Nobel Prize novelist José Saramago: When he was seven, his family learned “Saramago” had been put on his birth registration due to clerical error.

Wikipedia

José de Sousa Saramago, (16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010), was a Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature…In 2003, Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and in 2010 said he considers Saramago to be "a permanent part of the Western canon,” while James Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant.”

Autobiography

“Saramago was not a family name from my father’s side, but the nickname—meaning ‘wild radish’—by which the family was known in the village…When my father went to the registry office…to declare the birth of his second son, the clerk…was drunk (although my father always claimed Silvano acted out of spite) and he…decided to add Saramago to the plain José de Sousa that my father intended me to be. And, as it turned out…I later had no need to invent a pseudonym with which to sign my books…My family was unaware that I had entered life marked by the name of Saramago until I was seven, for it was only when they had to present my birth certificate in order to enroll me in primary school that the raw truth surfaced from the bureaucratic depths, to the great indignation of my father, who had grown to dislike the nickname. The worst of it was that, since…he was called plain José de Sousa, the Law…wanted to know why it was that his son was called José de Sousa Saramago. Feeling intimidated and wanting to make sure that everything was right and proper, my father had no alternative but to reregister himself under the name of José de Sousa Saramago. This must, I imagine, be the only case in the whole of history of humanity of a son giving his name to his father…[but]…my father…always insisted on being called plain Sousa” (1, pp. 37-39).

José Saramago’s use of the name “Saramago,” not only as a pen name, but as his real name, does not make sense to me. Does it make sense to you?

1. José Saramago. Small Memories. A Memoir [2006]. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa. New York, Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.