WERE U.S. WRITERS DISSED? YOU BETCHA’
Chris Sinacola Sina-cism, csinacola@telegram.com

Worcester Telegram
Friday, October 3, 2008
MA

Firestorm ignited at Swedish Academy

In case you were too busy reading John Grisham’s latest novel and
missed it, the head honcho of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl,
opined the other day that Americans are too ignorant to compete with
Europeans for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

"The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough
and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,"
Engdahl told Sweden’s leading daily paper, Svenska Dagbladet. "That
ignorance is restraining."

Well, I guess you can bet Americans are out of the running again
this year. The last American to win was Toni Morrison in 1993, and
while a dozen or so Americans are mentioned each year as contenders,
they consistently lose to such household names as Elfriede Jelinek,
Dario Fo and Wislawa Szymborska.

The Stockholm News offered this online gem for its English readers:

"Every automn the Swedish academy reveals who will be granted the
nobel price in litterature, the perhaps most prestigious nobel price
of them all. During the last thirty year, only three Americans have
be awarded."

Ja, and every automn I wait with baited breathing to see what the
price of litter will be this year, and to which obscure Europan litter
maker or poetess the price will go.

It’s not that I have anything against the obscure, mostly left-wing
European writers who win the prize year after year, sparking a small
flurry of sales among Americans such as myself desperate to be cool
and accepted in Parisian cafés, should such a café ever open in
Central Massachusetts. It’s just that I can’t stand to see American
literature get dissed.

We Americans have a Hall of Fame lineup, including Irving, Poe,
Hawthorne, Twain, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson,
Faulkner, Cather, Hemingway and Frost, to mention only a few scribblers
from our past. You’ll notice that first names are unnecessary in that
list, whereas a sample of last century’s European Nobel winners —
Heyse, Eucken, Mommsen, von Heidenstam, Spitteler, Benavente and
Karlfeldt — doesn’t exactly ring a bell.

Nor is America all that isolated from the world’s cultures. Washington
Irving gained fame spinning tales of Dutch settlement in New York’s
Hudson River Valley. Willa Cather and Olé Rolvagg wrote of the lives
of Scandinavian settlers in the Midwest. Our nation is blessed with
many literatures. We have Jewish-American writers such as Joseph
Epstein, Philip Roth and the late Saul Bellow, who did win the Nobel
Prize. There are Italian-Americans such as Don DeLillo, Gay Talese,
and Mario Puzo, whose "Godfather" novels are far more widely read
than anything by writers such as Kenzaburo Oe or Gao Xingjian, two
Nobel winners you have probably never read, and perhaps never heard of.

America offers a rich African-American literature, from Frederick
Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois to Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston
and August Wilson. We have master prose stylists who penned the
Declaration, Federalist Papers, and dozens of pamphlets that
ignited the flames of freedom. Our literary heritage boasts great
historians, such as Francis Parkman, Henry Adams, William H. Prescott,
and even Lewis and Clark, whose journals are a treasure trove for
historians. We have Asian writers, French-Canadian writers, Armenian
writers, and Hispanic writers. America has produced master essayists
such as E.B. White, accomplished novelists such as the late William
Maxwell, and beloved children’s authors such as Dr. Seuss. Do you
want Westerns? Science fiction? Post-modern fiction? Crime noir? Beat
poets? Welcome to America.

Moreover, we Americans have no need to denigrate European
writers. Personally, I think very highly of quite a few European
Nobel laureates, including Thomas Mann, Francois Mauriac, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, Winston Churchill and recent winner Orhan Pamuk of
Turkey. All were or are superb and important writers. Another laureate,
Irish poet Seamus Heaney, deserves eternal thanks for having rescued
Beowulf from the shackles of bad translations and reintroduced its
glory to American readers.

Perhaps our American literary tradition doesn’t come with enough Left
Bank cafés. I’ll just have to console myself at the local bookstore
café as I reread Fitzgerald, raft down the Mississippi with Huck Finn,
or go globetrotting with Mark Twain.

Oh the insularity!

–Boundary_(ID_fRn9CcR1Dyf5OMd9bCbjrA )–

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress