Abstract
The history of the literary Nobel Prize is the story of changing interpretations of an imprecise will. All five prizes – for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace – honor those who “have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind”. The literary prize should, furthermore, go to “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. But what is “ideal”? There are many questions about the literary prize, questions like “Why Sully-Prudhomme and not Tolstoy?” and “Isn't the Prize, after all, a political award?” The answers are found in the secret reports by the Nobel Committee to the Swedish Academy (this committee being a team of five, selected among the 18 members of the Academy).
A quite common misunderstanding is the idea that a full century of Nobel history forms a continuity, with the same criteria. In fact, each new generation within the Academy has had its specific set of values and, accordingly, its specific interpretation of Nobel's will. There is a great difference between the early reading of “ideal” direction as conservative idealism, the post-war concentration on the pioneers of literature, the later policy of awarding the unknown masters, and the recent interest in so-called witness literature.
Another false idea is that the literary prize is political. You must make a distinction between political effect which is inescapable and often unpredictable and political intention, which is expressly banned by the Academy. The prize for Solzhenitsyn illustrates the procedure.
A third misunderstanding could be labeled “The European Prize”. Early practice confirms such an idea, but the policy from the 1980s and onwards shows the ambition to make the prize the universal award that Nobel's will presupposes. Several steps are taken to secure the competence needed for such a difficult task. It is not necessary for a literary work to be translated into Swedish to be considered. The linguistic competence of the Academy, its scouting system, and the possibility of exclusive translations in 18 copies show such suspicions to be unjustified.
Obviously, there are many omissions on the list of laureates, partly as a consequence of the embarras de richesse offered by modern literature, partly because of lack of survey, especially in the first half-century. But many of the accusations of neglect prove to be anachronisms – the omission of Kafka, Pessoa, Cavafy etc. who died before publication of their essential work, and of Proust, Rilke etc. whose death left too short a time for the Academy to react.
A final subject of discussion is to what extent the list of laureates can establish a canon – a modern catalogue of World Literature. Nobel practice could contribute to such an enterprise but not be conclusive.
About the speaker
Prof Kjell Espmark was born in 1930 in Strömsund, Sweden. He is a writer and literary historian, and is Emeritus Professor of the History of Literature at Stockholm University. While still a student at Stockholm University College, Prof Espmark made his debut with Mordet på Benjamin (The murder of Benjamin, 1956). He spent most of the 1960s in literary research, concentrating above all on his forerunners, Artur Lundkvist and Harry Martinsson.
His work took wing in the 1970s, firstly with the trilogy Sent i Sverige (Late in Sweden). What Prof Espmark was doing at this time in his poetry was thus a kind of "soul translation" - and this became for a time the direction his literary-historical writing took. He published a couple of important volumes which in a natural way led to the professorship at Stockholm University in 1978: Att översätta själen (Translating the soul, 1975) and Själen i bild (Image of the soul, 1977).
Prof Espmark was elected to the Swedish Academy in 1981, where he succeeded the linguist Elias Wessén to Chair number 16. Among other honors he has been awarded the Svenska Dagbladet Prize for Literature in 1975, the Schück Prize in 1980, the Bellman Prize in 1985, the Kellgren Prize in 1998 and the Society of Nine Great Prize in 2000.
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