Nobel Portuguese novelist named for a wild radish insult
José Saramago (1922–2010) won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature for imaginative, compassionate, ironic parables. Over two million copies of his books sold in Portugal alone, in twenty-five languages—yet a clerk once stuck his father’s mocking nickname “saramago” (wild radish) on the birth register.
Born 16 November 1922 to landless peasants José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade in Azinhaga, Ribatejo, about a hundred kilometres northeast of Lisbon, he moved to Lisbon in 1924 when his father joined the police; elder brother Francisco soon died at four. Vacations with grandparents left the image of his stroke-stricken grandfather embracing fig and olive trees in farewell. After lathe training and mechanic work he haunted public libraries, married typist-artist Ilda Reis in 1944 (divorced 1970; daughter Violante born 1947), and worked welfare, publishing, and translation jobs.
Land of Sin (1947) was his lone novel until poetry returned with Possible Poems (1966) and Probably Joy (1970). After Portugal’s 1974 revolution he became assistant director of Diário de Notícias on 9 April 1975 under Vasco Gonçalves; a pro-communist line sparked a staff revolt, and after his angry intervention twenty-four journalists were expelled. Dismissal that year pushed him into full-time writing. A libertarian communist and atheist, he needled Church, EU, and IMF; in 1992 Cavaco Silva’s government ordered The Gospel According to Jesus Christ pulled from a European prize shortlist, after which he settled in the Canary Islands with translator Pilar del Río.
The Swedish Academy praised parables that regrasp “elusory reality”; allegories often subvert official history through a theopoetic human lens. In 1992 he helped found Lisbon’s National Front for the Defense of Culture; in 2007 the José Saramago Foundation took up human rights, Portuguese and global culture, and environmental concerns. He died 18 June 2010.
From Azinhaga poverty to Nobel stature, the wild-radish surname became a world brand for sentences that refuse consoling myths.
Source: José Saramago
