Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize in Literature this morning.
Salon ran an opinion piece earlier this week called "Why American novelists don't deserve the Nobel Prize." I'm not sure I agree with their conclusion -- American writers are too insular, no one can relate -- because it sounds like just another argument that we are special snowflakes, but I agree with the general sentiment of "Oh, get over yourselves." In truth, the U.S. is probably still disproportionately ahead in prizes claimed over the history of the Nobel, and to loudly whine that it's not faaaaaair every time it goes to a non-American writer doesn't do us any favors. And, though I joke every year about having never heard of the winner, the amount of translated literature that makes it to American shelves is (at an estimated 3 percent) extremely poor, so that could be our myopia working. (I won't hear that, say, the great Eritrean novelist can't exist yet. He or she might be out there!) Perhaps we should better inform ourselves a little more about the rest of world lit, before we start swinging.
What I really want to know is what the people who caused the swell in bets placed that Bob Dylan would be the next winner were thinking. Giant swindle, or misinformed prediction?
(Thanks to Henry for sending that in mere hours before the prize announcement... keep that line to Stockholm open.)
1 day ago
1 comment:
I've always wondered how to the Nobel committee deals with the challenge of the literature prize: how can they have enough people who are fluent in enough languages to be able to fairly judge all of the literature that's out there?
The science prizes have the advantage that science papers are only published in a handful of languages, and how well-written the paper is doesn't really impact the consideration for the prize. But I don't see how you can separate literature from the language it's written in. (Even if more world literature were translated into English, if I read a translation of one of Tranströmer's poems, how would I know that the English poem is really equivalent to the Swedish poem? The quality of the poem I read is going to be more of a comment on how good the translator is than how good the poet is. (I.e., a good poem in Swedish is necessary but not sufficient for a good translated poem in English.))
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