Not My Bible’s Keeper: Saramago’s Cain Translates Postsecular Dissent

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Not my Bible’s Keeper: Saramago’s Cain Translates Postsecular Dissent Nazry Bahrawi Singapore University of Technology and Design Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore

If the quintessential Cain of the Book of Genesis embodies the darker side of humanity, José Saramago’s Cain is better figured as the archetypal rebel-hero. As in the Old Testament, the titular character of Saramago’s final novel (2009) may be condemned to roam the earth till the end of days for killing his brother Abel, but this is not entirely a cursed existence. Cain’s raffish charm secures him trysts with the sultry Lilith and Noah’s daughters-in-law. In Saramago’s hands, a pariah becomes a rake – the envy, not shame, of ordinary men. This transformation may however seem trifle in light of another aspect of the new and improved Cain. In the realm of ethics, Saramago converts the world’s first murderer into a virtuous being. It was Cain, not an angel as depicted in the Bible, who saves Isaac from being slaughtered by his father Abraham. This was not his only act of kindness. Throughout the novel, the upright Cain makes a series of moral interventions that urge its readers to rethink holy narratives. To this end, Saramago’s interpretation, or ‘translation’, of a hitherto marginal biblical character can be seen as a gesture of postsecular dissent. Saramago’s Cain is postsecular in the way it contradicts ‘the secularisation thesis’. Popular for most of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the secularization thesis argues by way of empirical evidence that religion has become less important in industrialized societies. For instance, the sociologist Steve Bruce in his book Religion in the Modern World compares contemporary data with the 1851 British census to highlight that fewer people are attending churches, becoming clergies and professing affiliation to a church in the United Kingdom (Bruce, 1996, p. 30). While Saramago’s text can be taken as blasphemous for its unflattering depiction of God, I argue that Cain, in fact, dissents against the secularization

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thesis in suggesting that the world is not quite disenchanted. Contrary to the secularization thesis, the novel celebrates enchantment expressed through the liberating power of narratives. With Cain, the ability to tell creative stories becomes the antidote to religious dogma, which fossilizes imagination. Such a reading stems from an understanding of translation writ large. Here, translation must be seen as an active process of meaning-making that arises from comprehending, reviewing and adapting established texts and norms. In this essay, I make this case by narrativizing my own arguments on Cain. My first section ‘Cain redux’ assesses the existing discourses about the ‘translation turn’ in cultural studies before exploring its applicability to the field of literature and theology. Arguing that ‘cultural translation’ is an apt frame for understanding Saramago’s retelling of biblical narratives in Cain, the next section ‘Cain rising’ will then expound in greater detail the ways in which the novel can be considered an act of postsecular dissent by delving into the nascent but contemporary scholarship about the postsecular. Acknowledging that Cain is a labour of creative fiction, I will also explore in this section the narrative strategies employed by Saramago in Cain that can possibly define postsecular dissent as a literary undertaking. Finally in ‘Cain’s Uprising’, I argue that the phenomenon of writers translating scriptures can be seen as the future of Abrahamic postsecularity with references to other literary efforts that deal with Abrahamic religious history.

Cain redux How can Saramago’s Cain be seen as a translation? Answering this question necessitates taking a detour into translation studies. In their seminal work Constructing Cultures, translation theorists Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere make the following astute observation: ‘Rewriters and translators are the people who really construct cultures on the basic level in our day and age’ (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1998, p. 10). While it was expressed eleven years before the coming of Cain, this prescient statement aptly captures the spirit of Saramago’s novel. In his literary retelling, the blind author grants a hitherto marginal biblical figure the gift of critical gaze. By making Cain the cynical protagonist, Saramago envisions an alternative history of early Christianity. True to the words of Bassnett and Lefevere, Saramago is in the serious business of constructing culture. At this juncture, some history is needed. According to Edwin Gentzler in his preface to Constructing Cultures, Bassnett and Lefevere were the first to express the ‘cultural turn’ in the field of translation studies as not just an investigation of

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linguistic change but as a study of ‘a verbal text within the network of literary and extra-literary signs in both the source and target cultures’ (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1998, p. xi). Thus, critics of literary translation can no longer accept textual changes on their own merit, but must now link such deviations to extratextual factors. As Bassnett puts it in an essay in the same book, such critics now need ‘to consider broader issues of context, history and conventions’ (Bassnett and Lefevere, 1998,, p. 123). Two lines of inquiry raised by this ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies are relevant to my analysis of Cain. The first denotes the spectrum of ways in which a translated text could be received in the target culture, and the second concerns the strategies employed by a translator to adapt the text from a source culture to a target culture. This essay addresses both in its next section. Some modifications to the terms ‘source culture’ and ‘target culture’ must also be articulated. In the case of Cain, these terms assume new meaning. Conventional scholarship on translation is based on the premise that texts travel from one distinct culture to another. By this criterion, Cain is a text reproduced in more or less the same culture, though by ‘sameness’ I do not mean geographic commonality as much as religious sensibility. That is to say, Cain would make most sense for someone who is familiar with normative Christian doctrines. This echoes the following observation made by Lawrence Venuti in his book The Translator’s Invisibility: Every step in the translation process – from the selection of foreign texts to the implementation of translation strategies to the editing, reviewing and reading of translations – is mediated by the diverse cultural values that circulate in the target language, always in some hierarchical order. (Venuti, 1995, p. 308)

For Bassnett, the above quote from Venuti calls for translation analysts to consider ‘the relationship between the individual texts and the wider cultural system within which those texts are produced and read’ (Bassnett, 1998, p. 137). Indeed, the multiple inversions of aspects of the Book of Genesis in Saramago’s Cain would be lost to a reader who is not familiar with Christian doctrines. Yet familiarity does not equate to belief. As a case in point, Saramago himself was a self-professed atheist with an adept knowledge of the Bible. In adapting the frames of ‘source culture’ and ‘target culture’ to my reading of Cain, a distinction can still be made between the two. While the Old Testament and Saramago’s Cain address a largely Christian-centric audience, they are also speaking to two groups with differing socio-cultural milieus. It is logical to assume that the lasting impact of paradigm-shifting events like the Enlightenment,

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the Renaissance, the industrial revolution, the two World Wars, as well as genocides like the Holocaust, on Saramago’s modern readers (Cain’s target culture) have given them enough impetus to be concerned about ‘modern’ issues like parliamentary democracy, religious doubt, human rights and agency. These are probably not the concerns shared by the early Christians (source culture). The source and target cultures in this analysis are divided by time more than geography. Couched as a work of cultural translation this way, Saramago’s Cain conforms to Bassnett’s call for cultural critics to embrace what she calls the ‘translation turn’ in cultural studies (or in our case, literature and theology as a field of study which falls under that latter rubric) so as to coincide with the aforementioned ‘cultural turn’ in translation study. For the paradigm of ‘translation turn’ to work in our inquiry, this essay will need to subscribe to the premise that literature and theology is more than just a research focus, but an emerging and viable discipline with bearing on cultural studies. After all, since the release of pioneering works such as Northrop Frye’s The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982) and Harold Bloom’s The Book of J (1990), there has been a plethora of other works dealing with the links between literature and theology. Consider, for instance, specialist journals like Literature and Theology (Oxford UP) and Journal of Religion and Literature (University of Notre Dame) as well as edited volumes such as The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (2009) and The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture (2006). Then there are institutions, such as the International Society of Religion, Culture and Society which organizes a biennial international conference along themes of religion and culture from an interdisciplinary perspective. Common to all these enterprises is the assumption that scholarly investigations of literature and theology must also take into account extratexual factors as is required of any inquiry of cultural criticism. If so, then Saramago’s cultural translation of the Old Testament as Cain can also be seen as an exercise of Biblical hermeneutics, one which reads this ‘Book of books’ from the postsecular lens.

Cain rising At first glance, Cain appears to spew heresy. Its portrayal of an aloof, spiteful God alone may be enough to qualify it as a New Atheist novel. In an essay, Arthur Bradley articulates the New Atheist novel as an emerging literary genre in which New Atheists take ‘the novel, and literature more generally, as a privileged

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instance of their idea of a natural, secular experience of beauty, wonder, and transcendence’ (Bradley, 2009, p. 21). Yet to categorize Cain this way is simplistic if one considers reviews of Saramago’s final novel as intimating to something less polemical and much more nuanced. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, literary critic William Flesch has this to say about Cain: ‘Atheist though he was, Saramago’s narratives are intent on believing in god’s existence, the better to blame him for our condition, for the behaviour of the world’s cains and joshuas [sic] and Herods and Salazars’ (Flesch, 2012, par. 5). Another reviewer Daniel Hahn reaches a similar conclusion when he writes in The Independent: Saramago is a first-person narrator who keeps himself just out the corner of your eye. He’s often funny, and thought-provoking, and delightfully mischievous savouring the details of his own defiance. Every little bard, every little twist is absolutely deliberate. Translator Margaret Jull Costa carefully holds the thread of his winding sentences, which snake across pages and pages, running right through the direct speech, one sentence register, one moment Biblical-stately, the next earthly and idiomatic. The lord is glorious, magnificent, almighty, eternal, splendid, and also just a son of a bitch. (Hahn, 2011, par. 6)

For Hahn and Flesch, the novel’s vehemence towards God belies belief. God may be petty, but he exists. God may be difficult, but he is omnipotent. It is this contradictory nature of God as tyrant but also a caring creator that allows him to perform the following act of kindness even as he expels Adam and Eve from Eden: That said, the lord plucked out of the air a couple of animal skins to cover the nakedness of adam and eve, who exchanged knowing winks, for they had known they were naked from the very first day and had made the most of it too. (Saramago, 2011, p. 10)

This excerpt can be read from two perspectives. On the one hand, God could be hiding the ‘nakedness of adam and eve’ as a way of imposing a moral code. In this interpretation, the ‘knowing winks’ between Adam and Eve can be seen as an acknowledgement of mischief between the pair who saw themselves as having gotten away with doing something wrong. On the other hand, God could also be doing this out of concern. Here, the animal hides are meant to protect the pair’s vulnerable human parts from the harsh conditions of Earth. In this second interpretation, the ‘knowing winks’ between the two only enhances their

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ignorance of God’s omniscience. If God knows that the pair has broken his rule in Eden, he must surely know that they had also consummated their pairing in Eden. Other instances of God’s little acts of kindness abound in the novel, suggesting the latter to be a more plausible interpretation of the aforementioned excerpt. God may be aloof, but he is aware. With Cain then, hating God is comparable to hating a former lover who has hurt you deeply, but remains an undeniable part of your history. God is that former lover. This grudging acknowledgment of Godliness makes the text postsecular. It gestures to the nascent definition of the postsecular as the idea that the human penchant for magic and wonderment encapsulated through religion – or, what some would call ‘faith’ – has not actually gone away. This was a point I made in a previous essay Fictionalising the Utopian Impulse as Postsecular Islam, in which I argue that, rather than seeing the postsecular as ‘a reaction against the secular compulsion to privatise religion’ (Bahrawi, 2011, p. 330), it is better conceptualized as a condition that deconstructs the reason and faith dichotomy assumed by the New Atheists ‘through a process of hybridisation’ (Bahrawi, 2011, p. 331). Thus, the novel’s chastizement of normative Christianity appears to be more nuanced – Cain protests against religious dogma, but it also dissents against the secularization thesis. As postsecular dissent, Saramago’s Cain assumes a literary guise that works primarily through the presence of an omniscient narrator who clarifies what could be could be considered ‘gaps’ in the Book of Genesis. In the first chapter, the narrator describes her narrative of Cain as one written ‘with all the meticulousness of a historian’ (Saramago, 2011, p. 5). Among her many bold clarifications is the implicit proposition that Cain was the lovechild of Eve and the cherubim angel Azael, who was tasked by God to guard the gates of Eden in the days following Adam and Eve’s expulsion. After Eve pleads with him, Azael decides to help the stranded couple instead, raising suspicions in Adam as to the nature of his wife’s relationship with Azael. The birth of Cain infers the cuckolding of Adam: When cain is born, all the neighbours will be surprised by the pale rosy complexion with which he comes into the world, as if he were the son of an angel, or an archangel, or even, perish the thought, the son of one of the cherubim. (Saramago, 2011, p. 20)

Here, the omniscient narrator’s delight in suggesting the affair is clearly captured through her sarcasm (‘perish the thought’). This was not the only example of the omniscient narrator attempting to plug a certain historical gap within

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Christianity. In another instance, the narrator informs readers that God had indeed given belly buttons to the pair, even though this was not mentioned in the Book of Genesis. The passage in Cain reads: He [God] had gone there with the intention of correcting a slight flaw, which, he had finally realised, seriously marred his creations, and that flaw, can you believe it, was the lack of a navel [. . .]. Quickly, in case they should wake up, god reached out and very lightly pressed adam’s belly with the tip of his forefinger, making a rapid circular movement, and there was the navel. The same procedure, carried out on eve, produced similar results, with the one important difference that her navel was much better as regards design, shape and the delicacy of its folds. (Saramago, 2011, pp. 6–7)

The mystery of Adam and Eve’s navels has occupied Christians over centuries. Yet the narrator’s sarcastic tone here makes the entire debate sound ludicrous. Read between the lines, the text seems to be saying that such a preoccupation is a wasteful venture, and that the faithful should really focus on something graver. If we factor in Saramago’s Marxist beliefs, it would not be a stretch to speculate that the writer would have taken more kindly to Christian debates about the rich-poor gap that has expressed itself as liberation theology, or about the narrative of Job in which the seemingly powerless rises against the powerful as an allegory of the proletariat revolution prophesized by Karl Marx. Indeed, the narrator channels Job’s uprising through the protagonist Cain. This is captured in the text when God confronts Cain over the murder of the latter’s brother: Where is your brother, he asked, and cain responded with another question. Am I my brother’s keeper, You killed him, Yes, I did but you are the one who is really to blame [. . .] Just as you had the freedom to stop me killing abel, which was perfectly within your capabilities, all you had to do, just for a moment, was to abandon that pride in your infallibility that you share with all the other gods . . . (Saramago, 2011, pp. 23–4)

Yet again, the novel offers an alternative perspective to normative Christianity, clarifying another ‘gap’ in the Bible – this being, how Cain accepted his punishment. Instead of a dependent Cain who proclaims in Genesis 4:13 that ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear’, Saramago’s Cain cuts a defiant figure whose critique of a hubristic God’s is viable enough to prod a rethink. Seen this way, Cain becomes a hyperbolic version of Job. Cain becomes Job unbound.

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Some mention of form is important here. Saramago’s Cain is also postsecular in the way it draws attention to the allure of narratives as a way of enchanting the world. Here, the novel is at once a parody and pastiche of the Bible. It satirizes the Bible by way of the narrator’s sarcasm and Saramago’s unconventional casting. Yet it also pays homage to the good book by appropriating biblical characters and events, as well as by upholding the notion of Abrahamic omniscience, though Saramago transfers this power over from God to the narrator in his novel. Cain’s embrace of scripture – both satirical and otherwise – suggests certain veneration for the process of story-telling.

Cain’s uprising From the twentieth century on, the mark of Cain began to appear more frequently throughout the literary world. By this, I mean that the phenomenon of writers translating scripture into fiction has become pronounced, most prevalently among those who deal with Christianity. It is apt to demonstrate its expanse by beginning with Saramago himself. Cain was the writer’s second attempt at rewriting the Bible, with his first being The Gospel According to Jesus Christ published in Portuguese in 1991 and translated into English some three years later. The book recounts an alternative history of Jesus, who was forced into prophethood but decided to end his life by crucifixion in the hope of destabilizing God’s plan to convert the world. Its irreverent content was met with censure from the Catholic Church, as well as the Portuguese government. Later, Norman Mailer also published a novel of Jesus’s life, which the critic James Wood argues is less blasphemous because it misses the chance of knocking ‘Jesus off his throne’ (Wood, 1997, p. 34). It is important to reiterate here that Saramago’s Cain, while earning the ire of Catholics, is postsecular in the way it upholds the wonders of narrative as a way of enchanting the world. Yet Cain and Jesus are not the only biblical figures to get translated literarily. Also popular is Noah, who has received a similar treatment from Jeanette Winterson in her novel Boating for Beginners (1985) and Julian Barnes in his short story ‘The Stowaway’ (1989). Both stories offer a critical take on Noah, with Winterson depicting him as a capitalist and Barnes outlining his eugenics elitism. Meanwhile, destabilizing the literary retelling of biblical male-centric protagonist is the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, who fictionalizes the narrative of Mary in The Testament of Mary, shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, with the mother of Jesus doubting her son’s divine stature. For Terry R. Wright, literary retellings

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of The Book of Genesis can be traced even earlier. He cites Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve based on serialized short stories of Eve and Adam published between 1905 and 1906. According to Wright, Twain’s stories – while gentle on rewriting Genesis – postulate an alternative view of the Fall in which ‘Eve is shown to have more initiative than Adam [. . .] and more intellectual curiosity’ (Wright, 2007, p. 40). Such literary translations must be differentiated from retellings that touch on the Bible tangentially, or as allegory. Among these would be John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952) and the novels of Toni Morrison. With the former, Wright argues that Steinbeck’s novel is not exactly anti-tradition as much as it ‘follows the midrashic tradition [. . .] in providing both a commentary upon Genesis 4 and a supplementary narrative based on it’ (Wright, 2007, p. 51). In engaging with the biblical story of Cain, albeit indirectly as background, Steinbeck’s novel mirrors Cain’s appeal to the postsecular. With Morrison, meanwhile, critic Katherine Clay Bassard has argued in her book Tranforming Scriptures that “the Song of Songs is possibly the biblical urtext for much of Morrison’s novelistic and discursive project, since elements of its poetics appear in much of her work” (Bassard, 2010, p.  101). Here again the breaking down of the reason/faith dichotomy takes centre-stage. But literary translations of scriptures are not confined to Christian narratives. The mark of Saramago’s Cain can also be seen in Judaism and Islam, albeit in smaller dosages. With the former, the most renown is arguably The Book of J (1990), which features witty English translations of aspects of the Old Testament from Hebrew by David Rosenberg accompanied by essays by Harold Bloom. If theologians have long maintained that J, credited for having written the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, was in truth a group of anonymous authors, Bloom counter-argues that J was a single person – a brilliant poetess living in the court of Solomon more than 3,000 years ago. To a certain extent, Jenny Diski’s novel Only Human (2000) can also be considered a retelling of Judaic history. The novel narrates an alternative account of the Akedah, or the narrative of Isaac’s binding and foiled sacrifice, as arising out of a complex love triangle between Abraham, Sarah and God. In Diski’s account, Isaac was not saved by an angel as normative doctrine purports but by God Himself who stopped the slaughter from taking place at the last minute. Thinking that God cowered from committing to a serious relationship by backtracking on His command, Abraham becomes resentful of the former. Wright’s observation is relevant here: ‘This God, of course, is not that of Jewish or any other orthodoxy. He is a creature of Diski’s own imagining developed in response of the biblical

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text as she reads it, highlighting some of its absurdities and contradictions’ (Wright, 2007, p. 107). In terms of fictions dealing with Islamic narratives, literary retellings of the Qur’an are most famously spearheaded by the Nobel Prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz in his Arabic book Awlad Haritna (1959), which was translated into English as Children of Gebelawi (1981). The book re-reads the stories of the Islamic prophets by setting it in an Egyptian hara (alley) ruled by the authoritarian overlord Gebelawi, personifying God. The novel injects themes of class-consciousness and social justice into the development of Islam, and outlines the death of Gebelawi at the hands of ‘Arafah, personifying Science, thereby proposing the latter as the heir to religion (El-Enany, 1988, pp. 25–6). So controversial was this novel that an Islamic conservative stabbed Mahfouz in 1994 for blaspheming Islam – an attack that he fortunately survived, but one that had left him half-paralysed. Yet Mahfouz’s novel is probably the most extensive Islam-themed fiction that engages directly with Qur’anic narratives. Another modern text that comes close is Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses (1988). The novel re-envisions a modern version of Muhammad and Jibril as the characters Mahound and Gibreel to challenge the pervasiveness of rationality in the modern world. As Erickson describes it: ‘Rushdie’s discourse introduces contrariety and contradiction, challenging the logical, scholastic contention that a thing cannot be and not not be [sic] at the same time’ (Erickson, 1998, p. 139). While there are other Islamthemed fictions that deal with aspects of religious narrative, these two are the ones that deal directly with the Qur’an. As with Cain, the self-reflexive nature of these novels must not be taken as an attack against ‘faith’ in the manner of New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. While Awlad Haritna and The Satanic Verses are critical of Islam’s normative narratives, both books also outline the pervasive allure of the unknown expressed through the propensity for imagination. Mahfouz’s novel may see ‘Arafa killing off Gebelawi, but the denizens of his alley still desire for an overlord following his death. With Rushdie’s novel, the chastisement of logic can also be seen as a rejection of hyper-rationalism, perhaps even of scientism, that fuel the ontology of the secular. Both purport postsecular dissent. While brief, this survey of modern and contemporary fiction suggests that Saramago’s Cain is not alone in translating postsecular dissent. There are others across literatures of the Abrahamic faiths that do the same. One can therefore speak of a Cain’s uprising in the making. As a fledgling but discernible trend, novels of postsecular dissent gesture towards Prasenjit Duara’s breakthrough

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notion of dialogic transcendence in the way multiple levels of truth are contained within each other. Within Chapter  3 in this book, Duara writes: ‘These contestations are not necessarily conflictual, but prophets or rebels from the lower social orders periodically arise to challenge the betrayals of the selfappointed custodians of “higher truths” ’. In carving out an alternative history of a biblical story which reverses and chastizes but does not dismiss the sacred, Saramago’s Cain does exactly that, and so too its literary brethren.

References Bahrawi, N. (2011). ‘Fictionalising the utopian impulse as postsecular Islam: an East-West odyssey’. Literature and Theology. 25(3). 329–46. Bassard, K.C. (2010). Transforming Scriptures: African American Women Writers and the Bible. Georgia: University of Georgia Press. Bassnett, S. (1998). ‘The translation turn in cultural studies’. In S. Bassnett and A. Lefevere (eds) Constructing Cultures: Essays On Literary Translation. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Bradley, A. (2009). ‘The New Atheist novel: literature, religion, and terror in Amis and McEwan’. The Yearbook of English Studies. 39(1/2). 20–38. Bruce, S. (1996). Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults. Oxford: Oxford University Press. El-Enany, R. (1988). ‘Religion in the novels of Naguib Mahfouz’. British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. 15(1/2). 21–27. Erickson, J. (1998). Islam and Postcolonial Narrative. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Flesch, W. (2012). ‘The evil of banality’. The Los Angeles Review of Books. 30 June. Available at: http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/the-evil-of-banality. Gentzler, E. (1998). ‘Foreword’. In S. Bassnet and A. Lefevere (eds), Constructing Cultures: Essays On Literary Translation. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. Hahn, D. (2011). ‘Cain, by José Saramago, trans. Margaret Jull Costa’. The Independent. 19 August 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/ cain-by-jos-saramago-trans-margaret-jull-costa-2339964.html Saramago, J. (2011). Cain. (Trans.) M. J. Costa. London: Harvill Secker, 2009. Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Wood, J. (1997). ‘He is finished’. The New Republic. 12 May. 30–5. Wright, T.R. (2007). The Genesis of Fiction: Modern novelists as Biblical interpreters. Hampshire and Burlington: Ashgate.

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