From James Joyce to Murakami: The Losers and Forgotten of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Louise Glück's answer to the Nobel Prize: "I really need a coffee now"
Nobel 2020: American poet Louise Glück wins the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature
It is not easy to guess the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and that benefits the prize.
Then there's the Bob Dylan thing, which doesn't matter.
When at 1:00 p.m. yesterday a representative of the Swedish Academy read the name of Louise Glück, it was immediately known what she was talking about: poetry.
A poet.
A 77-year-old American poet, born in New York.
A poet in the Chair of Literature at Yale University
.
A poet with seven books of poetry published in Spain, all in the Pre-Textos publishing house.
The jury's reasons are precise:
"Because of his unmistakable poetic voice, which, with an austere beauty, makes individual existence universal
.
"
Fortunately Louise Glück's poetry is clearer, more direct and more vibrant than the Swedish scholars' motives for awarding it.
Some of her books translated into Spanish, such as
Vita nova
,
Ararat
,
Wild iris
or
Praderas
, set the journey to the austerity of her writing, where the emotional and the autobiographical are the same body from which poetry emanates, which for her is "Revenge against circumstances."
The news of the Nobel award was greeted with astonishment and with a burst of practicality amid the hubbub of journalism that sought it: “I want to say that it is a great honor, and then, of course, there are recipients of this award who do not admire
Then I think of those that are, and some very recent ones, and that makes me feel grateful.
Regarding
my first impression when I learned that I was awarded the Nobel, it was that I wanted to buy another house
, a house in Vermont.
Now I have a property in Cambridge, but I like Vermont better.
So I thought 'well, now I can buy that house'.
For the rest, my obligations, my worries and my pleasures are the same as always.
Above all, I am concerned with daily life with the people I love.
And why would his book suggest you start reading his work?
'The books are very different from each other.
I'd rather you didn't read my first book unless you want to feel contempt, but everything that follows that I think is of some interest.
I like my recent job.
Averno seems like a good place to start.
She belongs to the same generation as the Canadian Anne Carson (successive candidate for the award in recent years) and the North American Sharon Olds. Without the capacity of experimentation of the first nor the dramatic and narrative power of the second,
Glück has made disappointment, of the biographical inclemencies, of the abandonment and of a vigorous feeling of disappointment the impulse of his work
.
Also irony.
Ever since the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in 1996, poetry has been off the prize's radar
.
Twenty-four years have passed.
And a journalist, Svetlana Alexievich, in between.
But this has been a year of poets in the two great international literary awards.
Carson's Princess of Asturias and the recognition of the Swedish Academy of Glück.
Poetry in one of the least poetic years of the last half century.
Maybe that's why.
Maybe it has nothing to do with it.
But it is possible that poetry has accompanied more and better.
Because in her the experience of intimacy is strong.
Because it has soothing principles.
Because they are a defense against the offenses of life, as José Manuel Caballero Bonald says.
Truth as friendly
fire
has no place in poems when they are authentic, when they host that vein of truth that only some words and emotions in conjunction can achieve.
Poetry is a bit the memory of oneself and also, for that very reason, a bit the memory of the world.
Of joy and suffering.
Louise Glück suffered from an anorexic disorder as a young woman, but she did not have such a clear sense of self-destruction as to go to the ultimate consequences.
That forging of the self and self-esteem were the beginning of a way of being in life that found in words the necessary strategy to find a why.
"But as soon as I can locate myself again and understand myself, I immediately want to do the opposite," says the poet in an interview in the
Washington Square Review
.
«I need the experience of poetry to seem like an adventure.
It even has to look like fun, something you've never done before.
I'm not interested in polishing the monument of solemnity.
And it is that the pact of poetry with the reader unexpectedly proposes the guarantee of an enigma that is sustained in time and whose only approximate answer is strengthened on the side of the unknown.
Thinking about poetry (its mechanics, its reason, its prodigy, its border and its meaning) is an experience fueled by uneasiness
, a kind of game that almost always involves the difficulty of not knowing very well where you are going.
And that's what Louise Glück is looking for or is proposing.
And that is what happens with poetry as a tool with which to stand at a time when all the floors are confused backgrounds.
Poetry is what we accept as an entire attitude to time and language.
An impulse that we find, while the other things in life we do.
Louis Glück lives and writes at a similar speed.
In a rhythm where sobriety seems to supervise everything.
Even the experience of growing old, the evidence of death.
“
I think people my age are so afraid of the subject that they tend to have all their own notions about the horror of mortality embedded in every little gesture
.
But I understand the passage of time as a kind of state of strange happiness, as liberation from the abandonment of certain types of expectations.
Louise Glück's emotional territory reveals complex moral and sensual scenarios.
But that's also the exploration of her writing, inside herself.
A good example is the poet entitled
El espino
, where he writes: «
Next to you, but not / by your hand: this is how I look at you / walking through the garden / in summer: things / that cannot move / learn to look.
I don't need / chase you through / the garden;
everywhere / humans leave / sign of what they feel, flowers / scattered in the dust of the road, all / white and gold, some / slightly raised / by the afternoon wind.
I don't need / follow you where you are now, / sunk in the poison of this field, to / know the cause of your flight, of your human / passion, of your rage: why else / would you drop everything / that you have accumulated ?
».
A beautiful poem that confirms some of the suspicions that keep Louise Glück's poetry in suspense.
Writing is speculating.
Writing is waiting.
Stay on high alert.
Writing is fixing the provisional.
The harmonics of poetry are dependent on an idea, on a way of feeling, of looking, but they are not the idea itself but rather a more transparent flash, a secret that cannot be started.
Poetry is a way of thinking about language itself, a voluntary rehearsal of unintended consequences from a clear and extreme conscience.
This is the writing of Louise Glück.
A poetry capable of giving light when the temptation is darkness
.
A poetry that reaches the world and with emotional sobriety also "calls for disorder, disorder."
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