“Bridging worlds, one word at a time.”

A new segment of Filamentos by Bruma Publications.

You’re ninety. You’re old, aching. You tell me you were the most beautiful girl of your time – and I believe you. You can’t read. Your hands are thick and deformed, and your feet are stiff. You carried tons of stubble, firewood on your head, and water reservoirs. You’ve seen the sunrise every day. From all the bread you kneaded, a universal banquet would be made. You raised people and livestock and put the animals in your own bed when the cold threatened to freeze them. You told me stories of apparitions and werewolves, old family matters, a crime of death. Beam of your house, fire in your fireplace – seven times you got pregnant, seven times you gave birth.
You know nothing about the world. You don’t understand politics, economics, literature, philosophy, or religion. You’ve inherited a few hundred practical words, an elementary vocabulary. That’s what you’ve lived on, and you’re living on. You’re sensitive to disasters, street cases, princess weddings, and the theft of the neighbor’s rabbits. You have great hatreds for reasons you can no longer remember, great devotions based on nothing. You live. For you, the word Vietnam is just a barbaric sound that doesn’t fit in with your circle of a league and a half-in radius. You know something about hunger: you’ve already seen a black flag hoisted on the church tower (did you tell it to me, or did I dream it?) You carry your little cocoon of interests with you. And yet you’re bright-eyed and cheerful. Your laughter is like a rocket of colors. I’ve never seen anyone laugh like you.

I stand in front of you, and I don’t understand. I am your flesh and blood, but I don’t understand. You came into this world and haven’t healed from knowing what the world is. You reach the end of your life, and the world is still for you what it was when you were born: a question mark, an inaccessible mystery, something that is not part of your heritage: five hundred words, a yard that you can turn around in five minutes, a house made of tile and clay floor. I hold your calloused hand, run my hand over your wrinkled face and white hair, broken by the weight of the loads – and I still don’t understand. You were beautiful, you say, and I can see you’re intelligent. So why was the world stolen from you? Who stole it from you? But let’s say that I do understand, and I could tell you the how, the why, and the when if I knew how to choose from my countless words the ones you could understand. It’s no longer worth it. The world will go on without you – and without me. We won’t have told each other what mattered most.

We really won’t have? I won’t have given you because my words aren’t yours, the world that was rightfully yours. I’m left with this guilt that you don’t accuse me of – and that’s even worse. But why, Grandma, why do you sit on the threshold of your door, open to the starry and immense night, to the sky you know nothing about and will never travel through, to the silence of the fields and the haunted trees, and say, with the quiet serenity of your nineties and the fire of your never-lost adolescence: “The world is so beautiful, and I’m so sorry to die!”
I don’t understand this, but it’s not your fault.
José Saramago, Of This World and the Other (1971)

Translation by Diniz Borges

Brief Biography of José Saramago

José Saramago (born November 16, 1922, Azinhaga, Portugal—died June 18, 2010, Lanzarote, Canary Islands, Spain) was a Portuguese novelist and man of letters who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

The son of rural laborers, Saramago grew up in great poverty in Lisbon. After holding a series of jobs as a mechanic and metalworker, Saramago began working in a Lisbon publishing firm and eventually became a journalist and translator. He joined the Portuguese Communist Party in 1969, published several volumes of poems, and served as editor of a Lisbon newspaper in 1974–75 during the cultural thaw following the overthrow of António Salazar’s dictatorship. An anti-communist backlash followed in which Saramago lost his position, and in his 50s, he began writing the novels that would eventually establish his international reputation.

One of Saramago’s most important novels is Memorial do convento (1982; “Memoirs of the Convent”; Eng. trans. Baltasar and Blimunda). With 18th-century Portugal (during the Inquisition) as a backdrop, it chronicles the efforts of a handicapped war veteran and his lover to flee their situation by using a flying machine powered by human will. Saramago alternates this allegorical fantasy with grimly realistic descriptions of the construction of the Mafra Convent by thousands of laborers pressed into service by King John V. Another ambitious novel, O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (1984; The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis), juxtaposes the romantic involvements of its narrator, a poet-physician who returns to Portugal at the start of the Salazar dictatorship, with long dialogues that examine human nature as revealed in Portuguese history and culture.

Saramago’s practice of setting whimsical parables against realistic historical backgrounds in order to comment ironically on human foibles is exemplified in two novels: A jangada de pedra (1986; The Stone Raft; film 2002), which explores the situation that ensues when the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from Europe and becomes an island, and O evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo (1991; The Gospel According to Jesus Christ), which posits Christ as an innocent caught in the machinations of God and Satan. The outspoken atheist’s ironic comments in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ were deemed too cutting by the Roman Catholic Church, which pressured the Portuguese government to block the book’s entry for a literary prize in 1992. As a result of what he considered censorship, Saramago went into self-imposed exile on the Canary Islands for the remainder of his life.

Among Saramago’s other novels are his first, Manual de pintura e caligrafia (1976; Manual of Painting and Calligraphy), and such subsequent works as Historia do cerco de Lisboa (1989; The History of the Siege of Lisbon), Todos os nomes (1997; All the Names), O homem duplicado (2002; The Double), As intermitências da morte (2005; Death with Interruptions), and A viagem do elefante (2008; The Elephant’s Journey). Ensaio sobre a cegueira (1995; “Essay on Blindness”; Eng. trans. Blindness; film 2008) and Ensaio sobre a lucidez (2004; “Essay on Lucidity”; Eng. trans. Seeing) are companion novels. In 2012, his novel Claraboya (“Skylight”), written in the 1950s but languished in a Portuguese publishing house for decades, was posthumously published.

Saramago also wrote poetry, plays, several volumes of essays and short stories, and autobiographical works. His memoir As pequenas memórias (2006; Small Memories) focuses on his childhood. When he received the Nobel Prize in 1998, his novels were widely read in Europe but less known in the United States; he subsequently gained popularity worldwide. He was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize. In 1999, the biennial Prémio Literário José Saramago (José Saramago Literary Prize) was established in his honor to recognize young authors who were writing in Portuguese.

Brief Biography from: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jose-Saramago

We thank the Luso-American Education Foundation for their support.

“Bridging worlds, one word at a time.”

Vision Statement

“Whispers of the Written” envisions a world where the voices of Portuguese-language writers resonate beyond linguistic borders. By bringing their words to an English-speaking audience, we celebrate the literary heritage of Lusophone cultures and foster a deeper understanding of the universal human experience through storytelling and poetry.

Mission Statement

“Whispers of the Written” is a dedicated space for Portuguese-language writers to share their voices in translation, ensuring their words are heard, felt, and understood across cultures. We curate and present poetry, prose, and reflections from Portugal, Brazil, and the Lusophone diaspora, preserving their essence while making them accessible to a wider audience. We aim to build bridges between languages, histories, and emotions through thoughtful translation and literary engagement—one word at a time.