Jose Saramago wrote a Walk in the Country in 1981.
The NYTimes reviewed it 20 years later, not understanding it and missing more than what is lost in translation. "The poet of Portugal is José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize, a fabulist with the power of some mesmeric storyteller at the fireside. So you might expect that a book by Saramago called ''Journey to Portugal,'' tricked out with pretty photographs, would light up a country that was once Europe's anchor and now is shamefully unfamiliar. Sadly, you'd be wrong."
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/01/reviews/010401.01pyelt.html
Not an auspicious start.
Is it a travel book? No. It offers no trips, just a record of where the author went, what he experienced and what he thought.
Is it a book written for Westerners? No. It was published in Portuguese.
At least the writers of the review have a better assessment of how it SHOULD be assessed. "All this is puzzling, unless you realize that ''Journey to Portugal'' isn't a travel book at all. It's a historical document in its own right -- a product of the year 1979, when Saramago's journey started. A seemingly interminable dictatorship had ended just a few years earlier, and the idea of Portugal, as Saramago writes, had been ''poisoned by a paternalist, conservative rural idyll.'....This book is best read as a snapshot of Saramago's mind just before the first of his great novels, ''Levantado do Chão'' (''Raised From the Ground''),"
Has he ever traveled through his own native-born country, ignored the monuments as being monumental and just let the place be? The reviewer is annoyed at Saramago for not living up to unexplained expectations: "What he leaves out is sometimes puzzling, sometimes infuriating. How could he have gone to the mountain town of Belmonte and missed the great drama of the Jewish community coming back into the light after 500 years of concealment? Why does he leave out the modern importance of that so-called Temple of Diana in Évora: as a meeting place for the military conspirators who brought democracy back to Portugal in 1974? Is it just that he's the kind of man who, faced with a dolmen that might be 5,000 years old, ''drops his head to listen to his own heartbeat''?"
For a writer of English, however, I AM glad he calls out the difficulties of translations from Portuguese. I myself feel that the vague qualities of English can render the original incomprehensible: "The imprecision can't have helped the translators, Amanda Hopkinson and Nick Caistor, but their attention does seem to wander. You fall over phrases like ''the voluntary disposition or the incompletion of its lateral buildings'' or the sudden, entirely unexplained question: ''Are there any reserve demarcations in these parts?'' And it is worrying to think of a great stone castle sitting in a town center ''like a jelly on a plate.' "
The NYTimes reviewed it 20 years later, not understanding it and missing more than what is lost in translation. "The poet of Portugal is José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize, a fabulist with the power of some mesmeric storyteller at the fireside. So you might expect that a book by Saramago called ''Journey to Portugal,'' tricked out with pretty photographs, would light up a country that was once Europe's anchor and now is shamefully unfamiliar. Sadly, you'd be wrong."
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/01/reviews/010401.01pyelt.html
Not an auspicious start.
Is it a travel book? No. It offers no trips, just a record of where the author went, what he experienced and what he thought.
Is it a book written for Westerners? No. It was published in Portuguese.
At least the writers of the review have a better assessment of how it SHOULD be assessed. "All this is puzzling, unless you realize that ''Journey to Portugal'' isn't a travel book at all. It's a historical document in its own right -- a product of the year 1979, when Saramago's journey started. A seemingly interminable dictatorship had ended just a few years earlier, and the idea of Portugal, as Saramago writes, had been ''poisoned by a paternalist, conservative rural idyll.'....This book is best read as a snapshot of Saramago's mind just before the first of his great novels, ''Levantado do Chão'' (''Raised From the Ground''),"
Has he ever traveled through his own native-born country, ignored the monuments as being monumental and just let the place be? The reviewer is annoyed at Saramago for not living up to unexplained expectations: "What he leaves out is sometimes puzzling, sometimes infuriating. How could he have gone to the mountain town of Belmonte and missed the great drama of the Jewish community coming back into the light after 500 years of concealment? Why does he leave out the modern importance of that so-called Temple of Diana in Évora: as a meeting place for the military conspirators who brought democracy back to Portugal in 1974? Is it just that he's the kind of man who, faced with a dolmen that might be 5,000 years old, ''drops his head to listen to his own heartbeat''?"
For a writer of English, however, I AM glad he calls out the difficulties of translations from Portuguese. I myself feel that the vague qualities of English can render the original incomprehensible: "The imprecision can't have helped the translators, Amanda Hopkinson and Nick Caistor, but their attention does seem to wander. You fall over phrases like ''the voluntary disposition or the incompletion of its lateral buildings'' or the sudden, entirely unexplained question: ''Are there any reserve demarcations in these parts?'' And it is worrying to think of a great stone castle sitting in a town center ''like a jelly on a plate.' "
