Correos presented this Thursday, at the José Saramago House Museum in Tías, a stamp dedicated to the writer José Saramago on the centenary of his birth. The presentation ceremony was attended by the Director of Philately of Correos, Leire Díez Castro, and the Director of the José Saramago House Museum, María del Río Sánchez, among others. At the end of the event, the traditional honorary cancellation was carried out.
The Portuguese writer is one of the most important figures in universal literature. Narrator and essayist, he was a skeptical intellectual, who maintained an ethical and aesthetic position above political partisanship and committed to the human race. A controversial vision of history and culture is the crucial point of his works, influenced by authors such as Fernando Pessoa or Luis de Camões.
He obtained the 'Nobel Prize for Literature' in 1998, being the first Portuguese writer to achieve it. The Swedish Academy highlighted his ability to “make an elusive reality understandable, with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony.” His work is considered by critics around the world as one of the most important in contemporary literature.
José de Sousa Saramago was born in Azingaha (Portugal) on November 16, 1922 into a humble family of peasants. His mother, illiterate, instilled in him a thirst for knowledge and gave him his first book. At the age of fifteen he dropped out of school due to lack of means and had to work as a locksmith.
Writer, translator and literary critic
In 1947, the year of the birth of his only daughter Violante, he published his first novel, La viuda, but for editorial convenience it would be released under the name Terra do Pecado, and, although it received good reviews, he decided to remain unpublished for more than twenty years. At the end of the 1950s, he began working at the publishing house, Estudios Cor, as head of production. This new activity allowed him to connect with some of the most important Portuguese writers of the time. He also worked as a translator of authors such as Tolstoy, Baudelaire, or Raymond Bayer and later as a literary critic.
The year 1966 marked his official return as a writer with the publication of Os Poemas Possíveis. This book was followed, in 1970, by another collection of poems, Probablemente Alegría, and then, in 1971 and 1973 respectively, the titles Deste Mundo e do Outro and A Bagagem do Viajante. Journalist and member of the Portuguese Communist Party, he suffered censorship and persecution during the years of the Salazar dictatorship.
He joined the so-called Carnation Revolution that brought democracy to Portugal in 1974. It was from that moment that Saramago began his best-known and most active stage. Alzado del suelo (1980) was the novel that revealed him as the great mature and renovating Portuguese novelist. Sigueron works of great interest such as Memorial del convento (1982), El año de la muerte de Ricardo Reis (1984), La balsa de piedra (1986), Historia del cerco de Lisboa (1989), El evangelio según Jesucristo (1991) and Ensayo sobre la ceguera (1995), a work in
which the author, from an ethical point of view, warns about “the responsibility of having eyes when others have lost them” and which was made into a film in 2008.
This stamp is issued within the Literature series and is the second in this series to be issued this year, as on May 26 the stamp dedicated to Javier Marías was issued. Likewise, in April 2022, a stamp dedicated to Carlos Ruiz Zafón was issued, in May to Benito Pérez Galdós and in June to Celestino Fernández de la Vega. Already in September 2021, it was dedicated to the Centenary of the death of Emilia Pardo Bazán.
The stamp dedicated to José Saramago can be purchased at Correos offices, through Correos Market, contacting the Philatelic Service at the e-mail atcliente.filatelia@correos.com, or by calling 915 197 197.
