Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 Speculation

[Stiffelio]

As far as Russia is concerned, I've just got my hands on Mikhail Shishkin's "Maiden hair" (more exactly, "Venerin volos" in its original, as my copy is in Russian, luckily i can read it ). Haven't enough time to finish it yet, but my gut feelings tell me this is a Nobel-caliber author.

Is this novel already available in English? I checked with Amazon but they don't carry it...

[Liam]

^No, it's not. Just read it in Russian, Stiffy, and stop wasting our time, .

[Daniel del Real]

Anyway, their thread only seems half-alive (the last post is from June), but they have an interesting list of possible candidates, whose works they discuss when they're not too busy bitching about translation (Eric Dickens-style)--of foreign titles into Russian. See, Eric, not only Brits and Yanks are guilty of such atrocities.

Wait, what? June? When the hell did they start the speculation, March? And Eric wants to crucify us for starting in early August, oh booy

[Liam]

LOL, you wouldn't believe me if I told you, but they started it immediately the previous year's winner was announced: the first post is from Oct 10, 2011. Talk about an early start.

[Caodang]

PS. An interesting side-fact: other than Y, who is made fun of, not a single Russian author gets mentioned and/or seriously discussed by these Russian-speaking readers.

Now it's really something interesting I'll definitely take a look at it. But it does happen that sometimes a brilliant writer is appreciated and welcomed abroad better than in his own country.

[Eric]

The Shishkin book's got a nice cover, but where's the pubic hair of the title? Are the Russians still as puritanical as they were in Soviet times? Go on, show us a few of the curly bits. And the blurbwords say: "Bolshaya kniga", "Natsionalnyi byestsyeller". Say no more.

Eric does put our Russian friends through a simple test: I mention Chapman and Zatuliveter (reputable Saint Petersburg booksellers), and if the poster then disappears this is because they've been sent to Siberia. That's no doubt why Russians such as Altai (our man in Helsinki) seems to have vanished too, not to mention some half-Russian type whose name I would rather forget.

[maidenhair]

That's no doubt why Russians such as Altai (our man in Helsinki) seems to have vanished too, not to mention some half-Russian type whose name I would rather forget.

Maybe they were just scared away by your pubertal fantasies?

Adiantum capillus-veneris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ca...Nebrodi%29.JPG

[Eric]

Seriously, scholars, what is the difference between "maidenhair" and "pubic hair"? Definitions please! If you have named yourself Maidenhair, new reader, maybe it's a synonym, maybe something completely different. The word is "pubescent", by the way, not "pubertal". Brits love to make pubicle jokes in the same way that other nations talk incessantly about piss and shit, which forms an innate part of their humour.

My previous comments suddenly reminded me of a very old chestnut of a joke:

- Which Russian peninsula is named after an American drink?
- The Kola Peninsula.
- What's the favourite activity out there?
- Camping.

[maidenhair]

Brits love to make pubicle jokes in the same way that other nations talk incessantly about piss and shit, which forms an innate part of their humour.

Thanks for giving this discussion an educated touch.

[Eric]

When you're educated, you can afford to take the piss (rather than a piss), and don't need to hide behind a mask of pubescent anonymity. That's how you use the word "pubescent". I knew it was some sort of plant before, but the name is the same word as used in "mons veneris" and Venus, etc., so it cannot be coincidence, given the dirty minds of some monks who remained pubescent all their lives.

Let's get back to the Nobel. Though this year, I don't think anyone has a clue. Will they pick one of the "patiently waiting in the queue" authors, or will they play the wild card and find a rhyming poet from a country that no one of the WLF has ever visited? Or maybe they'll introduce a new rule whereby all the books written by the winner must be at least one thousand pages long. That would cut the field down a bit. Knausgård would really have to work hard to win. He's only written some 3,000 pages of his monster autobiography so far. I reckon he would need at least 10,000 to stand a chance.

[maidenhair]

Or maybe they'll introduce a new rule whereby all the books written by the winner must be at least one thousand pages long.

Yeah, right, lets get serious again. So... who did you say is clueless?

[Uemarasan]

Uemarasan, yes there are always exceptions and if you trawl through the internet you can make up a list of writers that only wrote one famous novel (or even one novel). At present I'm translating a book and reading a couple of others. So I don't fancy reading either Krasznohorkai nor Shishkin. Especially the latter seems to have been brought to the surface of the Sea of Literature by hype as he has not not written very much at all, but is now being worshipped as the greatest thing Russia had produced in the last twenty years. Krasznahorkai has written a good deal more, but also with him he seemed to rise from nowhere, to become the darling of people who like to show off that they've read books whose authors' names they often cannot spell, or who look deliciously exotic.

Maybe it's just a matter of the very simple thing called "you cannot know everything in the 'Sea of Literature'"? Do you know Russian or Hungarian? How many Russian or Hungarian literary journals, magazines, and newspapers have you read? Can you enlighten us with your vast knowledge of the pulse of the literary scenes in Russia and Hungary? Well then...

Read the work. Read the work. Read the work. Then you'll be able to make a valid opinion finally. I don't care if you don't have the time. Otherwise, let's resort to that hoary cliche: Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Now hopefully, back to our regular programming.

[Liam]

the dirty minds of some monks who remained pubescent all their lives

My beloved Bernardin de Saint-Pierre reports that there was some sort of sea-plant in Mauritius that the natives referred to as a monk's testicle, .

[Uemarasan]

Daniel and adorador, I knew I forgot someone... Thanks for bringing him up! Hwang Sok-yong is definitely worthy. I only wish he were more visible and as recognized as Ko Un is. Compared to the poet, he's unfairly relegated to the sidelines even in Korea.

Liam, tall order (well, not really), which I will try to fulfill in a subsequent post Pinky promise!

[John]

I'll nominate Spanish author António Lobo Antunes (Act of the Damned, Exhortation to the Crocodiles, The Inquisitors' Manual, Fado Alexandrino).

[Liam]

And the blurbwords say: "Bolshaya kniga", "Natsionalnyi byestsyeller". Say no more.

The first is actually a prize, Eric, literally meaning the "Big Book" Prize (of the year, I should think), and the second blurb means national bestseller, and what is wrong with that? I'll remind you that Virginia Woolf's Orlando was a runaway bestseller with the British public too, and it's a GREAT book. Not every bestseller on the list is a cheap romance novel or thriller.

[Liam]

OK, so I'd like to add two more names into the mix: the Irish-language poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi (I've read her bilingual collection The Miraculous Parish, and it's amazing, though very traditional and not as wildly experimental and esoteric as the poems of, say, Paul Muldoon) and the Libyan novelist and non-fiction writer Ibrahim Al-Koni. There are a lot of North African/Middle Eastern names being bandied about: Djebar, Adonis, etc, but al-Koni seems, to me, to be inherently more interesting and universal (granted, I say this without having read any of his works, I am still patiently awaiting the release of his great novel The Animists).

[maidenhair]

I'll nominate Spanish author António Lobo Antunes

If you would do that it would be your last nomination... but you might get some laughs...

[Eric]

I will answer Uemarasan, #73. I have a smattering of Hungarian, having studied it for two terms at Uppsala University in the 1980s, but I dropped out of the course. I've been on a few Russian courses in my time, so my reading level is somewhere between lower intermediate and intermediate. But I cannot either speak it, or read literature in it. Many people think you either know a language or you don't This is not true; such knowledge involves a continuum and four skills: speaking, understanding, reading, writing. These can be at different levels.

It is very frustrating with contemporary Russian literature, i.e. what is being written now, that non-Russian people do not seem to want to examine the literature as a whole, but instead appear to pull random names out of a hat, such as Shishkin, and turn these names and their owners into a cult. And the same is happening with Krasznahorkai - how many other contempoorary Hungarian authors apart from Nádas and him get an airing in English, if we discount Kertész because he won the Nobel? Again, as Hungarian is a difficult language for West Europeans, everything literary tends to get filtered via the German language and German tastes. There are very few people, such as the British translator George Szirtes, who can make judgements of their own about who the rising stars are in Hungarian liteatiure, For instance Péter Nádas' fat novel was already available in German in the late 1980s. When did it appear in English, and by way of what route (i.e. direct translation, translation via German, etc.)?

[Eric]

As for "Orlando", the transsexual novel of the 1920s, it could have contributed to Virginia Woolf's prowess but she did not, alas, win the Nobel, although her style is streets ahead of that of some authors.

I still find it curious that the Estonian Friedebert Tuglas wrote a novella on the same theme, except that he started out with a sweet little girl who ended up as a murderous prince. That work is called "Androgüüni päev" (The Day of the Androgyne), and I published a translation of it in a collection of Tuglas stories back in 2007. That story was first published in Estonian three years before "Orlando". Both Tuglas and Woolf were, no doubt, influenced by Oscar Wilde. If you like commedia dell'arte, both works are just the thing.