José Saramago

José Saramago (1922–2010) remains the only writer in the Portuguese language to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he received in 1998. More than a leading name in the contemporary novel, he was the author of a way of writing — dense, oral, built of immensely long sentences and reinvented punctuation — that stands as one of the most striking stylistic events in twentieth-century Portuguese prose. To read Saramago is, first of all, to relearn how to listen to the language.

A name out of the soil

He was born on 16 November 1922 in Azinhaga, a small village in the municipality of Golegã, in the Ribatejo, into a family of landless peasants. The surname itself has a telling origin: Saramago was not the family name — which would have been de Sousa — but the rural nickname by which his father’s relatives were known. Saramago is a wild field plant (of the genus Raphanus), eaten in times of hunger; it was the registrar who, on his own initiative, entered it as a given surname. The writer thus inherited, in his very name, the memory of the poverty and the rural world he would turn into literary matter.

From Azinhaga the family moved to Lisbon. Without the means to continue his studies, Saramago trained as a mechanical locksmith and held a number of jobs before he could live by writing: he worked as a clerk, a translator, a journalist and an editor. In 1947 he published a first novel, Terra do Pecado (“Land of Sin”), after which came a near-silence as a novelist lasting almost three decades.

Finding a voice

The Saramago the world knows emerges late, already past fifty. It is with Levantado do Chão (1980), a novel about three generations of Alentejo peasants, that he finds the voice and the syntax that would become his signature. Saramago credited the discovery to the memory of his maternal grandparents, Jerónimo and Josefa, illiterate oral storytellers whose tales, he said, taught him that to narrate is to speak. His prose is therefore born of the convention of the storyteller: a present narrator who comments, mocks, hesitates, summons proverbs and popular sayings, and addresses the reader as one talking by the fireside.

The river-sentence

The unit of Saramago’s prose is not the short sentence but the long period, which unwinds over lines and at times over pages, chaining clauses with commas in a single continuous breath. It is a syntax of orality: it follows the way speech actually runs — with asides, returns, restatements — rather than the model of schematic writing. The full stop is rare; the comma does almost all the work of articulation.

This flow dissolves the borders between the narrator’s voice and the characters’. Free indirect discourse — in which a figure’s thought merges with the narration without typographic warning — is the text’s natural register, and it forces the reader into constant attention, into reading as one who listens.

Punctuation reinvented

The most immediately recognisable trait is the handling of dialogue. Saramago dispenses with quotation marks and dashes: speech is not set off on its own line but absorbed into the body of the sentence. A change of speaker is signalled only by a comma followed by a capital letter — a minimal yet sufficient sign that a new voice has taken the floor.

This is no mere graphic whim but a decision about reading. By refusing the punctuation that separates and ranks, Saramago compels us to read the whole page as a stream of sound, restoring to written prose the rhythm and ambiguity of living speech. The capital comes to mark the opening of a line of speech; the comma, its continuity.

The work

From 1980 onward Saramago published, in steady succession, some of the most ambitious novels in the language, oscillating between the rewriting of Portuguese history and allegory of a philosophical and political cast.

Work	Year	English title
Levantado do Chão	1980	Raised from the Ground
Memorial do Convento	1982	Baltasar and Blimunda
O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis	1984	The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
A Jangada de Pedra	1986	The Stone Raft
História do Cerco de Lisboa	1989	The History of the Siege of Lisbon
O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo	1991	The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Ensaio sobre a Cegueira	1995	Blindness
Todos os Nomes	1997	All the Names
As Intermitências da Morte	2005	Death with Interruptions

Memorial do Convento, set in the Portugal of King João V and the building of the convent of Mafra, and O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis, which brings one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms back to life in Lisbon, are perhaps his most celebrated novels. From Ensaio sobre a Cegueira — in which an epidemic of white blindness lays a society bare — allegory becomes the dominant form, with fables about power, death, identity and responsibility. Irony, compassion and a lucid scepticism run through the whole body of work.

The Gospel, censorship and exile

In 1991 O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo, which presents a deeply human Jesus and a critical reading of the divine, provoked a sharp controversy. In 1992 the Portuguese government, by decision of the then Secretary of State for Culture, vetoed the novel’s candidacy for the European Literary Prize, deeming it offensive to Catholics. Saramago, an avowed atheist and a member of the Portuguese Communist Party, experienced the episode as an act of censorship and moved his residence to Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, where he lived with his wife and Spanish translator Pilar del Río. There he wrote much of his late work.

The 1998 Nobel

On 8 October 1998 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising a body of work that, with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony, lets us once again grasp an elusive reality. It was the first — and remains the only — time the prize has honoured an author writing in Portuguese, a recognition that reached beyond Saramago to become a landmark for the language as a whole. Saramago died on 18 June 2010 in Tías, Lanzarote; his legacy is now in the care of the José Saramago Foundation, based at the Casa dos Bicos in Lisbon.

A linguistic legacy

Saramago’s importance for the language lies not only in the prestige of the Nobel but in the demonstration that the written standard of Portuguese could be bent without breaking. By reorganising punctuation, erasing the border between speech and narration, and restoring to prose the breath of orality, he created an idiolect recognisable from its first sentence and, at the same time, deeply rooted in the Portuguese tradition of telling. Few modern writers have made so visible what the language, in the right hands, can still do.