Poema de Ricardo Reis [Annotated] (Portuguese Edition)

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So thank God his personality cr Pessoa split himself into four poets because he's pretty bland, pretty bleak and boring. So thank God his personality created these self-obsessed madmen to characterize the brilliance of Pessoa's imagination. They are excavators who find themselves punished with self and have different ways of examining selfdom. For instance, the zen mogul Alberto Caeiro deals with his self by fitful and aggravated reservation, not just of himself but of everything.

Violent acceptance of everything: If they want me to be a mystic, fine. So I'm a mystic. I'm a mystic, but only of the body. My soul is simple; it doesn't think. My mysticism consists in not desiring to know, In living wihtout thinking about it. I don't know what Nature is; I sing it. I live on a hilltop in a solitary cabin. And that's what it's all about. He is stubbornly peaceful, overly contemplating something that is utmost simplicity for the sake of reaching the threshhold of no more thought and thus extending towards freedom: Sometimes i start looking at a stone.

I don't start by thinking, Does it have a feeling? I don't force myself to call it my sister. But i get pleasure out of its being a stone, Enjoying it because it feels nothing, Enjoying it because it's not at all related to me. Occasionally i hear the wind blow, And i find that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth having been born This is the asshole of Pessoa's personality. In that why would someone make themselves look like an asshole, it is because assholes are part of the digestive process, they are anatomical not just for the body but for the entire whole of existence, this breaking down and regurgitation.

It is a man content to look upon the world and suffocate on last breaths tranquilly for every moment in his life. By asshole, i mean the stark realization of all chaos, and the peace that comes in the noise of chaos, And the man fell silent, watching the sunset. But a man who hates and loves, what's he got do with sunset? Mas que tem com o poente quem odeia e ama? Then there is the old man, more contemplating and pronouncedly wise, like a university professor. His name is Ricardo Reis. Think of the man at 70, ten years before he expects death, which could be longer or at any moment and the thoughts peddling gracefully in the abyss of sorrows, regrets, memories and joy.

You know, all that old man shit: I only ask the gods to grant me That i ask nothing of them. Happiness is a burden, Good fortune is a yoke, Both bespeaking too secure a state. Not composed nor discomposed, i would calmly live Beyond that state in which men take To sorrow and to joys. He is eloquent and conservative, truly a lovely well-educated throng. In this school of matched personalities, he is the understanding teacher who listens with an avid curiosity and presumes how the child will develop, and sees his own journey every day in the things he teaches, says, implores.

It is inevitably sad, and besides Pessoa himself, he is the saddest of his characters. Because he is the most mortal, in knowing his place apart from the universal and from being a side character more than an infinite testament to man: Recalling who i was, i see somebody else. In memory the past becomes the present. Who i was is somebody i love, Yet only in a dream. The sadness that torments me now Is not for me nor for the past invoked, But for him who lives in me Behind blind eyes.

Nothing knows me but the moment. Even my memory is nothing, and i feel That who i am and who i was Are two contrasting dreams. And then there's Walt Whitman, the infinite testament to Man i was just talking about, Alvaro de Campos. Someone who even within the most unimpressive, paltry statements makes a huge ordeal of the ecstasies within the perameters of any space: I have a terrible cold. And everyone knows how terrible colds Change the whole structure of the universe.

Making us sore at life, Making us sneeze till we get metaphysical. My day is wasted, full of blowing my nose. My head aches vaguely. A sad fix for a minor poet to be in! Today I'm really a minor poet. Whatever i was turns into a dream-wish that's disappeared. Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates. Look, all the world's religions are just as edifying as making candy.

So eat, my dirty little one, eat them up! If i could only down those chocolates as honestly as you do! But no, i'm the thoughtful kind who peels off the silver wrapper, thinks, This is only tinfoil, And throws it all on the floor, just as I've thrown my life away He is a sincere guy who enjoys everything, even anguish and that which he hates.

Scope and Content

And because of this, he is Man. He taps what masculinity is supposed to be about: What a message, what a delight and a feeling. To walk around the home naked is a feeling of security and freedom and suggestion, it is a feeling of warmth and a symbol of contemplation without being overly exerting. It is simply prying into Saturday, which is how Campos spends all of his time, navigating the hills of ancient lands and speaking about the wonders of their greens, their maidens, their perfection in this world.

I want to be the beast that acts out all your gestures, that sinks its teeth in keels and gunwales, that eats the masts and sops up blood and tar on deck, that chews up sails and oars, ropes and pulleys, a monster female sea-serpent, glutting herself on crimes! A symphony of sensations rises, incompatible and analogous, an orchestration of tumultuous crimes, dinning in my blood, of spasmodic bloody orgies resounding on the sea, rising wildly like a hot gale in my soul, a hot dust cloud dimming my lucidity, making me see and dream all this through my skin and veins only!

The book ends with sorry old Pessoa, going on about sorry old bullshit. He knew he was a weak little man with tiny poetry. The little blond boy lies in the street his guts hang out and a toy train loose loose on a string, forgotten. His face is a mash of ooze and nothing. A celluloid fish children float in a tub glints on the curb.

Darkness covers the street. Far off a light still casts its glow on all tomorrow promises Yeah, it's good and sad. But Pessoa's characters are so much more full! Feb 06, Sanjay Varma rated it liked it Shelves: Interesting sideshow to the mainstream modernist poets and thinkers, such as Pound, Breton, Marinetti. I say "sideshow" because I feel certain that Pessoa is an introvert and thrives in solitude. And so he could never live in Paris and attain the close camaraderie that the modernists felt for each other. And this means that his technique of writing via his heteronyms is primarily a natural expression of his introspection.

It is not primarily a fragmentation of personality for a theory; it is not Interesting sideshow to the mainstream modernist poets and thinkers, such as Pound, Breton, Marinetti. It is not primarily a fragmentation of personality for a theory; it is not analogous to cubist fragmentation of forms. I strongly identify with Pessoa's shyness and tendency to introversion, but I dislike these qualities in myself. And so I am biased against Pessoa. These are parodied and subverted in the projection of a different course of events, which is consequently represented by a character who often plays a role equivalent to that of a historian.

It seems appropriate to include another novel by Saramago in this category: The Gospel According to Jesus Christ The literary text reveals a Christ who is, above all, human, as are all the other members of his family. In my opinion, what this author regards as the representative model of the postmodern novel comprises only the novels belonging to the first category of postmodern fiction I identified at the beginning of this discussion, that is to say fiction that is interested in the past and in the rewriting of history.

These two novels, although making use of different fictional techniques the discussion of which goes beyond the scope of this article , are a good illustration of the reflection on the im possibility of escaping from the prison of language in ON SARAMAGO SPRING 57 representing the empirical world.

Administrative / Biographical History

Levantado do Chao is an interesting case of historiographic metafiction. All these events are seen through the eyes of various generations of a poor peasant family from Alentejo and are filtered through a narrator who critically analyses historical facts from a present viewpoint. Fiction can thus vindicate a new way of writing history and — why not — a new way of making history.

Levantado do Chao discusses the ideological writing of official history by playing with two intertexts that are well known to its potential Portuguese readership: It is precisely by confronting the voices of power represented by the landowners, the church and the state with the voices stifled by the dominant classes that the novel uncovers both the project of the perpetuation of injustice and social inequality and that of the battle against it through a progressive raising of political and social awareness in those who have the courage to fight to make themselves heard.

In sum, Levantado do Chao is a fictional text that rereads and rewrites Portuguese history in a politically and socially committed way Seixo, Lugares , thereby drawing attention to the need for a more humanized history. Considering my proposal for a typology of the main trends of postmodern historical fiction in more general terms, it is important to note the problematic underlying the four great types of novel that make up the typology, i.

Books by Álvaro de Campos (Author of Poemas de Álvaro de Campos)

Hence the necessity to tell what has already been told in a different way. Presiding over these modalities is a common concern based on three components: In short, and to paraphrase the quotation from Baltasar and Blimunda that appears in the epigraph to this article, there are different ways of formulating questions to the answers that the world gives us. It is the narrator who frequently tells about past events long after their occurrence, and who knows better than all the other characters the course of historical events and the impact they will have on the narrative and on the empirical reality.

Thus it is most commonly the narrator who ingeniously regulates the mechanisms of analepsis and prolepsis, the introduction of anachronisms, and the announcing of prophecies, which act within the limits of the expectations of the potential readers of literary texts, prefiguring, to a great extent, the symbolic dimension of literary representation. Nonetheless, we cannot forget the existence of historical fictions such as the abovementioned works of Gore Vidal. This will enable me to consider the specificity of the novels belonging to the categories of supra-real historical fiction and uchronian fiction.

What interests me above all is to see how the boundary is drawn between this world the real world which is modeled by historical discourse and the other world, which incorporates elements from the fantastic genre and creates alternative fictional worlds. Thus, I propose to consider, on the one hand, where and how fantastic elements enter Baltasar and Blimunda and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis that is, where and how historical fiction becomes supra-real and, on the other hand, where and how The History of the Siege of Lisbon becomes a uchronian novel.

To this effect, I have selected the following passages on which to comment: However, no mention is made of the airship in chapter five of the novel, which deals with a special encounter between a crippled soldier, Baltasar Mateus, and Blimunda, simple people who apparently are brought together while watching the procession of those accused by the Inquisition. Their meeting is somehow contrived by a gagged woman in the procession.

She is Sebastiana de Jesus, who has visions and revelations, and who feels her heart jump when she is about to locate her daughter Blimunda in the middle of the crowd. At last my heart has given me a sign — my heart has given a deep sigh. I am about to see Blimunda, I am about to see her. Ah, there she is.

Blimunda, Blimunda, Blimunda, my child. She has seen me but cannot speak, she must pretend that she does not recognize me, or even pretend to despise me, a mother who is bewitched and excommunicated, although no more than a quarter Jewess and converted. Do not speak, Blimunda. Just look at me with those eyes of yours, which have the power to see everything. Who can that tall stranger be who stands beside Blimunda?

She does not know — alas, she does not know who he can be or where he comes from. Whatever will become of them? Why do my powers fail me? Judging from his tattered clothes, that harrowed expression, that missing hand, he must be a soldier. Farewell, Blimunda, for I shall see you no more.

Blimunda said to the priest: Then, turning to the tall man standing beside her, she asked: What is your name? And the man immediately told her, thus acknowledging that this woman had a right to ask him. Baltasar Mateus, called Sete-Sois. The monarch honors the ceremony of the auto-da-fe with his presence, emphasizing the support given to the clergy.

Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems

Most curious of all is the irony used by the narrator in describing the procession, his mingling with the condemned, and his characterization of the event as a moment of general cheerfulness, an entertaining show for the people. The auto-da-fe therefore loses part of its religious character to reveal a recreational component that, in its turn, deconstructs the authority of the Church. This process is then reinforced by the importance given to the marriage ritual between Blimunda and Baltasar, undoubtedly heretical and deserving punishment, according to the religious laws of that age.

The introduction of supernatural elements only in the fifth chapter confirms what the first four chapters had already announced, that is, the criticism of the power structure of D. In fact, the introduction of another world in the novel does not surprise the reader, since the preceding chapters have prepared him or her for a narrative that privileges subversion. By emphasizing the heretical side of the political and religious ceremony of the auto-da-fe, by describing the union of a specific couple among the many that have come together to celebrate the event, and by associating Blimunda, from the very beginning, with the supernatural, Saramago hints ON SARAMAGO SPRING 63 at the important role that will be played by Blimunda and Baltasar in the political and ideological criticism leveled by the novel in its retelling of the history of the building of the Mafra Convent.

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is the novel by Saramago in which the inclusion of fantastic elements is taken to an extreme. Its main character is Ricardo Reis, one of the heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, who is transformed into a fictional character. Saramago takes advantage of the fact that Fernando Pessoa died in to re create Ricardo Reis, who in the narrative returns to Portugal after many years in Brazil.

Reis is an alter ego of Pessoa, who, deep in the maze of his multifaceted mind, debates over the anguished questions: The fantastic component enters the narrative surreptitiously in the very first chapter, through the gloomy atmosphere of a rainy winter day surrounding the Highland Brigades arrival in Lisbon. Meanwhile the guest returns to the reception desk, somewhat out of breath after all that effort. He takes the pen and enters the essential details about himself in the register of arrivals, so that it might be known who he claims to be, in the appropriate box on the lined page.

Name, Ricardo Reis, age, forty-eight, place of birth, Oporto, marital status, bachelor, profession, doctor, last place of residence, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, whence he has arrived aboard the Highland Brigade. It reads like the beginning of a confession, an intimate autobiography, all that is hidden is contained in these handwritten lines, the only problem is to discover the rest. The incorporation of another world — which is, in reality, the world of poetic work, a world that exists only on paper — is reinforced by references to the books brought along by Ricardo Reis. One of them in particular acquires special significance because it belonged to the ship but was kept by the passenger upon leaving the vessel.

Also emerging in the first chapter is another element that will acquire particular significance in the course of the novel: Newspapers can, indeed, be interpreted as a sort of mirror of the actuality of , a mirror reflecting the somber image of Fascism, which was gaining ground in Portugal and in Europe, an image of the world distorted by censorship and power interests.

This is achieved through the narration of a version of the siege of Lisbon that contradicts official historiography, starting from the assumption that the Crusaders did not help Dom Afonso Henriques fight the Moors in 1 The first chapter functions as a sort of prologue, in which the proofreader Raimundo Silva introduces his opinions regarding the relative character of historical discourse and the importance of correction, referring to the epigraph of the novel, taken from an imaginary Book of Exhortations.

The second chapter functions as a gateway to an alternative world. In this chapter, the notion of error becomes relevant again, going back to the reflection begun at the outset of the book in the conversation between the proofreader and the historian. The passage into the world of historical deception is not direct. To this effect, I have analyzed some of the reasons for the interest that postmodern literature has taken in the past and in the weaknesses of historical discourse, so as to present a proposal for a typology which can account for some of the regularities characterizing historical fiction produced in the second half of the twentieth century.

For this reason, these novels should not be apprehended simply as rereadings of the past, but also, and especially, as investigations into the present seen from a social, cultural, and political perspective. In all the narratives, this investment is laid bare by privileging the point of view of the Other, without which the correction and the critical rewriting of the past would not be possible.

On the political dimension of postmodern literary representation, see Foley, Hutcheon Poetics and Politics , and Wesseling. On the problem of historical representation and its relation with the narrative discourse, besides the aforementioned volume, see also White Metahistory. On modernist historical fiction, see Wesseling and Hutcheon Poetics. At the end of , Vidal published The Golden Age, which is also part of this series of novels.

On the main trends in scientific fiction produced from the s onwards, see Ebert. For a discussion about the pertinence of the ontological dominance in postmodernism, see, among others, Hutcheon, Poetics , and Wesseling. What I wanted was a room with a view of the river. The door at the end of the hallway had a little enameled plate, black numerals on a white background. Perhaps the guest wishes to slip out quietly in search of Lisbon by night and its secret pleasures This is no simple reflection of the common and familiar proportions the mirror is confronted with, length, width, height, they are not reproduced in it one by one and readily identifiable.

Instead they are fused into a simple intangible apparition on a plane that is at once remote and near, unless there is some paradox in this explanation which the mind avoids out of laziness. Here is Ricardo Reis contemplating himself in the depths of the mirror, one of the countless persons that he is, all of them weary. Nothing more than yet another regurgitation of those interminable, played-out accounts of the siege, the description of places, the speeches and deeds of the royal personage Works Cited Auerbach, Erich.

The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. The Idea of the Postmodern. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction. U of South Carolina P, Columbia Literary History of the United States. Historia Literaria, Modernismo e Pos-Modernismo. The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction. As Palavras eAs Coisas. Algumas Notas sobre a Historicidade da Literatura.

Books by Álvaro de Campos

A Poetics of Postmodernism: The Politics of Postmodernism. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. U of Nebraska P, Marinho, Maria de Fatima. O Romance Historico em Portugal. Campo das Letras, Associagao Internacional de Lusitanistas, Martins, Adriana Alves de Paula. Fim de Seculo, A Fantasia Cientffica de Philip K. A Bagagem do Viajante. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Trans, of Memorial do Convento. Bertrand do Brasil, Deste Mundo e do Outro.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. The History of the Siege of Lisbon. Trans, of Historia do Cerco de Lisboa. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Lugares da Ficgao em Jose Saramago. O Essencial e Outros Ensaios. Silva, Teresa Cristina Cerdeira da. Jose Saramago — Entre a Historia e a Ficgdo: Writing History as a Prophet. Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel.

Johns Hopkins UP, The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. John the words of Jesus. The question that interests me — captured in an ironic synthesis by the Proustian quote — is the representation of the others speech in a literary discourse, which, through its reference to the other, establishes with him or her a double-faced relationship composed in equal parts of respect and betrayal. In other words, writing is understood here as a labyrinthine agglomeration of discourses belonging to different times, places and genres and whose fragmentary irruptions break up the allegedly smooth continuity of the text.

At the same time respected and betrayed, those singular utterances, when brought into the discursive present, place in check the historical linearity that had situated them in a given chronological context, henceforward rendered inoperative. The enterprise of writing under the weight of the remembered past is not limited to any given author or historical period. Even in those times when the act of quotation lacked an ethical or aesthetic justification for instance in antiquity, with its Platonic disapproval of poetic imitation , writers were incapable of producing texts resplendent with an inaugural purity of origin.

Remnants and ruins have always been treasured material, zealously preserved by time in order to be preyed upon by our memory in a conscious exercise of cultural pillage. It should be noted, however, that such a plunder is a generous undertaking, since it brings up to date our interpretation of tradition, whether it proceeds in a reverential mode or is carried forth by a countercurrent of anti-canonical defiance.

The new text subjects the past to a regenerative action, making it leave its own bounds and thus acquire unexpected shapes and angles. On the other hand, it is also undeniable that different ways of dealing with the intertext do not always share the same motivations nor lead invariably to the same results. It has also challenged the absolute authority of authors and their property rights with regard to the truth of the text, and it has understood that the recovery of traditions is not tantamount to endorsing them or placing oneself in their debt.

But books that read books do not cease to function as well as readers of the world: It suffices to recall in this context his recent novel All the Names , where Sr. To refuse to separate the dead from the living is to maintain them all present, since, after all, the freedom associated with the present does not consist in its autonomy in relation to the past, but rather in the possibility of the two engaging in a fruitful dialogue, capable of responding in a different manner to those echoes from the past that have remained unanswered.

For the purposes of this article, I will focus on his recovery of the texts that compose the foundations of Portuguese and Western imagination, with particular emphasis on Camoes, the Bible, and the narratives of history. The Camoes Intertext It is hardly by accident that the author most commonly quoted, referred to or parodied in the Portuguese literary tradition should be Camoes, particularly Camoes the author of The Lusiads.

Using the roads that lead to Rome as the source for his pastiche, Saramago creates his own version of the expression, which designates Camoes as the meeting point of all Portuguese utterances. This is tantamount to saying that when our collective memory evokes Camoes, it never does so innocently. A reflex of another generation that managed to turn fatalism into action, this revolutionary generation includes women as well, metonymically represented by Maria Adelaide Espada, whose blue eyes are a legacy of her grandfather and whose name boasts a most singular etymology, as Germanic in origin as the names of the former masters: These are ideal ingredients of an epic discourse that claims the right to come to a standstill in the moment of conquered glory.

However, in spite of the fact that this historical conquest was being threatened by the inevitable crises that affect any inaugural experience, Saramago allowed himself the right to celebrate a fully realized utopia: In each of these narrative moments, discursive affinity with epic loftiness is given a particular textual shape. When Bartolomeu, Baltasar and Blimunda are about to take off in the Passarola, the narrator, aware that the project is precarious, its chances of success fragile, and its participants face great obstacles, comes to their aid and invokes — as in the epic — divine assistance: And now, Guardian Angel, what will you do?

For your presence has never been so necessary since you were first entrusted with this role. Here you have three people who will shortly go up into the sky, where man has never ventured, and they need your protection. They have done as much as they can on their own Unless you are prepared to give a little help, Guardian Angel, you are neither an angel nor anything else She is that woman who is holding the glass phial.

Protect her, Guardian Angel, for if the phial should break, there will be no journey, and that priest who is behaving so strangely, will not be able to make his escape. Also protect the man working on the roof. His left hand is missing, and you are to blame, for you were inattentive out there on the battlefield when he was wounded.

Through an extended metaphor, the narrator goes on to evoke in a consistent manner the archetypal elements of The Lusiadsr.

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What happens here is that the classic text, consecrated by tradition, is made to bestow on the present adventure a measure of heroic bravery and an epic dimension that it is deemed to deserve. In the episode in which the workers are brought to Mafra against their will, in order to expedite the construction of the basilica, the intertext is deployed with bitter irony, as a model of a rebellious diatribe against the arbitrary implementation of royal power.

Here however the similarities end, since the narrated story lacks the epic scope of the glorious past venture and the expectation of a victory over the unknown that justified, in principle, the departure of the sailors. The devil take the man who first put Dry wood on the waves with a sail! If, up to this point, the Camonian intertext could be taken to function merely as a sort of rhetorical background, further development of the scene makes the allusive commitment definitive by reprising literally a number of verses from The Lusiads.

With no concern for verisimilitude, these mothers and wives also say farewell to their sons and husbands in classic decasyllabics, expressly quoted by Saramago as a textual ready-made that produces an inescapable semantic estrangement. Oh, sweet and beloved husband; while another wails: Ah, my beloved boy, who gave me comfort and protection in my weary old age. The lamentations went on and on until the nearby mountains echoed those cries, moved by pity for these poor creatures.

The men are already at some distance and finally disappear from sight where the road curves, their eyes filled with tears — large teardrops in the case of the most sensitive among them — and then a voice rends the air. Having mounted an embankment, a natural pulpit for countryfolk, he calls out: Ah, empty ambition, senseless cupidity, infamous King, nation without justice. In its original form, this line is a splendid emblem of the view of Portugal as a pier of departures and of the expansionist project that continued to sustain the phantom of Portuguese glory long after its persistence had been recognized as fallacious.

In addition to this voyage devoid of epic qualities that brings Dr. In its vision of a separatist utopia, The Stone Raft reaches beyond a strategic intervention in the history of the present. Instead, it is the land itself, the raft-peninsula, that embarks on a voyage, reorienting its bearings in order to find its own direction. This is how the narrator comments on the separation of the Iberian landmass my emphasis to mark the quotation from The Luslads , first stanza of Canto One: If human strength had once been surpassed by the sailors who assumed the task of conquering the unknown, it was now helpless in face of an irreversible geological spectacle, which overlaid the tragedy with a suggestion of an erotic charge produced by the collusion of natural forces and history: Not surprisingly, a good illustration of this approach may be found in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis , since for the more recent historical record, such as that explored in the novel, the press has been a rich source of documentation.

Therefore, when faced with newspaper sources, a writer who is aware of the traps they contain learns to question them in such a way as to make them disclose their submerged meanings. These elements reappear in the novel not as a merely specular registry of events; instead, they become endowed with a symbolic meaning by the narrative context into which they are integrated. Such is, for instance, the case of the weather.

Nineteen thirty- six was, in fact, a grey and rainy year, as daily newspaper reports consistently confirm. In the following examples, all taken from the first pages of the novel, references to rain carry an incriminating charge: It is raining over the colorless city. The waters of the river are polluted with mud, the riverbanks flooded. A dark vessel, the Highland Brigade , ascends the somber river Their shoulders bent under the monotonous rain Has there been much rain, the passenger inquired.

For the last two months it has been bucketing down like the great flood, the driver replied as he switched off his windshield wipers. The narrative transforms a fortuitous, circumstantial piece of data into a symbolically charged, motivated and necessary fictional construct. Another form of appropriation of newspaper data can be illustrated by the narrative episode in which the writers virtuosity of composition reaches its highest point: The coming together of all these apparently disparate elements produces a text of many voices and varied rhythms, in which tragedy and irony go hand-in-hand and the patchwork of borrowings from different narrative registers never disguises its composite nature.

The episode creates a sort of rhythmic vortex, sweeping up the reader into a state where the constant jumping between discourses of diverse nature and orientation generates a contradictory multiplicity of responses and emotional reactions. Historical discourses are also present in Baltasar and Blimunda , the novel whose writing required extensive research into the documents of the Inquisition, Portuguese convents, the court of Dom Joao V and, of course, the construction works at Mafra.

The author was able to reconstitute these realities while at the same time subverting and parodying the perspective of the official record by celebrating the oppressed workers instead of the king who had been the intended beneficiary of the architectural tribute.

What The History of the Siege of Lisbon postulates is precisely this: Far from engaging in gratuitous playfulness, Saramago asks here some very serious questions with regard to a new concept of history. It is, therefore, less important to detect in the novel traces of historical accounts of the siege of Lisbon undoubtedly researched by Saramago than to uncover its engagement with the theoretical premises of a new historiography founded on the principles supplied by the French Nouvelle Histoire , with which Saramago had already shown himself to be familiar.

The first level is situated outside the novel: But before this history can materialize, a new narrative line has to unfold, situated in the present: This book belongs to you. Let me rephrase that, This is your book. Maria Sara and Raimundo Silva will have the right to their own story, ingeniously mirrored by a love story from the past, which is boldly brought into relief by the proofreader turned writer in the text he sets out to compose, and which resonates also with echoes of another ancient narrative, the medieval romance Amadis de Gaula.

This specular love, born of the comings and goings of the love experienced in the present, is lived by a new Oriana of the Amadis fame , now named Ouroana, who in her own way becomes a teacher of the ways of passion. The multiple levels of these overlapping stories, with their images reproduced in duplicate or triplicate, are all contained in what is, in the end, the only narrative that we read from the beginning to the end: This brings me to reiterate, in other words, what I have suggested earlier, that this novel is a sort of deductive parable, an exemplification of an idea expressed in the initial chapter.

Neither one of these concepts, however, is aimed at discrediting the historical project as such; indeed, they have the opposite effect, as they serve to empower the truth-generating potential of the historical fiction. The Biblical Intertext Saramago has stated, on a number of occasions particularly when asked about his novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ -, that it is not necessary to be a believer in order to see oneself as immersed in Christian culture.

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An unexceptionable affirmation, as the writer is well aware, considering to what extent the formation of Western ethical discourse has been indebted to the Judeo-Christian imaginary, as have been Western aesthetic models in the areas of literature, visual arts, architecture or music: In that novel, religious references employed by the discourses of the Latifundium, the Church and the State in order to legitimize their violent and authoritarian actions are ironically desecrated when denounced as instruments of political power.

On the other hand, Saramago often avails himself of a strategy of narrative displacement in producing heretical versions of religious models. A more radical procedure than the deconstruction of sacred truths by means of irony, this form of usurpation does not negate the value of the model, but rather denies its uniqueness and exemplary character, insofar as it multiplies the original pattern or discovers its recurrences in places and people that have no relation to divinity.

An example may be found in the references to the Way of the Cross, the birth of Jesus Christ and the resurrection of the dead that occur in three central episodes of the novel. Thus doubled, the suffering of Christ loses the singularity that has given it its exemplary force: Golgota and the Cyrenian, Veronica with her handkerchief, the Last Supper and the centurions are reiterated by the narrative in what is not a repetition, but an enactment of a new, greater drama if of lesser value to the official history by a different group of actors.

Two guards are taking him. Furthermore, to complete the traditional association of Christ with light, the narrative discourse invents a deceptive falsehood: The falsehood is deceptive because although the ants confuse the radiance of the fireflies with sunlight, metaphorically they are not mistaken in their announcement of another sunrise, represented by the birth of Maria Adelaide: That which the example of Christ promises for an afterlife is realized in the present, as a utopia made concrete within history. Educated at the University of Glasgow he received an M.

He was a member of many associations and societies including: His career was wide and varied. From he was an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester, before progressing to the position of lecturer in Latin American Literature and finally senior lecturer in Latin American Literature From he lectured at the University of Liverpool and was also a visiting lecturer at Middlebury College in and In addition he also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester and was the guest of honour at a reception given by the Vice-Chancellor.

Dr Pontiero also won various prizes for his work. In addition Dr Pontiero translated numerous stories and poems as well as writing works of his own. He also contributed many articles and reviews in English and Spanish to professional journals in Europe and the Americas. Born into a farming community in in Azinhaga, Portugal, he was a lifelong atheist and a member of the Communist Party. During his secondary education in Lisbon, he was forced to abandon his studies because of financial difficulties and held various manual jobs prior to becoming a journalist and writer.

By the s and early s he had published several books of poetry and essays and by the late s was beginning to draft plays and to write his early novels. In the s he published four major novels which would bring him the international recognition of being Portugal's most eminent, distinguished and influential contemporary writer and won many awards including the Nobel Prize for Literature in The collection was received by the library in seven labelled folders. However, because some of the material has been collected after the death of Dr Pontiero, it is unclear whether or not it was he who actually arranged the folders or possibly Dr Juan Sager who donated the papers.

In preparing this updated list, the collection has been arranged to reflect the order in which it was received. The collection includes material which is subject to the Data Protection Act In accordance with the DPA, UML has made every attempt to ensure that all personal and sensitive personal data has been processed fairly, lawfully and accurately.

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