Nobel Prize in Literature 1959

[Ben Jackson]

This year's Nobel Prize was awarded to Salvatore Quasimodo, an Italian poet who defeated fellow Italian novelist Ignazio Silone, Ezra Pound and Karen Blixen. There were 56 writers nominated for this year's prize, with future laureates like Sartre, John Perse, Steinbeck, Andric been nominated.

Blixen had majority support from the Nobel Committee that year. As Osterling, chairman of the committee later said "if the prize should go to the 74 year old writer, it should go to her without delay." But Eyvnid Johnson, himself later a Nobel Laureate, suggested that giving the prize to Blixen would mean that the prize would be seem as Scandinavian prize. Authors from that region had won the prize four times more than other countries. He opted instead to either give the Prize to Quasimodo or Silone. Pound, on the other hand, was rejected by Dag Hammarskjold for his, as usual, fascist role in the War. Thus Blixen was rejected for "Reverse Provinicialism."

I remembered a story of when Moravia, hearing rumours that the prize that year was going to Italy, threw a wild party with the hope that he would win. Turned out it was his compatriot Quasimodo. I wondered how he could have felt.

Can't say much about Quasimodo's lyrical quality to be honest. I have read fifteen poems of him. His poems have this classical poetry vibe, with combination of hermetic style of 20th Century Italian poetry. Not in the same league with Pound, and can't put him in the same level as other great Nobel winning poets like Eliot, Montale, Transtromer, Seferis or Elytis, but not a very bad poet. Peter Englund once complained that Blixen ought to have won the Nobel. Haven't read Silone so I can't say about his chances.

 

[Papageno]

I remembered a story of when Moravia, hearing rumours that the prize that year was going to Italy, threw a wild party with the hope that he would win. Turned out it was his compatriot Quasimodo. I wondered how he could have felt.

Oh, I truly hope that's just a rumor! I remember hearing that Philip Roth regularly went to his editor's office in the wake of the announcement only to be disappointed each time. But given how much mystery envelops the selection process, I hope that no one actually feels confident enough to throw a preemptive party risking humiliation...

 

[Ben Jackson]

Salvatore Quasimodo was awarded the Nobel Literature Prize "for his lyrical poetry which with classical fire expresses tragic experiences of life in our times." Announced on 21st October, 56 names were suggested.

Some Facts:

Nominations from Swedish Academy Members:

Ignazio Silone--- Hjalmar Gullberg
Ezra Pound--- Johannes Edfelt
Albert Moravia--- Hjalmar Gullberg
St John Perse--- Harry Martinson
Karen Blixen--- Hjalmar Gullberg

Nominees that were later Laureates:

Jean Paul Sartre (Nobel Laureate 1964)
St John Perse (Nobel Laureate 1960)
Ivo Andric (Nobel Laureate 1961)
John Steinbeck (Nobel Laureate 1962)

First Time Nominees:

Ernest Claes
Sochi Raut Roy
Osbert Sitwell
Sacheverell Sitwell
Charles Mauron
Martin Heidegger
Mario Rouques
Frank Raymond Leavis
Juana de Ibarbourou
Stefan Andres
Heimito Von Doderer
Arnold Zweig
Maria Raquel Adler
Miguel Torga
Anna Seghers
Louis Aragon
Max Frisch
Julian Gracq
Etienne Gilson
Hans Egon Holthusen

Nominated female writers:
Karen Blixen
Juana de Ibarbourou
Maria Dabrowska
Maria Raquel Adler
Gertrud von Le Fort
Edith Sitwell
Elizabeth Goudge
Anna Seghers

Famous Names (this list include former finalists, writers I have read will be indicated by capital letters):

E M FORSTER
Andre Malraux
Carl SANDBURG
Ramon Menendez Pidal
Miroslav Krleza
Aldous HUXLEY
William Somerset MAUGHAM
Christopher Fry
Marcel Pagnol
Jean Giono
Thornton Wilder
Romulo Gallegos
Vasco Pratolini
John Cowper Powys
Sean Casey
Alfonso Reyes
Albert MORAVIA
Graham Greene

Books highlighted by the Nobel Committee (these books marred/aided the chances of the shortlisted writers)

Karen Blixen: Out of Africa
In words of Anders Osterling:

A remarkable creation in literature and in recent decades unsurpassed bothers artistic vision of nature and epic treatment of its ethnographic matter with depth and compassionate representation of Africa temperament; an idealistic appeal which has granted a wider reach in today's novel

On Last Tales, Seven Gothic Tales and Anecdotes of Destiny, by Osterling:

Created a genre, at times a touch pastiche-like and artificial, but at it's high point brilliant with ingenious imagination and witty, with essence of finest narrative art in Babbette's Feast (one of the tales in Anecdotes of Destiny).

Ignazio Silone: Fontamara, Bread and Wine, God that Failed, Seed Beneath the Snow, Handful of Blackberries, Secret of Luca

Salvatore Quasimodo: And Suddenly, It's Evening, False and True Green, Life's not a Dream, Incomparable Earth, Day After Day

Ezra Pound: Personae, Ripostes, Exultations, Homage to Sextus Propertius, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Cantos

The committee noted the innovative achievements of both Pound and Quasimodo, with Quasimodo praised for "religious compassion which attained universality and his innovative voice which expressed the plight and conscience of Italian people," but Pound's rejection, while noting his pioneering significance, was rejected "for his subhuman rejection, excluding a prize intended to lay weight on idealistic tendency of recipient's efforts-- wartime applauding of mass extermination of European Jews."

Committee Members:

Anders Osterling
Hjalmar Gullberg
Eyvnid Johnson
Sigfried Siwertz
Dag Hammarskjold

 

[Ben Jackson]

Reflections on Salvatore Quasimodo

One of Italy's finest poet of the last century, Quasimodo's poems are hermetic in outlook, outlook on analogy and associate images which conveys, at times, pessimistic meditations on human condition with copious references to Classical mythology due to his translation of classical literature into Italian. Themes in his poems include anguish, despair and solitude, partly influenced by seeing his fellow countrymen dying during World War 2, memories of childhood and native landscape of Sicily (the windswept areas, Greek-styled columns, shepherds horns, seas and rocks) and mythical paradise lost displaying influences of Sappho and Leopardi. The ideal island becomes archetype of metamorphosis in which human is identified with plants and mysterious biological process of nature, with psychological counterpoint of archaic memories. His poems, which possess religious compassion, acquire universality and his poems can also be interepted as carrying the conscience of the nation and his search for social utopia, and as a whole, with touches of impressionism, mystical desire for spiritual transcendence. To me, he's a great poet that deserves attention and more readership. You can look for his Selected Writings or his Collected Poems (his individual volumes of poems are very difficult to find nowadays).

Again, a Green River (New Poems 1942)
Again, a green river plunders me
and accord of grass and poplars,
where the gleam of dead snow's forgotten.

And here within the night, mild lamb
has howled with head of blood:
there floods, in that outcry, the time
of the long wolves of winter,
of the well, homeland of thunder.

And Suddenly, It's Evening (And Suddenly It's Evening 1943)
Each alone on the heart of the earth,
impaled upon a ray of sun:
and suddenly it's evening.

Quarries (Errato and Apollyon 1936)
Syllables of shadows and leaves,
on the grass, abandonedly
the dead make love

I hear. Dear's the night of the dead,
for me--- a mirror of sepulchers,
of quarries of greenest cedars,

of mines of salt,
of rivers whose Greek names,
spoken, are soft verses.

Rain's Already with Us (New Poems 1942)
Rain's already with us,
Tossing silent air.
Swallows skim spent waters
On the Lombard Lakes,

Fly like gulls at little fish,
Beyond the garden enclosures, the scent of hay.

Again a year's burned,
Without lament, without a cry
Upraised to win us--suddenly-- a day.

To the Night (Sunken Oboe 1932)
From your womb
Unremebering rose and weep.

Angels tread, mute
With me; things have no breath;
Every voice's turned to stone,
Silence of buried skies.

Your first man
Knows not, yet grieves.

Colours of Rain and Iron (Day After Day 1946)
You said: death, silence, solitude,
Like love, life. Words
Of our makeshift images.
And the wind rose light each morning
And the season colored with rain and iron
Passed over the rocks, over
Our mewed-up murmur of the damned.

The truth's distant still.
And tell me, man cleft upon the cross
And you with hands thick with blood
How shall I answer those that ask?
Now, now: before another wind does rise,
Another stillness fill the eyes, before another rust flourishes.

False and True Green (False and True Green 1955)
No longer wait for me, with the coward heart
Of the clock. It matters not if you set free
Or fix the squalor: all that's left
Are hard and ragged hours, the beat of leaves upon your windowpane steep above two sheets of clouds.
I keep the slowness of a smile,
Dark sky of a dress, the rust---
Colored velvet around your hair
And horse on your shoulders and your face
Sunk in water that hardly stirs.

Strokes of leaves rough with yellow, birds of soot. Other leaves now cleave the branches, darting out
Entangled: April's false and true green, that unleashed sneer of certain flowering.
And do you flower not,
Put on no days, not dreams me?
There rest, shyness of writing diary
Verses or casting a howl into the void
Or into the incredible heart that still
Struggles with it's ruined time.

 

[Leseratte]

Reflections on Salvatore Quasimodo

One of Italy's finest poet of the last century, Quasimodo's poems are hermetic in outlook, outlook on analogy and associate images which conveys, at times, pessimistic meditations on human condition with copious references to Classical mythology due to his translation of classical literature into Italian. Themes in his poems include anguish, despair and solitude, partly influenced by seeing his fellow countrymen dying during World War 2, memories of childhood and native landscape of Sicily (the windswept areas, Greek-styled columns, shepherds horns, seas and rocks) and mythical paradise lost displaying influences of Sappho and Leopardi. The ideal island becomes archetype of metamorphosis in which human is identified with plants and mysterious biological process of nature, with psychological counterpoint of archaic memories. His poems, which possess religious compassion, acquire universality and his poems can also be interepted as carrying the conscience of the nation and his search for social utopia, and as a whole, with touches of impressionism, mystical desire for spiritual transcendence. To me, he's a great poet that deserves attention and more readership. You can look for his Selected Writings or his Collected Poems (his individual volumes of poems are very difficult to find nowadays).

Again, a Green River (New Poems 1942)
Again, a green river plunders me
and accord of grass and poplars,
where the gleam of dead snow's forgotten.

And here within the night, mild lamb
has howled with head of blood:
there floods, in that outcry, the time
of the long wolves of winter,
of the well, homeland of thunder.

And Suddenly, It's Evening (And Suddenly It's Evening 1943)
Each alone on the heart of the earth,
impaled upon a ray of sun:
and suddenly it's evening.

Quarries (Errato and Apollyon 1936)
Syllables of shadows and leaves,
on the grass, abandonedly
the dead make love

I hear. Dear's the night of the dead,
for me--- a mirror of sepulchers,
of quarries of greenest cedars,

of mines of salt,
of rivers whose Greek names,
spoken, are soft verses.

Rain's Already with Us (New Poems 1942)
Rain's already with us,
Tossing silent air.
Swallows skim spent waters
On the Lombard Lakes,

Fly like gulls at little fish,
Beyond the garden enclosures, the scent of hay.

Again a year's burned,
Without lament, without a cry
Upraised to win us--suddenly-- a day.

To the Night (Sunken Oboe 1932)
From your womb
Unremebering rose and weep.

Angels tread, mute
With me; things have no breath;
Every voice's turned to stone,
Silence of buried skies.

Your first man
Knows not, yet grieves.

Colours of Rain and Iron (Day After Day 1946)
You said: death, silence, solitude,
Like love, life. Words
Of our makeshift images.
And the wind rose light each morning
And the season colored with rain and iron
Passed over the rocks, over
Our mewed-up murmur of the damned.

The truth's distant still.
And tell me, man cleft upon the cross
And you with hands thick with blood
How shall I answer those that ask?
Now, now: before another wind does rise,
Another stillness fill the eyes, before another rust flourishes.

False and True Green (False and True Green 1955)
No longer wait for me, with the coward heart
Of the clock. It matters not if you set free
Or fix the squalor: all that's left
Are hard and ragged hours, the beat of leaves upon your windowpane steep above two sheets of clouds.
I keep the slowness of a smile,
Dark sky of a dress, the rust---
Colored velvet around your hair
And horse on your shoulders and your face
Sunk in water that hardly stirs.

Strokes of leaves rough with yellow, birds of soot. Other leaves now cleave the branches, darting out
Entangled: April's false and true green, that unleashed sneer of certain flowering.
And do you flower not,
Put on no days, not dreams me?
There rest, shyness of writing diary
Verses or casting a howl into the void
Or into the incredible heart that still
Struggles with it's ruined time.

Thanks for this review + special selection of poems.