Pictures from a Library
Reading Saramago in Giovanni Pontiero’s Faxes

Olive tree marking the site of Saramago’s ashes, Casa dos Bicos, Lisbon, 2026. Image provided by the Author.

From 1932 to 1974 the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal exerted control over its people by denying them an education in a bid to keep them away from knowledge and therefore power (Tiago Duarte). In contrast, the country’s greatest living novelist at the time, José Saramago, was deeply interested in the relationship between books, readers and their authors. As he observed, ‘each book I write is a conversation with the reader’, and such a conversation was deemed a collaborative process requiring active participation, for reading and writing are political acts which hold the ‘promise of a privileged place of encounter between two self-exploring subjectivities’ (Nicola J. Watson). Given these concerns, Saramago would have been gratified to know that thousands of his readers took to the streets when his body left his island home of Lanzarote in 2010 for burial in Lisbon, waving their copies of his novels aloft as a mark of respect, admiration and affection for the work he had created and they had brought to life in their imaginations.

Asserting ‘national cultural capital and international visibility’ (Watson), Saramago established a foundation in his name in 2007, housed within the sixteenth-century Casa dos Bicos in Lisbon. He defined its purpose as the defence of the Declaration of Human Rights, the protection of the environment and the promotion of contemporary literature and Portuguese culture. His ashes are buried nearby under an ancient olive tree transplanted from his native village in Azinhaga (shown here). Since his death Saramago’s foundation has also become a literary shrine to which his readers flock from across the globe to learn the story of his life and his books (now translated into forty-eight languages), presented through a permanent display of his personal effects. For writers ‘stamp themselves upon their possessions… indelibly’ (Virginia Woolf) and even their mundane tools can carry a talismanic agency engendering an intimate encounter between writer and reader. Other material traces have the power to retain the ghostly outline of a text’s genesis, and are captured in archives (drafts, notes, plans, letters) as is evident in the papers of the distinguished translator Giovanni Pontiero, held in the Rylands. The fact that Pontiero believed that the act of translation was a matter of reading, ‘essentially the closest reading I can give a text in word or spirit’, ideally qualified him as Saramago’s exclusive English translator until his untimely death in 1996. Yet it is through the medium of the antwacky technology of the fax machine that we find the best record of the dialogue between our author and his translator. Fax after fax flow between the pair ‘conveying the dense content of a letter as quickly as a telephone conversation… [accelerating] the work cycle from weeks to minutes’ (Jonathan Coopersmith). And so through this wholly unexpected and unsung medium of these faded, odiferous pages their collaboration leaps into life to unlock the text, acting, as Saramago observes, like ‘doors opening to give me a deeper understanding of my own language’.