The Nobel Prize in Literature 1971-1980

Patrick White “for an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1974

Eyvind Johnson “for a narrative art, far-seeing in lands and ages, in the service of freedom”

Harry Martinson “for writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1975

Eugenio Montale “for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions”.

Eugenio Montale, born in 1896, is one of the few obvious “true masters” of the last fifty years of Italian literature. Born in Genoa into a family of businessmen, he discontinued his secondary studies and started, on a private basis, to study singing with the baritone Ernesto Sivori. But the 1915-18 war (in which he served as an infantry officer), the death of Sivori and his decision to go in for a literary career, turned Montale away from that course, in which he had shown an extraordinary interest in melodrama, even its technical aspects. When he started to devote himself to poetry, he was already in possession of a rich and versatile culture and a taste for Bellini’s and Debussy’s music, impressionist painting and the art of the great novelists of nineteenth-century Europe, at the same time sharing the interests of the Ligurian poets Roccatagliata-Cecardi, Boine and Sbarbaro. However, the “regional” outlook of the poetry of his time was not allowed to limit the critical attention that he paid to Leopardi and Foscolo. It was not until after the war that the poet dedicated himself fully to creative activities and literature. In 1921, he contributed to “Primo Tempo”, with Solmi and Debenedetti, revealing, besides his poetic gifts, a rare critical talent through his acuteness and independence of conventional patterns. His Omaggio a Svevo, published in 1925 in the Milanese paper “L’Esame”, aroused much attention, determining, among other things, the fortune of the works of the Triestine writer.

Montale settled down in Florence in 1928, where he became director of the Gabinetto Vieusseux library. He was one of the first inspirers of “Solaria”, always being one of the most active and politically non-conformist Florentine intellectuals until, in 1938, refusing to join the party then in power, he was dismissed from his directorship at the Gabinetto Vieusseux.

In 1925, he published his first collection of poems, Ossi di seppia, which quickly became one of the “classics” of contemporary Italian poetry; in his verses, sentiment appears desiccated by a severe intellectual rigour, evoked with intimate fullness in the fervid and striking sights of the Mediterranean landscape. Some critics aptly saw in Ossi di seppia a singular introspective continuity, as in a great modern novel, linked to the story of the protagonist, finding its most developed form in the poem “Arsenio”.

When Le occasioni (1939) was published, it brought consistent confirmation of this inner line of development which, bearing a new classical-modern imprint, identified itself with the great contemporary metaphysical poetry. In Le occasioni, Italian poetry and culture as a whole were, from then on, to recognise a book that reflected the solitude and the agony over the human condition of one who lucidly opposed Fascist oppression, creating a song of noble stoicism.

Montale’s biography is a chronicle of poetry. The Second World War saw the publication, in 1943, of Finisterre, a collection which, published in Lugano in two successive editions of modest print runs, constituted one of the cornerstones of the volume La bufera e altro, a consistent continuation of his whole work, printed in 1956. La farfalla di Dinard – which from the ninety-six pages of the 1956 edition was expanded, from one edition to another, into the 273 pages of the 1960 edition – showed Montale to be an original writer of autobiography and imaginative prose, almost a narrator, with malicious flashes of wit but with an elegiac spirit.

In 1961, Montale was awarded an honorary degree at the University of Rome and shortly afterwards, at the universities of Milan, Cambridge, and Basel. In 1967, President Saragat appointed him senator for life “in recognition of his distinguished achievements in the literary and artistic fields”. This event relieved him, in a sense, of the obligation to go every day to the editorial office of the “Corriere della Sera”, where he had been working as a music critic, editor and special correspondent since 1948. The following works, prose as well as poetry, confirmed the vitality of a writer who, true to the fundamental themes of his early career (the Universe marked by inevitable failure and pain as an existential stigma), managed to collect experiences and important moments from the spiritual transformations of our times. Auto da fé (1966 and 1972), Fuori di casa (1969 and 1975) and Quaderno di tradazioni (1948 and 1975) are books that give an idea of the vastness of his interests and of the versatility of his talent, later confirmed by La bufera e altro (1970).

In 1971, Mondadori published his fourth collection of poetry, Satura, which soon became a bestseller. The book, exhibiting the usual linguistic ambiguity typical of Montale, alludes to a poetry that disrupts its own and others’ patterns, including, in a paradoxical manner, much more than is usual (even for Montale) to include in the stylistic and linguistic models of poetry: meditative solicitations, existential themes about man still in some way Christian and Western, a wisdom anything but senile, subtle and provocative humor in the face of a world that changes and proceeds along its tragic and mysterious route.

Montale’s great poetry, in actual fact, is born out of the search for those presences that reveal and liberate the hidden world, such as spectres and amulets. Not insusceptible to the stylistic lessons of Pascoli and Gozzano, nor to contemporaries writing in English, Montale has in his turn influenced younger Italian poets, even post-Ermetismo poets and experimentators.

After a volume of cultural articles, La farfalla di Dinard, he published in 1973, still with Mondadori,Diario 1971-72, which contains more recent lyric poems, born of a moral meditation not very different from that which brought forth the poems of Satura.

Attentive to the effects of history, Montale’s poetry stands out as congenial to spirits that are aware of the consequences (of which, from many aspects, we have not yet seen the end) of the second world tragedy, which the writer saw as temporary reflections of an evil without origin and without end, according to a parable which makes him belong to the more conscious part of the European intellect.

Eugenio Montale died in 1981.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1976

Saul Bellow “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1977

Vicente Aleixandre “for a creative poetic writing which illuminates man’s condition in the cosmos and in present-day society, at the same time representing the great renewal of the traditions of Spanish poetry between the wars”.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1978

Isaac Bashevis Singer “for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life”.

n one of his more light-hearted books, Isaac Bashevis Singerdepicts his childhood in one of the over-populated poor quarters of Warsaw, a Jewish quarter, just before and during the First World War. The book, called In My Father’s Court (1966), is sustained by a redeeming, melancholy sense of humour and a clear-sightedness free of illusion. This world has gone forever, destroyed by the most terrible of all scourges that have afflicted the Jews and other people in Poland. But it comes to life in Singer’s memories and writing in general. Its mental and physical environment and its centuries-old traditions have set their stamp on Singer as a man and a writer, and provide the ever-vivid subject matter for his inspiration and imagination. It is the world and life of East European Jewry, such as it was lived in cities and villages, in poverty and persecution, and imbued with sincere piety and rites combined with blind faith and superstition. Its language was Yiddish – the language of the simple people and of the women, the language of the mothers which preserved fairytales and anecdotes, legends and memories for hundreds of years past, through a history which seems to have left nothing untried in the way of agony, passions, aberrations, cruelty and bestiality, but also of heroism, love and self-sacrifice.

Singer’s father was a rabbi, a spiritual mentor and confessor, of the Hasid school of piety. His mother also came from a family of rabbis. The East European Jewish-mystical Hasidism combined Talmud doctrine and a fidelity to scripture and rites – which often merged into prudery and strict adherence to the law – with a lively and sensually candid earthiness that seemed familiar with all human experience. Its world, which the reader encounters in Singer’s stories, is a very Jewish but also a very human world. It appears to include everything – pleasure and suffering, coarseness and subtlety. We find obstrusive carnality, spicy, colourful, fragrant or smelly, lewd or violent. But there is also room for sagacity, worldly wisdom and shrewd speculation. The range extends from the saintly to the demoniacal, from quiet contemplation and sublimity, to ruthless obsession and infernal confusion or destruction. It is typical that among the authors Singer read at an early age who have influenced him and accompanied him through life were Spinoza, Gogol and Dostoievsky, in addition to Talmud, Kabbala and kindred writings.

Singer began his writing career as a journalist in Warsaw in the years between the wars. He was influenced by his elder brother, now dead, who was already an author and who contributed to the younger brother’s spiritual liberation and contact with the new currents of seething political, social and cultural upheaval. The clash between tradition and renewal, between other-worldliness and faith and mysticism on the one hand, and free thought, secularization, doubt and nihilism on the other, is an essential theme in Singer’s short stories and novels. The theme is Jewish, made topical by the barbarous conflicts of our age, a painful drama between contentious loyalties. But it is also of concern to mankind, to us all, Jew or non-Jew, actualized by modern western culture’s struggles between preservation and renewal. Among many other themes, it is dealt with in Singer’s big family chronicles – the novels, The Family Moskat (1950), The Manor (1967), and The Estate(1969). These extensive epic works have been compared with Thomas Mann‘s novel,Buddenbrooks. Like Mann, Singer describes how old families are broken up by the new age and its demands, from the middle of the 19th century up to the Second World War, and how they are split, financially, socially and humanly. But Singer’s chronicles are greater in scope than Mann’s novel and more richly orchestrated in their characterization. The author’s apparently inexhaustible psychological fantasy has created a microcosm, or rather, a well-populated microchaos, out of independent and graphically convincing figures. They bring to mind another writer whom Singer read when young – Leo Tolstoy.

Singer’s earliest fictional works, however, were not big novels but short stories and novellas, a genre in which he has perhaps given his very best as a consummate storyteller and stylist. The novel, Satan in Goray, written originally in Yiddish, like practically all Singer books, appeared in 1935 when the Nazi catastrophe was threatening and just before the author emigrated to the USA, where he has lived and worked ever since. It treats of a theme to which Singer has often returned in different ways and with variations in time, place and personages – the false Messiah, his seductive arts and successes, the mass hysteria around him, his fall and the breaking up of illusions in destitution and new illusion, or in penance and purity. Satan in Goray takes place in the 17th century, in the confusion and the sufferings after the cruel ravages of the Cossacks, with outrages and mass murder of Jews and other wretched peasants and artisans. The people in this novel, as elsewhere with Singer, are often at the mercy of the capricious infliction of circumstance, but even more so, their own passions. The passions are frequently of a sexual nature but also of another kind – manias and superstitions, fanatical hopes and dreams, the figments of terror, the lure of lust or power, the nightmares of anguish, and so on. Even boredom can become a restless passion, as with the main character in the tragi-comic picaresque novel, The Magician of Lublin(1961), a most eccentric anti-hero, a kind of Jewish Don Juan and rogue, who ends up as an ascetic or saint.

This is one of the most characteristic themes with Singer – the tyranny of the passions, the power and fickle inventiveness of obsession, the grotesque wealth of variation, and the destructive, but also inflaming and paradoxically creative potential of the emotions. We encounter this tumultuous and colourful world particularly in Singer’s numerous and fantastic short stories, available in English translation in about a dozen collections, from the early Gimpel The Fool (translated 1953), to the later work, A Crown of Feathers (1973), with notable masterpieces in between, such as, The Spinoza of Market Street (1961), or, A Friend of Kafka (1970). The passions and crazes are personified in Singer as demons, spectres, ghosts and all kinds of infernal or supernatural powers from the rich storehouse of Jewish popular imagination. These demons are not only graphic literary symbols, but also real, tangible beings – Singer, in fact, says he believes in their physical presence. The middle ages rise up in his work and permeate the present. Everyday life is interwoven with wonders, reality spun from dreams, the blood of the past with the moment in which we are living. This is where Singer’s narrative art celebrates its greatest triumphs and bestows a reading experience of a deeply original kind, harrowing, but also stimulating and edifying. Many of his characters step with unquestioned authority into the Pantheon of literature, where the eternal companions and mythical figures live, tragic and grotesque, comic and touching, weird and wonderful people of dream and torment, baseness and grandeur.

Books

Issac Bashevis Singer, born in Leoncin near Warsaw, emigrated 1935 to USA. He died in 1991.In addition to the works mentioned above Singer’s writings include – in English:

the novels

The Slave, transl. by the author and Cecil Hemley. New York: Farrar Straus, 1962; London: Secker and Warburg, 1963.

Enemies: A Love Story, transl. by Alizah Shevrin and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1972.

Shosha. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1978.

Reaches of Heaven. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1980.

The Golem. London: Deutsch, 1983.

The Penitent. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1983.

Yentl the Yeshiva Boy, transl. from the Yiddish by Marion Magid and Elisabeth Pallet. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1983.

The Ring of the Fields. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1988.

Scum, transl. by Rosaline Dukalsky Schwartz. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1991.

the collections of short stories

Short Friday, transl. by Ruth Whitman and others. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1964; London: Seeker and Warburg, 1967.

The Seance, transl. by Ruth Whitman and others. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1968; London: Cape, 1970.

Passions, transl. by the author in collab. with others. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1975; London: Cape, 1976.

Old Love. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1979.

The Power of Light. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1980.

The Image and Other Stories. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1985.

The Death of Metuselah and Other Stories. London: Cape, 1988.

the memoirs

A Little Boy in Search of God: Mysticism in a Personal Light. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976.

A Young Man in Search of Love, transl. by Joseph Singer. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978.

Lost in America. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1981.

for children

Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, transl. by the author and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Harper, 1966; London: Secker and Warburg, 1967.

When Schlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories, transl. by the author and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1968.

A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing up in Warsaw, transl. by the author and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1969.

The Fools of Chelm and Their History, transl. by the author and Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1973.

Why Noah Chose the Dove, transl. by Elizabeth Shub. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1974.

Stories for Children. N.Y.: Farrar Straus, 1986.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1979

Odysseus Elytis “for his poetry, which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clear-sightedness modern man’s struggle for freedom and creativeness”.

Descendant of an old family of Lesbos, he was born in Heraclion (Candia) on the island of Crete, November 2, 1911. Some time later his family settled permanently in Athens where the poet finished his secondary school studies and later visited the Law School of the Athens University. His first appearance as a poet in 1935 through the magazine “Nea Grammata” (“New Culture”) was saluted as an important event and the new style he introduced – though giving rise to a great many reactions – succeeded in prevailing and effectively contributing to the poetical reform commencing in the Second World War’s eve and going on up to our days.

In 1937 he visited the Reserve Officer’s Cadet School in Corfu. Upon the outbreak of the war he served in the rank of Second Lieutenant, first at the Headquarters of the 1st Army Corps and then at the 24th Regiment, on the advanced fire line. During the German occupation and later, after Greece was liberated, he has been unabatedly active, publishing successive collections of poetry and writing essays concerning contemporary poetry and art problems.§

He has twice been Programme Director of the Greek National Radio Foundation (1945-46 and 1953-54), Member of the National Theatre’s Administrative Council, President of the Administrative Council of the Greek Radio and Television Service as well as Member of the Consultative Committee of the Greek National Tourist’s Organisation on the Athens Festival. In 1960 he was awarded the First State Poetry Prize, in 1965 the Order of the Phoenix Brigade and in 1975 he was proclaimed Doctor Honoris Causa of the Philosophical School of the Thessaloniki University and Honorary Citizen of the Town of Mytilene.

During the years 1948-1952 and 1969-1972 he settled in Paris. There, he listened to philology and literature lessons in the Sorbonne and got acquainted with the pioneers of the world’s avant-garde (Reverdy, Breton, Tzara, Ungaretti, Matisse, Picasso, Chagall, Giacometti). Starting from Paris he travelled and visited subsequently Switzerland, England, Italy and Spain. In 1948 he was the representative of Greece at the “International Meetings of Geneva”, in 1949 at the Founding Congress of the “International Art Critics Union” in Paris and in 1962 at the “Incontro Romano della Cultura” in Rome.

In 1961, upon an invitation of the State Department, he traveled through the U.S.A.; and – upon similar invitations – through the Soviet Union in 1963 and Bulgaria in 1965.

Elytis’ poetry has marked, through an active presence of over forty years, a broad spectrum. Unlike others, he did not turn back to Ancient Greece or Byzantium but devoted himself exclusively to today’s Hellenism, of which he attempted – in a certain way based on psychical and sentimental aspects – to build up the mythology and the institutions. His main endeavour has been to rid his people’s conscience from remorses unjustifiable, to complement natural elements through ethical powers, to achieve the highest possible transparency in expression and to finally succeed in approaching the mystery of light, “the metaphysic of the sun” – according to his own definition. A parallel way concerning technique resulted in introducing the “inner architecture”, which is clearly perceptible in a great many works of his; mainly in the Axion Esti – It Is Worthy. This work – thanks to its setting to music by Mikis Theodorakis – was to be widely spread among all Greeks and grew to be a kind of the people’s new gospel. Elytis’ theoretical ideas have been expressed in a series of essays under the title (Offering) My Cards To Sight. Besides he applied himself to translating poetry and theatre as well as creating a series of collage pictures. Translations of his poetry have been published as autonomous books, in anthologies or in periodicals in eleven languages.

Literature

“Orientations” (1940)

“Sun – The First” (1943)

“An Heroic And Funeral Chant For The Lieutenant Lost In Albania” (1946)

“To Axion Esti” – “It Is Worthy” (1959)

“Six Plus One Remorses For The Sky” (1960)

“The Light Tree And The Fourteenth Beauty” (1972)

“The Sovereign Sun” (1972)

“The Trills Of Love” (1973)

“The Monogram” (1973)

“Step-Poems” (1974)

“(Offering) My Cards To Sight” (1974)

“The Painter Theophilos” (1973)

“Second Writing” (1976)

“The Magic Of Papadiamantis” (1976)

“Signalbook” (1977)

“Maria Nefeli” (1978)

“Selected poems” Ed. E. Keeley and Ph. Sherrard (1981)

“Three Poems under a Flag of Convenience” (1982)

“Diary of an Invisible April” (1984)

“The Little Mariner” (1988)

“What I Love. Selected Poems” (1986)

“Krinagoras” (1987)

“The Elegies of Oxopetras” (1991)

Reference Works

Mario Vitti: Odysseus Elytis. Literature 1935-1971 (Icaros 1977)

Tasos Lignadis: Elytis’ Axion Esti (1972)

Lili Zografos: Elytis – The Sun Drinker (1972); as well as the special issue of the American magazine Books Abroad dedicated to the work of Elytis (Autumn 1975. Norman, Oklahoma, U.S.A.)

Odysseus Elytis: Anthologies of Light. Ed. I. Ivask (1981)

A. Decavalles: Maria Nefeli and the Changeful Sameness of Elytis’ Variations on a theme (1982)

E. Keeley: Elytis and the Greek Tradition (1983)

Ph. Sherrard: Odysseus Elytis and the Discovery of Greece, in Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 1(2), 1983

K. Malkoff: Eliot and Elytis: Poet of Time, Poet of Space, in Comparative Literature, 36(3), 1984

A. Decavalles: Odysseus Elytis in the 1980s, in World Literature Today, 62(l), 1988

Translations

Poesie. Procedute dal Canto eroico e funebre per il sottotenente caduto in Albania. Trad. Mario Vitti (Roma. Il Presente. 1952)

21 Poesie. Trad. Vicenzo Rotolo (Palermo. Istituto Siciliano di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici. 1968)

Poèmes. Trad. Robert Levesque (1945)

Six plus un remords pourle ciel. Trad. F. B. Mache (Fata Morgana. Montpellier 1977)

Korper des Sommers. Übers. Barbara Schlörb (St. Gallen 1960)

Sieben nächtliche Siebenzeiler. Übers. Günter Dietz (Darmstadt 1966)

To Axion Esti – Gepriesen sei. Übers. Güinter Dietz (Hamburg 1969)

The Axion Esti. Trans. Edmund Keeley and G. Savidis (Pittsburgh, U.S.A. 1974)

The Sovereign Sun. Trans. Kinom Friar (Philadelphia, U.S.A. 1974)

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1980

Czeslaw Milosz who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts”