Countries without Nobel Prizes for Literature

[Heteronym]

What do Argentina and Brazil have in common? They're two countries with great literature and not a single Nobel Laureate.

St. Lucia, a tiny island in the Caribbean, has Derek Walcott.

Does anyone else find fascinating the distribution of Nobel Prizes around the world? It's like some countries keep hoarding them - Poland has five, Italy six, Ireland four. How can one explain this?

 

[waalkwriter]

India doesn't actually have a Nobel Laureate. The arguments for Tagore are quite sketchy. He was Bengali, and therefore I consider him to be a Bengali Nobel Laureate, not an India one. There hasn't been a Hindi laureate, or a Punjabi one, or any true Indian Laureate.

It brings me to some general complaints I have about discussing authors. Joseph Conrad was not a British author. He grew up in Poland, spoke Polish first, and was a Polish emigre who learned English and relocated there and wrote in English. But that doesn't change the fact he didn't grow up in Cheshire, he didn't form his opinions there, his cultural background, his critical and formative years of life.

If someone lives the first twenty years of their life in one country, they belong to that country. Thus Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Nabokov are Russian, not American. Would Gunter Grass suddenly be French if he renounced his German citizenship and moved to France after a lifetime abroad? Then way is Gao Xiang considered to be a French Nobel Laureate just because he lives in France?

 

[Eric]

Waalkwriter, the nationality question is indeed a conundrum. But they award the Nobel prizes to individuals, not according to nationality. The fact that Milosz lived for years in California, as did Thomas Mann, with Isaac Bashevis Singer living in New York, and Nabokov and Brodsky and Solzhenitsyn in other parts of the USA, does not make them all dyed-in-the-wool apple-pie Americans.

If the world were a more civilised place, all these Russians and Poles under Communism, and Germans under Nazism, wouldn't have had to live in exile because the authorities in their countries of origin were too stupid, fearful, and ignorant to cope with clever writers who told the truth instead of what the authorities (look at North Korea!!!) wanted to hear about themselves.

*

To return to the original question, The Netherlands is one country that has never had a Nobel Prize for Literature. But in Holland they have never learnt to promote the really accomplished national writers instead of their own friends, one-day butterflies, or dreadful moralists. There can surely be no other decent country with around 16 million inhabitants in northern Europe that has not won a Nobel yet for literature. I'm not sure that Mulisch and Nooteboom are necessarily Nobel material, but someone will emerge one day. Given the fact that The Netherlands has a good translation culture, Dutch authors must get plenty of literary impulses from abroad and exposure to great authors. But outside of Holland, you hardly ever hear anything about Dutch literature as a whole.

 

[anchomal]

You raise an interesting point, waalkwriter. If you are born in a country does that make you from there? Not everything is so clear cut, I think. Where is the cut-off point. If you spend the first twenty years of your life in a country then surely that is your country forever, but why twenty years? Why not, say, fifteen, or ten? By ten you have learned to read and write and talk and walk. It's a difficult thing to define.

Saul Bellow was born in Canada, left at the age of nine and moved to Chicago. But he was born into an emigrant family (they had moved from Russia just two years before he was born). So you wonder what sort of household he grew up in, what were the influences that shaped him. This emigrant influence is important, I think, and must be considered. If you are born in Texas or southern California to a Mexican family, and if the community with which you interact is virtually entirely Mexican, how American are you ever going to feel?

The distribution of the Nobel prizes are fascinating. Aside from Tagore, there were no pre-1930s non-European winners. Ireland definitely punches above its weight with four, and probably can feel hard done by in not having at least one more (James Joyce being an obvious front runner, but according to the archives Sean O'Casey was also considered three times in a row prior to 1950 and probably also after that - he died in 1964). Looking through the list, Europe certainly seems to have been (and continues to be) considered the centre of the literary universe.

 

[Amorphous]

There is actually a very simple explanation: Svenska Akademien does not care about nationality. The nationality reported is in all probability nothing but the actual citizenship of the laureate.

Since nationality is not considered when awarding the prize, it is reasonable to assume that it will not be distributed evenly among the world's nations. The size and strength of literary environments differ between countries and on top of that, we have the literary preferences of the members. There are only 18 members - not all of them active at this time - so individual member preferences have a strong impact.

 

[kpjayan]

India doesn't actually have a Nobel Laureate. The arguments for Tagore are quite sketchy. He was Bengali, and therefore I consider him to be a Bengali Nobel Laureate, not an India one. There hasn't been a Hindi laureate, or a Punjabi one, or any true Indian Laureate.

This is incorrect. Bengali ( or BongLA , as it is called) is part of Indian literature. India has 22 official languages and each has its own very developed literary tradition.

Though Hindi and its sister languages( bhojpuri, Rajasthani, hariyanvi etc) , are the largest spoken language, the literary scene in other languages are equally if not better in terms of both quality and quantity. Languages like Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Oriya ,Panjabi and Telugu are rich in literary tradition and history.

So, Tagore and Bengali literature is very much a part of Indian Literature.

 

[Eric]

This comment by Anchomal interests me most in this context:

You raise an interesting point, waalkwriter. If you are born in a country does that make you from there? Not everything is so clear cut, I think. Where is the cut-off point. If you spend the first twenty years of your life in a country then surely that is your country forever, but why twenty years? Why not, say, fifteen, or ten? By ten you have learned to read and write and talk and walk. It's a difficult thing to define.

If we stick to Nobel Laureates or those who would have qualified, there are differences. Take two major immigrant authors in the USA. In his mental outlook, Milosz never really left the sphere of Poland, and more especially, the Polish-speaking parts of what is now Lithuania of his childhood. Whereas Nabokov, brought up in a much more cosmopolitan way, even as a child, with regard to cultures and languages, is much harder to pin down regarding nationality and feeling.

So I agree with Anchomal: not everything is clear-cut. You only have to look at a number of Irish-born authors to wonder whether, for example, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde were Irish writers or English ones, given the large amounts of time spent in England. Yet Joyce is always considered an Irish writer, despite his long stays in, for instance, Trieste, itself a kind of borderline region between Italy and Slovenia.

 

[Heteronym]

There is actually a very simple explanation: Svenska Akademien does not care about nationality. The nationality reported is in all probability nothing but the actual citizenship of the laureate.

That still doesn't explain why the Academy has an obsession with Polish, Russian, Italian citizens, but ignores Brazilian and Argentinean ones.

 

[anchomal]

Arguments for both Shaw and Wilde as English rather than Irish can certainly be made, Eric. Both were born in Dublin but as British subjects, and both enjoyed their success while living in London. But Shaw was twenty before he left Dublin, and Wilde was also twenty when he went to study at Oxford. In addition, Wilde's mother was a poet and Irish nationalist, and his father wrote books on Irish archeology and folklore. So both surely do qualify as Irish in the fulles sense of the word.
The question, I suppose, is how they saw themselves. Both men wrote in more of an English style, as opposed to Joyce, who seemed to burrow quite deeply into the Irish psyche. Even though he lived abroad for much of his life, I think he never really considered himself to be anything but Irish.
But what would Beckett be?

 

[Mirabell]

That still doesn't explain why the Academy has an obsession with Polish, Russian, Italian citizens, but ignores Brazilian and Argentinean ones.

actually, it does. if nationality is random, that is. random distribution is not equal distribution. a pattern like this is to be expected.

 

[anchomal]

Could it have been, at least prior to the 'sixties, simply a matter of distance? With Europe (and, in cultural terms, the US) on the doorstep, it would surely be less of a struggle for these writers to be noticed.

 

[Daniel del Real]

The question, I suppose, is how they saw themselves.

I think you hit the nail with this statement. Several times we have discussed this topic here with no certain answer. For me it is very important the language in which they wrote and the space where their books were situaded. With that combination you can take a good decision.