Yesterday I made a sarcastic remark at New-Poetry about the blurb at the Nobel site for the latest mediocrity getting money from Stockholm in the literature department. John Jeffrey replied, “Bob, if you go to the Noble Prize for Lit web site, there’s a list of all the laureates. For the recent winners, those little blurbs (such as Tranströmer’s ‘condensed, translucent images’ you commented on) have been so overblown that they crack me up. Here are some for various winners. (See if you can guess who based on the blurb.)
“‘…for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat’.
“‘…author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization’.
“‘…that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny’.
“‘…for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories’.
“But it seems these incomprehensible burbs are a recent phenomenon. It wasn’t always this way. Back in ’23, they wrote that Yeats was awarded the prize,“for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” That’s probably too clearly phrased for today’s fancy-pants Nobel writers.”
Said I: “I’m a sucker for ‘cartography,’ John, so I love the blurb with that in it. As for the Yeats blurb, well, my problem with it is the same as my real problem with all the blurbs: they treat poetry as a sociopolitical instrument; what it does for ‘the spirit of a whole nation’ is what counts, not what it does as works of art—not for a whole nation but only for its best few (although I believe in the trickle-down effect that will allow lesser talents to use the innovations of geniuses to make art most of the rest of a nation will enjoy—the Bob Dylans, for instance). The over-blown gush the Nobel people use for their blurbs is just their way of saying they haven’t the slightest idea for what poetry is at its best—though a few times I accept that they’ve rewarded it at its best, as with Yeats. Maybe with Tranströmer, too, who knows. I don’t and won’t have time to, but my intuition is that, at best, he’s another Yeats—which is to say, as Brahms was to Beethoven—when Wagner had become the next Beethoven. Not that I’d shoot someone for preferring Brahms’s music to Wagner’s, but I would shoot someone for claiming Brahms was anywhere near as important a composer as Wagner, and importance ought to be of . . . importance.”
I mentioned Dylan because some people are advancing him as an appropriate Nobel Laureate. If writers like Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck were, then I guess he is.
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