José Saramago

Giovanni Pontiero

Baltasar and Blimunda

Jose Saramago

When Raimundo Silva, humble proof-reader for a Lisbon publishing house, takes it upon himself to insert a negative into the sentence of a history book, he rewrites history. The effect of this act of insubordination is to make his editor, the voluptuous Dr Maria Sara, fall in love with him.

The History of the Siege of Lisbon

In a mythic adventure and political fable about the contemporary European community, the Iberian peninsula detaches from the Continent and floats off to sea, becoming home to a group of god-like humans

The Stone Raft

Lygia Bojunga Nunes

A young boy becomes friends with the artist in the apartment upstairs and tries hard to understand when his friend commits suicide.

My Friend the Painter

An Anthology of Brazilian Modernist Poetry

A wry, fictional account of the life of Christ by the 1998 Nobel laureate in literature “Illuminated by ferocious wit, gentle passion, and poetry.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review For José Saramago, the life of Jesus Christ and the story of his Passion were things of this earth: a child crying, a gust of wind, the caress of a woman half asleep, the bleat of a goat or the bark of a dog, a prayer uttered in the grayish morning light. The Holy Family reflects the real complexities of any family, but this is realism filled with vision, dream, and omen. Saramago’s deft psychological portrait of a savior who is at once the Son of God and a young man of this earth is an expert interweaving of poetry and irony, spirituality and irreverence. The result is nothing less than a brilliant skeptic’s wry inquest into the meaning of God and of human existence.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

"The Translator's Dialogue: Giovanni Pontiero" is a tribute to an outstanding translator of literary works from Portuguese, Luso-Brasilian, Italian and Spanish into English. The translator introduced authors such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Clarice Lispector and Jose Saramago to the English reading world.Pontiero's essays shed light on the process of literary translation and its impact on cultural perception. This process is exemplified by Pontiero the translator and analyst, some of the authors he collaborated with, publishers' editors and literary critics and, finally, by an unpublished translation of a short story by Jose Saramago, "Coisas."

Giovanni Pontiero

Books

Your next favorite book is out there