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After the mote and beam parable you gave. If only… meaning, if only the obstacles to my speaking out were not so large. Or meaning like you say, if only it wasn’t impossible to remain calm.

 

And quiet – mutam nequiquam.

 

Do you recognise the words? And those odd phraseologies she employs – as for silentia muta noctis, which she translates as the ‘deep speechlessness of night’? And nequiquam – pointless to go on.

 

Teach us, dea muta, teach us! While I was also alongside her reading some fragments from WH Auden’s ‘Homage to Clio’:

 

…I have seen

Your photo, I think, in the papers, nursing

A baby or mourning a corpse; each time

You had nothing to say and did not, one could see,

Observe where you were, Muse of the unique

Historical fact, defending with silence

Some world of your beholding.

 

…but we, at haphazard

and unseasonably, are brought face to face

by ones, Clio, with your silence. After that

nothing is easy.

 

And lastly next to this fragment too, from out of all last June’s obituaries on Saramaga –

 

“Gradually, he came to recognise that, for him, the genesis of his novels occurred best with the flash of an idea and then (oddly, perhaps) a name, and a literary category. Thus The Manual of Painting and Calligraphy: A Novel and his original title Ensaio Sobre a Cegueira (Essay On Blindness, 1995) which, to his extreme annoyance, was rendered in the 1997 English edition simply as Blindness. (Its sequel, Ensaio Sobre a Lucidez – Seeing – was published in 2004.”


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