Playwrights From Portugal

"Sei, Camoens, denn mein Vorbild!"

"Gedoemd poëet, zwerver en banneling."

"Ed or quella del colto, e buon Luigi, Tant 'oltre stende il glorioso volo, Ch'i tuoi spalmati legni andar men lunge.'Ond'a quelli, a cui s'alza il nostro polo, Ed a chi ferma incontra i suoi vestigi, Per lui del corso tuo la fama aggiunge."

"Fortuna estrana que al ingenio aplico La vida pobre y el sepulcro rico."

"Camoëns, en Portugal, ouvrait une carrière toute nouvelle, et s'acquérait une réputation qui dure encore parmi ses compatriotes, qui l'appellent le Virgile portugais."

"Camões soothed with it [the Sonnet] an exile's grief."

"Black the mountains of Timor Sweeping from the sea Watched Camoëns drift ashore, Rags and misery . . . Hidden in that hollow rod Slept, like heavenly flame Titan-stolen from a god, Lusitania's flame."

"Sonnet in full:"

"Eu cantarei de amor tão docemente, Por uns termos em si tão concertados, Que dois mil acidentes namorados Faça sentir ao peito que não sente."

"Porém, pera cantar de vosso gesto A composição alta e milagrosa Aqui falta saber, engenho e arte."

"[Ah o amor...] que nasce não sei onde, Vem não sei como, e dói não sei porquê."

"In general, fakirs, like scribes and potters, are sitting down, when he’s standing up, a fakir is just like an other man, and sitting down, he’ll be smaller than the others,"

"The day before is what we bring to the day we're actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done."

"… because contrary to what people say, two weaknesses don't make for a still greater weakness, but for renewed strength ..."

"Very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the firs phalange, the mesophalange and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain. [...] It should be noted that fingers are without brains, these develop gradually with the passage of time and with the help of what the eyes see…. That is why the fingers have always excelled at uncovering what is concealed."

"Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs."

"Age carries with it a double load of guilt,"

"The emptiness of old age had caused him to forget that, in matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little."

"He felt very tired, not from the mental effort, but because he had suddenly seen what the world was like, how there are many lies and truths,"

"After all, we are always on time, behind time, in time, but never out of time, no matter how often we are told that we are."

"Don’t quibble with the king over pears, let him eat the ripe ones and give you the green ones."

"It’s is the old who age a day every hour,"

"The best way to killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud."

"Every thing in life is a uniform; the only time our bodies are truly in civilian dress is when we’re naked."

"Creating is always so much more stimulating than destroying."

"Lord knows why they depict death with wings when death is everywhere."

"Time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagination that we can catch him out."

"Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed."

"Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts."

"[T]here are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything."

"...eu já estava na vigésima parte do livro, triste, quando senti que o livro podia ser escrito. Percebi que só seria capaz de escrevê-lo se o fizesse como se contasse. Não passando para a escrita o chamado discurso oral, porque isso é impossível, mas introduzindo na escrita um me-canismo de aparente prolixidade, aparente desor-ganização do discurso. Digo aparente porque sei o trabalho que me deu fazer de conta que era tudo assim."

"We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts if, one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we have only the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in the verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other."

"No dia seguinte, ninguém morreu."

"A propósito, não resistiremos a recordar que a morte, por si mesma, sozinha, sem qualquer ajuda externa, sempre matou muito menos que o homem."

"The man changed position, turned his back on the wardrobe blocking the door and let his right arm slide down toward the side on which the dog is lying. A minute later, he was awake. He was thirsty. He turned on his bedside light, got up, shuffled his feet into the slippers which were, as always, providing a pillow for the dog's head, and went into the kitchen. Death followed him. The man filled a glass with water and drank it. At this point, the dog appeared, slaked his thirst in the water-dish next to the back door and then looked up at his master. I suppose you want to go out, said the cellist. He opened the door and waited until the animal came back. A little water remained in his glass. Death looked at it and made an effort to imagine what it must be like to feel thirsty, but failed. She would have been equally incapable of imagining it when she'd had to make people die of thirst in the desert, but at the time she hadn't even tried. The dog returned, wagging his tail. Let's go back to sleep, said the man. They went into the bedroom again, the dog turned around twice, then curled up into a ball. The man drew the sheet up to his neck, coughed twice and soon afterward was asleep again. Sitting in her corner, death was watching. Much later, the dog got up from the carpet and jumped onto the sofa. For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog on her lap."

"Mal sabendo ainda soletrar, já lia, sem perceber que estava lendo. Identificar na escrita do jornal uma palavra que eu conhecesse era como encontrar um marco na estrada a dizer-me que ia bem, que seguia na boa direcção. E foi assim, desta maneira algo invulgar, Diário após Diário, mês após mês, fazendo de conta que não ouvia as piadas dos adultos da casa, que se divertiam por estar eu a olhar para o jornal como se fosse um muro, que a minha hora de os deixar sem fala chegou, quando, um dia, de um fôlego, li em voz alta, sem titubear, nervoso mas triunfante, umas quantas linhas seguidas."

"The past is an immense area of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a motorway, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath. Sometimes scorpions crawl out or centipedes, fat white caterpillars or ripe chrysalises, but it's not impossible that, at least once, an elephant might appear..."

"When the lord, also known as god, realised that adam and eve, although perfect in every outward aspect, could not utter a word or make even the most primitive of sounds, he must have felt annoyed with himself, for there was no one else in the garden of eden whom he could blame for this grave oversight..."

"In short, as well as being as big a son of a bitch as the lord, abraham was a consummate liar, ready to deceive anyone with his forked tongue, which in this case, according to the personal dictionary belonging to the narrator of this story, means treacherous, perfidious, false, disloyal and other similarly fine qualities. When he reached the place of which the lord had spoken, abraham built an alter and placed the wood on it. He then tied up his son and lifted him on to the altar, on top of the wood. Without pausing, he took up his knife in order to sacrifice the poor boy and was just about to slit his throat when he felt a hand grip his arm and heard a voice in his ear shouting, What are you doing, you wretch, killing your own son, burning him, it's the same old story it starts with a lamb and ends with the murder of the very person you should love most, But the lord told me to do it, said abraham, struggling, Keep still, or I'll be the one who does the killing, untie that boy at once, then kneel down and beg his forgiveness, Who are you. My name is cain, I'm the angel who saved isaac's life. This isn't true, cain is no angel, that title belongs to the being who has just landed with a great flapping of wings and who is now declaiming like an actor who has finally heard his cue, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, nor do anything to him, for now I know that thou fearest the lord, being prepared, for love of him, to sacrifice even your only son, You're late, said cain, the only reason isaac isn't dead is because I stepped in to prevent it. The angel looked suitably contrite, I'm terribly sorry to be late, but it really wasn't my fault, I was on my way here when I developed a mechanical problem in my right wing it was out of synch with the left one, and the result was that I got completely turned around, in fact I wasn't even sure I would get here, and given that no one had told me which of these mountains had been chosen as the place of sacrifice, it's a miracle I arrived at all, You're late, said cain again, Better late than never, replied the angel smugly, as if he had uttered a great truth, That's where you're wrong, never is not the opposite of late, the opposite of late is too late, retorted cain. The angel muttered, Oh, no, a rationalist, and since he had nor yet completed the mission with which he had been charged, he rattled off the rest of his message, This is what the lord commanded me to say: since you were capable of doing this and did not withhold your own son, I swear by my good name that I will bless you and multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens and as the sand upon the seashore and they will possess the gates of his enemies, and in your seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed because you have obeyed my voice, the word of the lord, That, for those who don't know it or pretend to ignore it, is the lord's double accounting system, said cain, whereby one man can win and the other not lose, apart from that, I don't see why all the people of the earth will be blessed just because abraham obeyed a stupid order, That is what we in heaven call due obedience, said the angel."

"My country is the Portuguese language."

"Ah, who will write the history of what might have been?"

"The most gifted novelist alive in the world today ... one of the last titans of an expiring literary genre."

"[The Gospel According to Jesus Christ] is an awesome work, imaginatively superior to any other life of Jesus, including the four canonical Gospels."

"José Saramago will be a permanent part of the Western canon. ... In all of his wonderful meditations upon the ruefulness of our lives, there is always the spirit of laughter beckoning us in the art of somehow going on. His achievement is one of the enlargements of life."

"A slight, modest man who looks more like an elderly clerk than a literary giant..."

"Saramago is not easy to read. He punctuates mostly with commas, doesn't paragraph often, doesn't set off conversation in quotes —; mannerisms I wouldn't endure in a lesser writer; but Saramago is worth it. More than worth it. Transcendently worth it."

"I read to learn. I have always read to learn. For example, I have learned almost more than I can bear to know from Saramago's Blindness and Seeing. But for all the intensity of Saramago's moral purpose and the awful clarity of his vision, my whole heart and soul rebel against calling those great novels "didactic.""

"With parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony[, José Saramago] continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality."

"A writer, like Faulkner, so confident of his resources and ultimate destination that he can bring any improbability to life."

"Worse still if that sameness should ever become total."