José Saramago - Skylight

“Something very simple: I’m going to live. I will leave your home feeling much more confident than when I entered it. Not because the path you showed me was the right one for me, but because you made me realize that I need to find my own path. It will take time, though…”

“Yours will always be the path of pessimism.”

“Probably, but I want my pessimism to keep me safe from facile, comforting illusions — like love.”

Silvestre gripped him by the shoulders and shook him:

“But Abel, anything that isn’t built on love will only generate hate!”

“You’re right, my friend, but perhaps that’s how it will have to be for a long time yet. The day when we can build on love has still not arrived.”

I would like to thank my fellow Saramago translator Maartje de Kort for her helpful insights and the students who attended translation workshops at University College Cork, University College Dublin and Glasgow University for the fruitful discussions we had about two short extracts from the novel. And my thanks, as always, to my husband, Ben Sherriff.

JOSÉ SARAMAGO (1922–2010) was the author of many novels, among them Blindness, All the Names, Baltasar and Blimunda , and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis . In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

MARGARET JULL COSTA has won numerous prizes for her work, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.