Glick won the Nobel Prize: a poet who ventured in the depths of suffering
■ Observer
She is a poet who can make people feel the pain of life and the weight of survival.
At 19:00 on October 8th, Beijing time, the Swedish Academy announced that the American poetess Louise Glick won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature. The reason for the award was "because of her indisputable poetic voice, with a simple Beauty makes the existence of the individual universal".
According to the media, she is the 16th female recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In today's pandemic, it is very meaningful for the Nobel Prize judges to choose Louise Glick for the award.
As her Chinese translator Liu Xiangyang put it, Glick’s poems “pierce people like an awl and stick to the heart”.
Although her poems are about life, death, and love, death has always been the core theme of her poems.
She is a poet who can make people feel the pain of life and the weight of survival. There are fewer and fewer such poets in contemporary America. This is probably an important reason why she has won the love of many Chinese poets.
Rimbaud said that faculties must be indulged. This indulgence does not refer to indulgence, but to experience the rich events or emotions at all times.
Glick is just such a poet. In order to reach the unknown, she has been undergoing this kind of experience, digging and discovering the unknown territory in her soul.
Human thoughts are always tired of thinking about suffering, just like the living flesh hates death, but Glick voluntarily hides in the darkest corners of mankind, until he becomes one with the invisible place. A true poet is Come out to us like this.
Because of this obsession, her poems convey some of the most secret connections among people, between people and nature, and between people and death.
Poets are not prophets, but poets often find things that people can understand in the future from things in the present.
In some situations, poetry is effective only when it truly faces the suffering and thinks about it. No matter when and where the suffering occurs, their essence is the same.
Suffering not only makes thinking effective, but also makes thinking deep and complex, allowing poetry to enter a field it has never entered.
In Glick's poems, it is not difficult to find that she has always maintained a certain surprise at the things we are familiar with, like a certain unexpected feeling of the world.
This kind of surprise can only be realized in the deep loneliness.
It can be seen from Glick's life experience that she seems to have been living in a spiritual loneliness.
Therefore, Glick made poetry himself, his own nature, his entire body and mind, and the spontaneous spurt of his entire soul. This is the most important characteristic of a poet.
Not many poets can do this.
A poet needs to open himself completely, as Whitman puts it "complete confession of personality."
But this is not a self soaked in the dunya, but a self that transcends individual existence and thinks about universal values.
Glick is such a poet.
Nietzsche said that poets are people's bridges to distant times and impressions.
A large number of Glick's poems are like a beam of light from the past, but present a new color in the present. This light may be a dying culture, or it may be a past suffering.
Glick did this not to make life easier, as Nietzsche said, but to let people have a more true and comprehensive understanding of the current suffering.
It is from the sobriety of facing the suffering that hope can grow.
□Ye Kuangzheng (Poet)