a
common expression then...) than reading, writing and
arithmetic.
A few months after settling in the capital my brother Francisco
two years older, died. Though our living conditions had improved
a little after moving, we were never going to be well off.
I was already 13 or 14 when we moved, at last, to our own - but
very tiny - house: till then we had lived in parts of houses,
with other families. During all this time, and until I came of
age I spent many, and very often quite long, periods in the
village with my mother's parents Jerónimo Meirinho and
Josefa Caixinha.
I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was
writing with no spelling mistakes and the third and fourth
classes were done in a single year. Then I was moved up to the
grammar school where I stayed two years, with excellent marks in
the first year, not so good in the second, but was well liked by
classmates and teachers, even being elected (I was then 12...)
treasurer of the Students' Union... Meanwhile my parents reached
the conclusion that, in the absence of resources, they could not
go on keeping me in the grammar school. The only alternative was
to go to a technical school. And so it was: for five years I
learned to be a mechanic. But surprisingly the syllabus at that
time, though obviously technically oriented, included, besides
French, a literature subject. As I had no books at home (my own
books, bought by myself, however with money borrowed from a
friend, I would only have when I was 19) the Portuguese language
textbooks, with their "anthological" character, were what opened
to me the doors of literary fruition: even today I can recite
poetry learnt in that distant era. After finishing the course, I
worked for two years as a mechanic at a car repair shop. By that
time I had already started to frequent, in its evening opening
hours, a public library in Lisbon. And it was there, with no help
or guidance except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste
for reading developed and was refined.
When I got married in 1944, I had already changed jobs. I was now
working in the Social Welfare Service as an administrative civil
servant. My wife, Ilda Reis, then a typist with the Railway
Company, was to become, many years later, one of the most
important Portuguese engravers. She died in 1998. In 1947, the
year of the birth of my only child, Violante, I published my
first book, a novel I myself entitled The Widow, but which
for editorial reasons appeared as The Land of Sin. I wrote
another novel, The Skylight, still unpublished, and
started another one, but did not get past the first few pages:
its title was to be Honey and Gall, or maybe Louis, son
of Tadeus... The matter was settled when I abandoned the
project: it was becoming quite clear to me that I had nothing
worthwhile to say. For 19 years, till 1966, when I got to publish
Possible Poems, I was absent from the Portuguese literary
scene, where few people can have noticed my absence.
For political reasons I became unemployed in 1949, but thanks to
the goodwill of a former teacher at the technical school, I
managed to find work at the metal company where he was a
manager.
At the end of the 1950s I started working at a publishing
company, Estúdios Cor, as production manager, so returning,
but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some
years before. This new activity allowed me acquaintance and
friendship with some of the most important Portuguese writers of
the time. In 1955, to improve the family budget, but also because
I enjoyed it, I started to spend part of my free time in
translation, an activity that would continue till 1981: Colette,
Pär Lagerkvist, Jean
Cassou, Maupassant, André Bonnard, Tolstoi, Baudelaire,
Étienne Balibar, Nikos Poulantzas, Henri Focillon, Jacques
Roumain, Hegel, Raymond Bayer were some of the authors I
translated. Between May 1967 and November 1968, I had another
parallel occupation as a literary critic. Meanwhile, in 1966, I
had published Possible Poems, a poetry book that marked my
return to literature. After that, in 1970, another book of poems,
Probably Joy and shortly after, in 1971 and 1973
respectively, under the titles From this World and the
Other and The Traveller's Baggage, two collections of
newspaper articles which the critics consider essential to the
full understanding of my later work. After my divorce in 1970, I
initiated a relationship, which would last till 1986, with the
Portuguese writer Isabel da Nóbrega.
After leaving the publisher at the end of 1971, I worked for the
following two years at the evening newspaper Diário de
Lisboa, as manager of a cultural supplement and as an
editor.
Published in 1974 with the title The Opinions the DL Had,
those texts represent a very precise "reading" of the last time
of the dictatorship, which was to be toppled that April. In April
1975, I became deputy director of the morning paper Diário
de Nóticias, a post I filled till that November and from
which I was sacked in the aftermath of the changes provoked by
the politico-military coup of the 25th November which blocked the
revolutionary process. Two books mark this era: The Year of
1993, a long poem published in 1975, which some critics
consider a herald of the works that two years later would start
to appear with Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, a
novel, and, under the title of Notes, the political
articles I had published in the newspaper of which I had been a
director.
Unemployed again and bearing in mind the political situation we
were undergoing, without the faintest possibility of finding a
job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time
to find out what I was worth as a writer. At the beginning of
1976, I settled for some weeks in Lavre, a country village in
Alentejo Province. It was that period of study, observation and
note-taking that led, in 1980, to the novel Risen from the
Ground, where the way of narrating which characterises my
novels was born. Meanwhile, in 1978 I had published a collection
of short stories, Quasi Object; in 1979 the play The
Night, and after that, a few months before Risen from the
Ground, a new play, What shall I do with this Book?
With the exception of another play, entitled The Second Life
of Francis of Assisi, published in 1987, the 1980s were
entirely dedicated to the Novel: Baltazar and Blimunda,
1982, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1984, The
Stone Raft, 1986, The History of the Siege of Lisbon,
1989. In 1986, I met the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río.
We got married in 1988.
In consequence of the Portuguese government censorship of The
Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), vetoing its
presentation for the European Literary Prize under the pretext
that the book was offensive to Catholics, my wife and I
transferred our residence to the island of Lanzarote in the
Canaries. At the beginning of that year I published the play
In Nomine Dei, which had been written in Lisbon, from
which the libretto for the opera Divara would be taken,
with music by the Italian composer Azio Corghi and staged for the
first time in Münster, Germany in 1993. This was not the
first cooperation with Corghi: his also is the music to the opera
Blimunda, from my novel Baltazar and Blimunda,
staged in Milan, Italy in 1990. In 1993, I started writing a
diary, Cadernos de Lanzarote (Lanzarote Diaries), with
five volumes so far. In 1995, I published the novel
Blindness and in 1997 All the Names. In 1995, I was
awarded the Camões Prize and in 1998 the Nobel Prize for
Literature.
From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1998, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1999
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/ Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate.
José Saramago died on 18 June 2010.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1998
José Saramago
