Sagarana is the title of Joćo Guimarćes Rosa's first book, a pioneer of fantastical realism in Latin America. Sagarana is a word invented by Guimarćes Rosa, a great inventor of neologisms. The word is made up of two parts each of which has a different etymological origin: "saga", which in Portuguese has the same meaning as in English, and stands for a story which spans across many epochs and generations, and "rana", a collective suffix taken from the native Brazilian dialect Tupi. Sagarana is, therefore, the "multiple story", the "never-ending saga": perhaps it is the imaginary union of all the stories ever to be created by the man during his long exile upon this planet.

Sagarana's story begins here.

The Sagarana workshop: tools for communication
Ideas, even the best ones – the inspiration for a story, for a film script or a radio play – fail more often due to the technical unskilfullness in putting them in writing than for the fact that they are inadequate.
Sagarana is conceived as an old workshop where all its students will be able to find the tools they need in order to organize their creative ideas so as to obtain a precise narrative product from a simple cue or inspiration.

What we will learn, what we will do
In the workshops we will learn to read poetry by going into the workshop of lexical invention and mastering the basic forms of composition, we will enter the world of the theatre in order to develop a thought that will be constantly visual. We will learn how to read a literary text so as to learn to read our own selves, others and reality. We will take the text to pieces in order to study its structure and technique. We will compare the fundamental aspects of narrative art with the results of our exercises until we reduce the difference between the idea and the final written product, thus obtaining a full awareness of our own writing.

Together we will learn to understand what makes a certain text important, and why others are not. We will study the great authors by analyzing their narrative structure and their literary greatness. We will study myths, archetypes and cosmogonies, the history of the classical and modern thought, screen language, narrative structure and history of the theatre. We will look into the psychology of creativity and literary ethics.

We will learn how to organize a text and what is the writer's role, how to write a play or a novel and, contemporarily, we will discover that writing means facing our own conceptual universe and our personal vision of the world in one single indissoluble plan of life. We will also learn how to work together and understand that comparison and confrontation with others are an opportunity and not a threat.

Talent's embankments
With our work, our study and the workshops we will build solid embankments, capable of containing and strengthening individual talent without the risk of dissipating it in mistaken choices. We will practice steering our works in the right direction so as to make them become texts of value and not just the fruit of a vague initial "inspiration".

The writer will be able to choose the style, tense, rhythm, color and trend of the text by organizing the techniques and instruments at his disposal, just like a musician.

Those stories which we have always felt were important but which we have not been capable of telling will find their dimension: novel or play, short story or film script, thus giving rise to that "great pleasure in writing" which the Italian poet Leopardi puts as the top of list of mankind's pleasures, and which Sagarana we will teach you to achieve.

Note: the pictures on this site were taken by Enzo Cei