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By Elton Uliana

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You see that seduction is the very word.

Luiz Augusto Rebello da Silva, Contos e Lendas, vol. II, 1908 (translation mine)

José Saramago spent much of his working life as a metalworker, a civil servant, and a jobbing translator before becoming, in his fifties, one of the most distinguished European novelists of the twentieth century. An atheist and a lifelong communist, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998 for fiction the Swedish Academy characterized as “sustained by imagination, compassion and irony.” It could easily have been described as a long-standing argument with the institutions of church and state, both of which depend on specific forms of assent. Saramago’s increasingly open conflict with these institutions intensified, and eventually cost him dearly, with the controversy surrounding O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo (1991), translated into English by Giovanni Pontiero as The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, a novel that retells the life of Jesus from conception to crucifixion, giving him a father in Joseph rather than in God, a lover in Mary Magdalene rather than the Magdalene of ecclesiastical piety, and doubts enough to loosen the Crucifixion from theological inevitability, infusing it instead with an emphatically human and earthly sensibility. The novel provoked fierce opposition from Catholic circles, after which the Portuguese government deemed it too offensive for submission to the European Literary Prize in 1992. Saramago regarded the decision as an act of censorship, left the country initially for Spain, and, in February 1993, moved with Pilar del Río to Lanzarote, which remained his home for the rest of his life.

Saramago’s fiction repeatedly turns to stories that seem already calcified, secured by history, ideology, scripture, or collective memory, only to discover within them a more unstable and often unpredictable dynamic, one in which what tradition has handed down speaks with piercing irony against the very authority that helped preserve it. This is especially true of The Gospel’s opening chapter, which appears at first to begin at the end, with Christ already on the cross. But the scene before the reader is neither a direct narration of Calvary nor simply an innocent account of scriptural history. Rather, it is an extended verbal encounter with the artist Albrecht Dürer’s 1498 woodcut “The Crucifixion,” from the series The Large Passion, in which Saramago’s narrator moves across the image figure by figure, converting its visual stillness into the unfolding time of narration with characteristic acerbity and subjecting his subject of contemplation to the propulsive movement of the sentence, turning, in this way, syntax itself into an active force upon the image. That is already a considerable feat of language, and rendering it anew in English falls to the Scottish-Italian scholar and translator Giovanni Pontiero, whose translation must recreate not only what the image contains but the strange agency with which Saramago’s idiosyncratic language animates it.

In Levantado do Chão (1980), later translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa as Raised from the Ground, Saramago imagines storytelling as a practice of crossing between the “seen and invented, lived and imagined,” which he completes, in the same sentence, as “the supreme art of erasing the boundaries between them.” This impulse becomes especially visible, almost tactile in The Gospel’s first chapter, where the prose in both Portuguese and Pontiero’s English feels as if it were advancing under the skin of things rather than keeping its distance from them. In that sense, this chapter contains one of those moments in which literature seems to test the limits of how it can deal with an image worn smooth by familiarity, exerting an arresting aesthetic force, but also a profound disquiet, typically Saramaguean in character, precisely because it reinstates, with sudden strangeness, what we thought we knew by heart. The effect reaches beyond discomfort into a deeper disturbance of perception, moral, imaginative and aesthetic, one in which the familiar is handed back to us altered and inwardly unsettled.

Before presenting the scene, however, Saramago places the reader in front of two epigraphs. The first is from Luke, the evangelist who opens his own book with a declaration of historical method, where he investigates, verifies, writes, and instructs Theophilus so that he might “recognize the solidity of the doctrine in which he was instructed.” The words attributed to Luke represent a voice that self-legitimizes through diligence, scruple, and order. The second epigraph is Pilate’s: Quod scripsi, scripsi – what I have written, I have written. Against Luke’s scrupulous self-justification, Pilate’s words are steeped in the lapidary stubbornness of someone who neither justifies nor explains, and who signed, with that same stubbornness, the very death of Jesus, without recourse to method or doctrine. Saramago places side by side the evangelist who is sustained by obdurate conviction and the procurator who fixes himself in inflexible persistence, opening between the two the space in which the novel installs itself: a textual entanglement suspended between doctrine and caprice, fully aware of itself as fiction. It is clear from the very first page that Saramago, insidiously, summons Christian tradition to testify against itself, turning it into an instrument of its own subversion.

The Swedish Academy’s citation is a fair formulation, but incomplete, at least with regard to this novel. There is irony in abundance, to be sure, but to reduce The Gospel to simple irony is to miss what makes it magnificently singular: its quality of seduction, produced through the pacing of the prose, the gradual animation of the image and the reader’s scarcely noticed implication in both. The two operate at the same time, though not in the same register; irony cuts in obliquely, by stealth, while seduction gathers force more slowly, insinuating itself into each line.

If irony is an exercise in distance, a clinical gaze that observes its object from outside, protecting the observer, seduction demands proximity, a lowering of defenses that opens an aperture to the reader’s own infiltration. Through that aperture, Saramago draws our critical attention into complicity; he conducts us through the interior of Dürer’s woodcut, making us feel the heat of the sun that appears tormented, the weight of the suffering bodies, so that, when he suddenly points to paper and ink, the inherited spectacle of the Crucifixion, monumentalized by centuries of repetition, seems to collapse line by line into bare desolation. That we only feel the impact of the fall because we were led to believe in the solidity of the scene is the entire force of the passage.

That force has a name. The narrative technique through which this virtuosic process of seduction unfolds is ekphrasis, the verbal evocation of a visual work, although Saramago unsettles its customary relation between the describing voice and the image described. Dürer’s woodcut is absent from the page and must be reconstructed through language, yet the narrator moves across its surface with such temporal and physical immediacy that the figures seem to emerge from pictorial fixity into the present moment of reading. In Saramago’s hands, this strategy produces an effect close to what classical rhetoric called enargeia, vividness so absolute it counterfeits presence. Pontiero’s translation opens with no less enargeia than the original:

The sun appears in one of the upper corners of the rectangle, on the left of anyone looking at the picture. Representing the sun is a man’s head that sends out rays of brilliant light and sinuous flames, like a wavering compass in search of the right direction, and this head has a tearful face, contorted by spasms of pain that refuse to abate. The gaping mouth sends up a cry we shall never hear, for none of these things is real, what we are contemplating is mere paper and ink, and nothing more.

Beginning in the upper-left corner with the sun, the narrator proceeds methodically across the image, from figure to figure and detail to detail, while the present tense allows each element to appear as an event in progress rather than as an object already fixed in representation. The result is a disturbance of the hierarchy that would ordinarily separate scriptural episode, visual image, and verbal narration: the Crucifixion seems to occur within the woodcut, the woodcut within the sentence, and the sentence within the reader’s experience. Under the pressure of Saramago’s syntax, the figures begin to act, suffer, and withdraw before us, even as the narration repeatedly reminds us that the life they acquire remains inseparable from paper and ink. The woodcut supplies the reality through which the voice moves, while the voice gives the image movement, agency, and time. We follow that movement, hardly noticing that we have already become enmeshed in it.

The first sign of this involvement is already present in the opening sentence. In Portuguese, “o sol mostra-se num dos cantos superiores do retângulo” [the sun shows itself in one of the upper corners of the rectangle]. The verb is reflexive, the sun acts upon itself, reveals itself, has a kind of volition, of reticence, as if it were choosing the moment to appear. Giovanni Pontiero resolves this with “the sun appears,” a more neutral, more visual formulation. Pontiero’s choice represents a reorganization enforced by the English language itself, which cannot accommodate the reflexive with the same naturalness as Portuguese, displacing the sun’s agency from the gestural plane of self-manifestation to the more stable visual register of appearance. Even so, “appears,” however precise, decisively alters the image’s pitch: where “mostra-se” suggests a gesture that emerges from within the scene, something close to a will of the sun itself, the English stabilizes that movement onto a plane of pure sight. And with that shift, what had been happening now presents itself as something observed. In Saramago, the sun was not painted; it revealed itself, a distinction that, subtle as it may be, contains the entire premise of the chapter.

That displacement is intensified by the narrative voice’s systematic use of the present indicative: “vemos,” “está atraindo,” “vai-se embora” [“we see,” “is attracting,” “goes away”], lending the five-hundred-year-old woodcut the presumed urgency of a live broadcast, presumed because equivalence between original and translation is never a given but an effect the prose must continually produce. Among the elements sustaining this presumption of liveness is the fact that Saramago, as he himself acknowledged, writes to be heard. His prose, with those intricately interwoven, interminable clauses that nevertheless retain their thrust, sounds, for the most part, more uttered than written. It is this orality that drags us from focus to focus across the image, with the immediacy of a voice narrating what it sees for the first time.

Susan Sontag’s resistance to interpretative mastery, and her idea that aesthetic experience should intensify the presence of the work of art rather than reduce it to explanation, is particularly helpful here, although the seduction I have been describing introduces a further paradox, one in which each apparent release offers the reader an illusion of freedom while drawing them more deeply into the scene. Midway through the first paragraph, after having led us through a suffering sun and a convulsed face that screams without sound, the narrator interrupts with disconcerting coldness: “pois nenhuma destas coisas é real, o que temos diante de nós é papel e tinta, nada mais” [for none of these things is real, what we have before us is paper and ink, nothing more]. Pontiero translates this as “what we are contemplating is mere paper and ink.” The “mere” strikes the right tone, but “contemplating” internalizes the gesture, softening the physical impact of “temos diante de nós” [we have before us]. Where the original points, placing the object in front of the reader, the translation draws back from the movement. Nevertheless, the effect holds. Far from undoing the illusion, the interruption deepens it.

Such insistence on materiality acknowledges both the condition of representation and the physical technique of the woodcut. In the wood, form emerges through removal, as matter is cut away and light rises from what remains. This logic creates an uncanny, mechanical kinship between Dürer’s gouge and the novelist’s syntax. While theological tradition has accumulated centuries of varnish and shadow over the figure of Christ, Saramago’s narrative technique operates through a severe, sculptural subtraction. His narrator excavates the block of myth, paring away dogmatic excess and hagiographic rubble until only the essential remains: the human. We are left with ink itself, which, in meeting the paper, reveals the vulnerability of flesh stripped of divine glory. If Dürer carves the wood to liberate the image, Saramago carves the dogma to liberate the story.

Two paragraphs later we are back inside the scene, following the narrator’s gaze across Joseph of Arimathea’s robe and Mary Magdalene’s neckline, as if the interruption had never happened. Paper and ink become a metafictional inflection that makes the representation more insistent and persuasive. By exposing its own artifice, the illusion becomes more effective, and Saramago shows us this through a finely calibrated narrative and philosophical method.

And in this section irony enters with peculiar precision, its edge sharpened by the pretense of piety. The description of Mary Magdalene, with its false moral gravity, “com grave dano das almas, assim arrastadas à perdição pelo infame corpo” [to the grave detriment of souls, thus dragged to perdition by the infamous body], brings to the surface the very carnal fascination upon which the devotional scene depends, not least because Christian iconography requires the faithful to fix their gaze on the flesh while teaching them to understand that gaze in the language of the soul. The narrator then adds, with a generosity only apparently pious, that even if Mary Magdalene were entirely naked, “ainda assim haveríamos de demonstrar-lhe respeito e homenagem” [we would still be bound to show her respect and homage]. Saramago implicates his own narration in this very act of looking, making visible the contradiction that the sacred image ordinarily absorbs into devotion.

Pontiero proceeds with notable acuity: “lewd stares of passing men” has a crispiness that the original would not disdain, and “dragged to perdition” reinstates the pious excess that sustains the irony. There are places in which the translation expands the original, finding in the English language resonances that were not explicitly anticipated but which Pontiero, a passionate reader before he was a translator, knew how to extract. This, I think, is one of those moments in which English literature is reconfigured by another tongue. Far from confusing categories, such a claim recalls Raymond Williams’s distinction between the literature of a language and the reading of a nation, and his warning that to collapse the two is to impoverish both. Pontiero’s English in translating Saramago belongs to the Anglophone tradition with the same legitimacy as Conrad’s English, which never concealed that he thought in Polish before writing. They are two distinct objects with their own internal laws, each altering what may be recognized as literature in English and, more controversially, as English literature.

Not always, of course, does the translation manage to reconfigure all the textures of the original. When Saramago writes that Jesus “é o único a quem o futuro concederá a honra da maiúscula inicial” [is the only one to whom the future will grant the honour of the initial capital letter], the irony is simultaneously semantic and typographic. Throughout the entire novel, proper names are written in lower case, a deliberate subversion that makes Jesus’s capital letter a historical privilege granted only by posterity and emptied of ontological authority. Pontiero resolves this tactically with “inscribing his initials in capitals,” which, while adequate, is considerably more explanatory and less charged with the graphic tension of the original, leaving perhaps one of those seemingly untranslatable residues that disclose an underlying structural asymmetry between languages. Saramago’s own formulation, “it is authors who make literature national, but it is translators who make literature universal”, contains a humility that is also a lucid acknowledgement of the unevenness inherent in every act of translation. Harold Bloom, in considering The Gospel imaginatively superior to any other life of Jesus, including the four canonical Gospels, was right, but was speaking, without knowing it, of two books at once: Saramago’s and Giovanni Pontiero’s.

At the end of the chapter the intertwined movements of seduction and irony converge in a single sentence. The man who walks away with the bucket and the sponge, vilified by Christian ideology as the one who offered Jesus vinegar in mockery, is given dignified reconfiguration by Saramago: “fez o que podia para aliviar a secura mortal dos três condenados, e não fez diferença entre Jesus e os Ladrões, pela simples razão de que tudo isso são coisas da terra, que vão ficar na terra, e delas se faz a única história possível” [he did what he could to relieve the mortal thirst of the three condemned men, and he made no distinction between Jesus and the Thieves, for the simple reason that all these are things of the earth, which will remain in the earth, and from them will be written the only possible history]. Pontiero finds here a cadence that echoes the King James Bible: “from them will be written the only possible history,” a reverberation belonging to the target language’s own tradition, which transforms “vão ficar” [will remain] – resigned, settled, hushed in Portuguese – into something with the solemnity of a sacred declaration. The original maintains a certain inclination; the translation, instead, assumes a more elevated posture. Together they produce two different matrices of truth without establishing any order of authority between them.

In a devastating reversal, Saramago’s Jesus appears last. After the sun, the thieves, the three Marys, the horsemen, the angels, the skull of Adam, the son of God is introduced without emphasis, in an almost administrative tone: “este homem, nu, cravado de pés e mãos numa cruz, filho de José e de Maria, Jesus de seu nome” [this man, naked, nailed by hands and feet to a cross, son of Joseph and Mary, Jesus by name]. With this calculated delay, the chapter unveils its deepest nature, demonstrating that Dürer’s woodcut, like any image that time has crystallized into certainty, always contained a truth more complex, more human, more contradictory than tradition wished to preserve. By altering the image’s conditions of habitability, Saramago compels us to inhabit it anew, frame by frame, to the end, to the man walking away with the bucket without waiting for the outcome, because the things of the earth remain in the earth, and from them is made the only possible history.

In Cain (2009), his final novel, also translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa, Saramago attacked the same theological ideology with declared, combative irony: Cain confronts God directly, indicting him to his face across the worst episodes of the Old Testament, including Sodom, the Flood, and the binding of Isaac, for the cruelty done in his name. The Gospel, by contrast, withholds that confrontation; Saramago enters instead through the interstice of the image, carving his subversion into the scene stroke by stroke, the way Dürer’s own gouge worked the wood, while the reader is still occupied in recognizing it. These are two distinct strategies serving the same project: compelling literature to resist the assurances of inherited certainty, to open what doctrine has sealed, and to restore to visibility the human contradictions that repetition has taught us not to see. More than thirty years after it was written, The Gospel continues to exert an extraordinary and unsettling force, and its opening chapter gives that force its most concentrated form, stripping familiarity of authority and restoring the Crucifixion to sight as an image we had learned to recognize long before we had truly seen it.

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Elton Uliana is a Brazilian writer, literary critic, and translator based in England. He is co-editor of the Brazilian Translation Club at University College London (UCL), where he collaborates on Translation Theory programmes. His work has appeared in World Literature Today, Massachusetts Review, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Latin American Literature Today, Routledge’s Art in Translation, Asymptote, West Branch, and Your Impossible Voice, as well as in the anthologies Daughters of Latin America (HarperCollins, 2023) and Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction: A Bilingual Anthology (UCL Press, 2024). Uliana was selected for English PEN Presents: Brazil 2026, supporting his sample translation of Carla Bessa’s Jabuti Prize-winning Vultures. In 2026, he and Amanda Sarasien were awarded the Massachusetts Review’s Jules Chametzky Translation Prize for their translation of José Luís Peixoto’s “The Woman Who Dreamed.”