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Great imagery, riding a rocking horse

I found this written by his current translator:

A word perhaps about the punctuation. Saramago uses only commas and full stops and has a
horror of what James Joyce called 'perverted commas'. Saramago first used this style in Levantado
do Chão, a novel about farm workers in the Alentejo. He wanted to reproduce their speech
rhythms on the page and, to do so, it felt more natural to dispense with quotation marks,
question marks, colons and semi colons and to rely on the rhythms of the prose to carry and
convey all of that. Saramago says that he concentrates on patterns of sounds and pauses, often
adding a word or words because a sentence doesn't read properly - it lacks the right music.
When friends complained that they couldn't follow the text or understand what was going on,
Saramago advised them to read it out loud, and then they understood. He insists that what he
writes must be able to be said. And in fact when I'm translating Saramago, I keep reading the
emerging English text out loud. This is something I do anyway with all my translations, but with
Saramago it's even more crucial because the rhythm of the sentences often also carries the
sense. His dialogues are actually relatively easy to translate, precisely because they do follow
such natural rhythms.
So although the paragraph-less pages look daunting, the seamlessness with which Saramago
moves from narrative voice into dialogue and out again with a minimum of punctuation has the
effect of drawing the reader on. The English translation has to reproduce that seductively
seamless quality.

The rest of it can be read at http://www.kcl.ac.uk/cont.../1/c4/79/74/jullcosta.pdf