Nobel Peace Prize

[irvin66]

Tomorrow will the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the European Union.
One can doubtless ask whether they have deserved the prize, what do you think about that?

[trish]

Doesn't the prize often go to an individual (rather than a group) who is in a position to (and is thought by the committee to have the inclination to) push two or more warring parties toward a peace?

[Stavros]

Doesn't the prize often go to an individual (rather than a group) who is in a position to (and is thought by the committee to have the inclination to) push two or more warring parties toward a peace?

Not at all, organisations have been given the prize in the past -such as the International Committee of the Red Cross; but if you look at the original remit it says that the recipient of the prize should have "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses". On this basis, most of the recipients were not worthy, including Martin Luther Kng Jr (1964); but we knew that for other reasons anyway. Those reasons being political -outside of the sciences, if you look at the recipients of the most 'subjective' prizes, the Literature and the Peace prizes, the core justification was not there. I can't imagine many people have waded through the several million words Winston Churchill wrote that won him the literature prize, and I doubt many have read all three volumes of the Gulag Archipelago written by Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, like other Nobel laureates was not a great writer anyway, as if that was part of the deal (but he may have been the most anti-Jewish of the lot).

I am not disparaging all of the Peace Prize winners, make your own mind up, the list is here:
List of Nobel Peace Prize laureates - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On literature -the few who in my opinion are great writers are great writers without the prize (11 to be precise), it made no difference to their reputation whereas some of the recipients could barely write anything worth reading, eg Doris Lessing, William Golding, Hemingway et al. The eclectic list of losers and users is here:
List of Nobel laureates in Literature - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Prospero]

C'mon Stavros - don't be so coy. Name the eleven you think to be great writers.
Do they include Seamus Heaney, Pamuk, J M Coetzee, Derek Walcott, Paz, Szymborska, V S Naipaul by any chance from recent years? Mahfouz, Brodsky, Canetti, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Neruda, Boll, Beckett,Sartre, Camus, Faulkner, Russell, Eliot, Gide, O"Neill, Piradello, Mann, Sinclair Lewis, Shaw, Yeats, Kipling....

[trish]

Thanks for the correction, Stavros. I should've been able to look it up myself, but I'm the gunning for the Nobel Prize in Slothful Torpidity. Unfortunately it looks like Congress has got that one in the bag. Perhaps they should give the Peace Prize to the person who simply created the least friction between Nations. Gimme, gimme.

It does seem difficult, among all the works of literature that are produced on a yearly basis, to judge which are prize-worthy. How can academic politics not intrude? Yet, I'm not unhappy with the Old Man in the Sea, or Lord of the Flies. I do confess to having never developed a taste for Lessing, not having yet even sampled Pamuk and wasting time I reading "lesser" artists (e.g. China Mieville and others) with some regularity.

[Stavros]

C'mon Stavros - don't be so coy. Name the eleven you think to be great writers.
Do they include Seamus Heaney, Pamuk, J M Coetzee, Derek Walcott, Paz, Szymborska, V S Naipaul by any chance from recent years? Mahfouz, Brodsky, Canetti, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Neruda, Boll, Beckett,Sartre, Camus, Faulkner, Russell, Eliot, Gide, O"Neill, Piradello, Mann, Sinclair Lewis, Shaw, Yeats, Kipling....

In the first place as I said the truly great writers have never needed a prize to confirm their reputation -there is also the greater difficulty of judging literature in a foreign language unless one is familiar enough with it to understand its subtleties. Pasternak is a good example, in purely aesthetic terms one of the finest writers in Russian since Pushkin, if not of all time. Yet Akhmatova's poetry at its best is better than his and more accessible, whereas her contemporary, Maria Tsvetayeva translates poorly into English where in Russian it is full of alliterations, symmetries and nuances translation cannot do justice to. Russians have told me how difficult it is to render the sense of her poetry into English, and they and Russian speakers have all confirmed the exquisite artistry of Pasternak. In that one opening sentence of Dr Zhivago, Pasternak establishes the musical structure of the book which reads like a sequence of songs or poems; and yet retains the majesty of art written on a broad canvas, an important point as the book is about the endurance of the word and because the narrative ends in the twlilight of Moscow where two friends have devoured the poems by Zhivago which then close the book. This the beginning:
On they went, singing "Eternal Memory", and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.

Another issue must be consistency and the judgement of a writer's work as a whole, except that this usually leads to a relegation, as is the case with most of the people on the list and, indeed, all writers; it is after all very hard to expect a high degree of quality over a lifetime and very few writers have been able to produce more than two books of lasting merit, Faulkner is lucky in this sense, as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying are works of genius, whereas his other books are turgid and suffer from the padding that comes from a failure of the imagination. Indeed, on this basis, while there have been some truly outstanding American novels, the only American in the 20th century to have produced a lasting body of work is Robert Lowell, and of the novels the only ones to last the distance have been the two aforementioned by Falkner; and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. My standards are high and harsh, but that's the way it is. As I see it, the Golden Age of American letters ended with the death of Whitman. It doesn't meant there are not some enjoyable books -Last Exit to Brooklyn, On the Road, City of Night, Invisible Man, yes they all readable, as are a host of crime novels by Patricia Highsmith and Raymond Chandler, but hardly great literature; it is unfair to attempt to make more of it than it is. I am mystified by Thomas Pynchon and may need to make a major effort to understand his books before if I have time, but its not exactly an urgent requirement.

Of the writers on your list I have followed Seamus Heaney's career from its inception, and am pleasantly amazed at the quality of writing he produces, year after year; how you can include the scribblings of a windbag like Shaw along with Heaney beats me; and Sartre had the good sense to refuse the prize. I also enjoyed reading Grazia Deledda in the 1990s although I don't class her work as front rank largely because of the lack of adventure in her style, but Elias Portolu is I think essential reading for anyone going to Sardinia. Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Melisande as Debussy's libretto is heavenly, but his other work is trying. And while I appreciate those Italian poets, I am not sure their work as a whole merits my list. William Golding shares with Doris Lessing a relentless conservative frame of mind whose pessimism is so irrational, and whose politics so opposed by historical reality it reduces their writing to something slightly more imaginative than a letter from Colonel Blimp to the Daily Telegraph, if without the purpose. VS Naipaul -come on, this isn't writing, it barely ranks as journalism. I would rather read a 12 year old writing an essay What I did on my holidays, it could not be worse than anything the old poseur could ever produce.

Thus, truncated by my ignorance of their work, the list, not including those great writers I don't know must include:
Yeats (but only just), Pasternak, Camus, Beckett, Neruda, Boll, Heaney and Grass. On reflection the others don't make it.

The question then is, which great writers from the 20th century did not win this particular medal -and the money of course, which is what matters most.

Your call.

[Prospero]

I agree 100 per cent with your point about great writers being great regardless of whether they have won literary prizes or not. My list offered to you included those widely seen as 'great" by society and whose work I have read widely, but not necessarily my view (I agree with you about Shaw being a windbag and Heaney being with the excellence of Heaney, but strongly disagree about Naipaul - a deeply disagreeable individual but a fine writer at his best "A Bend in The River", "The Enigma Of Arrival." ).

A career must, perforce, be judged by its highest achievements and the relationship they have to the overall career. Thus a writer like Mailer who did produce a handful of very powerful books (The Naked and the dead, The Executioners Song, Armies of The Night) must also be held culpable for works of egregious awfulness (Ancient Evenings being the very worst).

"Traduttore, tradittore" Yes - as Robert frost said "Poetry is what gets lost in translation." Poetry is he greatest challenge to the translator. Novels are an easier, but not easy, task. And yet millions of people around the world can only glimpse and taste something of the greatness of poets this way. Unless you are able to speak fluently all of the great languages you can never fully appreciate the power of the great poets such as the Russians Akhmatova and Tsvetayeva (Though Max Hayward did offer some bery good work with Akhmatova) and indeed the great Pushkin is also re-imagned pretty well by your hated Nabokov and by Charles Johnston. But ho can we judge the translations of a bengali poet such as Tagore or Arabic writers? The iimpid translations of Symborska offer a great and economic clarity of language and thought. Whether this is true of the original polish i have no idea.

Lowell? (Not novels as your remarks suggest but a poet). So what then of Robert frost? And a few other non-Nobelled writers such as Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur or Richard Wilbur. The list is longer.

As for those who did not win the prize? The great omission must be Jorge Luis Borges. But since politics is such a key determinant, (hence the inclusion of Solzhenitsyn) i understand Borges' perceived attitude to the military dictatorship in Argentina made him a non-starter. Auden is another odd omission.

[Stavros]

I agree 100 per cent with your point about great writers being great regardless of whether they have won literary prizes or not. My list offered to you included those widely seen as 'great" by society and whose work I have read widely, but not necessarily my view (I agree with you about Shaw being a windbag and Heaney being with the excellence of Heaney, but strongly disagree about Naipaul - a deeply disagreeable individual but a fine writer at his best "A Bend in The River", "The Enigma Of Arrival." ).

A career must, perforce, be judged by its highest achievements and the relationship they have to the overall career. Thus a writer like Mailer who did produce a handful of very powerful books (The Naked and the dead, The Executioners Song, Armies of The Night) must also be held culpable for works of egregious awfulness (Ancient Evenings being the very worst).

"Traduttore, tradittore" Yes - as Robert frost said "Poetry is what gets lost in translation." Poetry is he greatest challenge to the translator. Novels are an easier, but not easy, task. And yet millions of people around the world can only glimpse and taste something of the greatness of poets this way. Unless you are able to speak fluently all of the great languages you can never fully appreciate the power of the great poets such as the Russians Akhmatova and Tsvetayeva (Though Max Hayward did offer some bery good work with Akhmatova) and indeed the great Pushkin is also re-imagned pretty well by your hated Nabokov and by Charles Johnston. But ho can we judge the translations of a bengali poet such as Tagore or Arabic writers? The iimpid translations of Symborska offer a great and economic clarity of language and thought. Whether this is true of the original polish i have no idea.

Lowell? (Not novels as your remarks suggest but a poet). So what then of Robert frost? And a few other non-Nobelled writers such as Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur or Richard Wilbur. The list is longer.

As for those who did not win the prize? The great omission must be Jorge Luis Borges. But since politics is such a key determinant, (hence the inclusion of Solzhenitsyn) i understand Borges' perceived attitude to the military dictatorship in Argentina made him a non-starter. Auden is another odd omission.

I agree with most of what you write, since prizes in literature can never really mean that there is a consensus on either a book or a writer -after all, one might think Shakespeare's reputation is unassailable until you encountered Hugh MacDiarmid who dismissed the whole of Shakespeare and most English poetry with him. Even in the case of Dante, for a non-Catholic Paradiso is heavy going where Inferno and Purgatorio are at least borne along by the stunning imagery and language. It is therefore amusing, but pointless to name names, it just means that, unlike Trish, I can't stand Hemingway, yet I do know he is considered a great American writer; same with Nabokov -but then I spent the best part of 20 years trying to read The Prelude and finally decided that, reputations aside, Wordsworth is not for me outside some pleasant small poems. I believe there are composers who loathe Mozart, which seems impossible, whereas I know people whose loathing of Wagner may well be pathological rather than aesthetic.

But the thread is actually about the Peace Prize, which makes it even harder as so few of the laureates meet any of the original criteria for which the prize was supposed to be awarded.

As I said, in the end, its the money that matters most.

[Prospero]

Indeed - and one of the most absurd recipients of the peace prize was President Obama. It was awarded before he'd been in office five minutes - and well before he started killing huge numbers with the drone strikes.

But then Kissinger also go the peace prize.

[hippifried]

Well... If the Germans start marching south again in the near future, we'll know the prize was misplaced.