Part of José Saramago's legacy will go to the Cervantes Letter Box

Brian Bujalance Lisbon, 23 Mar Part of the legacy of the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner José Saramago will go to La Caja de las Letras of the Cervantes Institute in Madrid on 25 April, the anniversary of the Carnation Revolution, coinciding with the centenary of the birth of the author of “Essay on blindness”. The delivery will be possible under an agreement signed today in Lisbon between the Saramago Foundation and the Cervantes Institute. “La Caja de las Letras is the place where the Institute says that the true wealth of a country is its culture. We have transformed the old cash box of Banco del Río de la Plata into Caja de las Letras (the current headquarters of Cervantes), where we received the inheritance of our elders,” the director of the Institute, Luis García Montero, explained to Efe. For the Saramago Foundation it was “an honor” to receive the Cervantes proposal, especially to commemorate a date as important as the Revolution that ended the dictatorship in the country. “We set out to search hard and we intend to fulfill both what the director proposes and what is part of our reason for existing in life: respect, veneration for those who came before us and made us have two great languages,” the president of the foundation, Pilar del Río, told Efe. The Foundation keeps secret, for the time being, what it will deposit in the Caja de las Letras. “It will surely be something significant and that we will be able to learn about the legacy in the act when we receive Saramago's inheritance,” said García Montero. THE UNION OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE The protocol signed this Wednesday between the Foundation and Cervantes will allow the development of joint activities and projects to spread the Spanish and Portuguese language and culture and commemorate the centenary of the birth of Saramago (Azinhaga 1922- Lanzarote 2010). “The agreement means fulfilling what we were born to do, praising and promoting culture in our respective countries with specific authors and respecting our respective languages,” explained Pilar del Río. José Saramago “has always, since his initial works, he looks not only at the Iberian Peninsula in its entirety, it includes many references to Spanish literature”, added the Spanish journalist. The universe of Spanish and Portuguese speakers exceeds 850 million people - of them some 600 million Spanish-speaking - and may reach 1.2 billion by the middle of this century, according to United Nations demographic estimates. IMAGES AND WORDS Along with the signing of the protocol, Cervantes wanted to pay tribute to Saramago and Spanish-Portuguese literature with “Navigators of the Stone Raft”, an exhibition by Argentinian Daniel Morzinski that hosts the Institute's headquarters in Lisbon. The exhibition brings together a hundred photographs taken from writers from more than 20 Portuguese-speaking and Spanish-speaking countries who have a link with José Saramago. Morzinski, known as “the photographer of writers”, recalled some anecdotes with José Saramago, including a session held in Paris in 1998, days after the Nobel Prize who recognized his career was announced. Writers such as Luis Sepulveda, Julio Cortázar or Jorge Luis Borges have passed through Morzinski's lens, and he is clear about it: “the more portrait writers, the more I have to portray,” he told Efe and later at the event. García Montero wanted to highlight the values of Mordzinski, who “for a long time has been shooting many people who are neither Borges nor Saramago”, at not-so-well-known writers. José Luis Peixoto, one of the most prominent authors of current Portuguese literature and who turns José Saramago into a character in his latest novel, highlighted that Mordzinski's idea of taking photography to its limits: “It has to do with the crossing of different dimensions, of what literature is and that person who writes” .EFE. bbo/sea/aam (photo) (video)