In the celebrations of Jose Saramago´s centenary

By David Rosh Pina

"The journey never ends, only travelers end. And even they can still go on in the memory, the remembrance, the narrative," wrote José Saramago, the Portuguese writer and laureate of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony [with which he] continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.”

Born into a family of landless peasants in Azinhaga do Ribatejo, Portugal, on November 16^th, 1922, he ended his journey, aged 87. on June 18^th, 2010, in Las Palmas, Canarias, the Spanish Atlantic islands. This year he completed 100years but his journey goes on in our memory.

To pay tribute to José Saramago on the centenary of his birth, the embassy of Portugal in Tel Aviv organized an event in the central public library of the city, Beit Ariela Shaar Zion Library, with the support of the Portuguese Instituto Camoes and the José Saramago Foundation. The ambassador of Portugal, Jorge Cabral, opened the event which counted with the participation of Professor Carlos Reis, the High Commissioner to the centenary of Jose Saramago, and the Israeli foremost experts in Jose Saramago, Miriam Ringel, the author of the “Moral Imagination in Saramago´s Work”, and Menachem Peri, as well as the translator of Saramago´s work into Hebrew, Miriam Tivon.

Known for novels such as Baltasar and Blimunda, a “brilliant...enchanting novel” (The New York Times Book Review) set in eighteenth-century Portugal at the height of the Inquisition, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Blindness, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Cain, The Elephant's journey, and so many others.

To read Saramago is perhaps the best way of celebrating his 100th anniversary to perpetuate his memory. As he once wrote in his book Death with Interruptions: “Even death, faced with the option of death or life, she would choose life.”