Next in my sequence of educating myself about the work of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who were not white men. Gabriela Mistral (real name Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, 1889-1957) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1945, the first Latin American writer to get the award. Originally trained as a teacher, she had become famous as a writer with her second volume of poetry, Desolación, published in 1922, and had also pursued an international career in education which transitions to being a full-time diplomat from 1932 onwards.
Her Nobel speech is short and modest, and the presentation speech from the Swedish Academy is also short but makes interesting parallels with the career of Selma Lagerlöf, also a schoolteacher who hit the big time with her writing.
It’s actually quite difficult to get hold of Mistral’s writing in English, and I had to be satisfied with a 2002 collection of prose and prose-poems edited and translated by Stephen Tapscott. The second paragraph of the third piece, “The Golden Pheasant”, is:
Gracias al blanco y al negro no hace arder el arrayán sobre el que se coloca.
Thanks to the white part and the dark part, it doesn’t scorch the myrtle tree where it perches.
I found the pieces in general lyrical, but also sad; a lot of them are religious, rooted in the Catholic tradition which looked eternal in the early twentieth century but is now crumbling away; the emotional energy is rich and intense. None of the passages particularly jumped out at me, but I could see that the whole is at least as great as the sum of tis parts. The observations at the end about writing and politics are also interesting, as she tried to carry the perspectives of Chile to the rest of the world and vice versa. You can get it here. I wish I had been able to find a translation of Desolación though, or of Ursula Le Guin’s tranlation of some of her poems.
This is the next in my sequence of educating myself about the work of winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature who were not white men. Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) was born in Denmark, but her father was Norwegian and they moved back to Norway when she was two. She began writing as a teenager, and won the Nobel Prize in 1928, when she was 46, then the second youngest winner after Rudyard Kipling (since beaten by Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, and Albert Camus).
The Nobel Committee is clear that the award was for Kristin Lavransdatter: the citation was “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages”. She had been nominated previously in 1922, 1925 and 1926; in 1928 her nomination came not from a writer but from Norwegian psychologist Helga Eng. In her mercifully short acceptance speech, she restricts herself to celebrating the bonds between Norway and Sweden. I find the Chairman of the Academy’s presentation speech somewhat patronising, but he’s clear that Kristin Lavransdatter is the key to Undset’s succcess.
I must say that I approached it with some trepidation. My project to read non-white-male Nobel Literature laureates has not been super successful so far; I have read two short okayish novels by Selma Lagerlöf, some incomprehensible poetry by Rabindranath Tagore and a dull book by Grazia Deledda. And Kristin Lavransdatter checks in at over 1100 pages, and I could tell that it was another tale up upstanding rural folk, like the Lagerlöf and Deledda books. However, I realised that I could just read the first part, published in 1920, for this project, and come back to the second and third parts in due course of my normal rounds of reading.
So, what did I think of The Wreath, the first part of Kristin Lavransdatter? Here is the second paragraph of the third chapter:
Ogsaa Kristin følte at det var en stor lykke de hadde faat med den lille spæde søsteren. Tænkt over at morens tunge sind gjorde det stilt paa gaarden hadde hun aldrig; hun hadde syntes det var som det skulde være, naar moren optugtet og formanet hende, men faren lekte og skjemtet med hende. Nu var moren meget mildere mot hende og gav hende mere frihet, kjælte ogsaa mere for hende, og da la Kristin litet merke til at hendes mor ogsaa hadde meget mindre tid til at stelle med hende. Hun elsket da Ulvhild, hun som de andre, og var glad naar hun fik bære eller vugge søsteren, og siden blev det endda mere moro med den lille, da hun begyndte at krype og gaa og tale og Kristin kunde leke med hende.
Kristin also felt it was a great joy that they had been given her little infant sister. She had never thought about the fact that her mother’s somber disposition had made life at home so subdued. She thought things were as they should be: her mother disciplined or admonished her, while her father teased and played with her. Now her mother was gentler toward her and gave her more freedom; she caressed her more often too, so Kristin didn’t notice that her mother also had less time to spend with her. She loved Ulvhild, as everyone did, and was pleased when she was allowed to carry her sister or rock her cradle. And later on the little one was even more fun; as she began to crawl and walk and talk, Kristin could play with her.
English translation by Tiina Nunnally.
Actually I rather liked it. It’s set in the 14th century, in a valley in central Norway. Kristin is the daughter of Lavrans (as you might have guess from the title); he is a respectable nobleman who betroths her to the neighbours’ virtuous son. Kristin however falls in love with an more mature chap who has children from a previous relationship (Undset’s own husband was also an older chap with children from a previous relationship) and eventually persuades her family to let her marry him, wearing the virginal wreath of the book’s title, though she alone knows that she is several months pregnant (as Undset was when she married).
I thought Kristin herself was very well realised, as were the men and women in her life, and the Norwegian landscape and climate, both of which are significant factors in the story, are vividly depicted. One of the interesting subplots is that Kristin’s younger sister suffers a spinal injury in an accident and remains bedridden for the rest of her short life. One of Undset’s own children had a learning disability, as did one of her stepchildren; I don’t know any more details than that, but for obvious reasons disabled characters catch my attention.
It’s quite a Catholic book. Kristin is sent off to a convent school in Oslo, and the portrayal of the nuns is pretty realistic; in general the church plays a helpful role. Undset herself converted to Catholicism in 1924, to great public scandal in Lutheran Norway. In general it’s a huge contrast with the likes of The Good Wife of Bath, which I bounced off last year. My Catholic days are behind me, but I appreciate calm description rather than polemic.
So yeah, this was the first discovery of a new and interesting writer for me in this project, and I will get to the second and third volumes in good time. Meanwhile you can get Kristin Lavransdatter: The Wreath here.
그녀는 아주 젊지 않다. 딱히 미인이라고 부르기도 어렵다. 다만 목선이 고운 편이고 눈매가 서글서글하다. 자연스러워 보이는 옅은 화장을 했으며, 흰 반소매 블라우스는 구김 없이 청결하다. 누구에게든 호감을 줄법한 그 단정한 인상 덕분에, 희미하게 얼굴에 배어 있는 그늘은 그다지눈에 띄지 않는다.
She isn’t really young anymore, and it would be difficult to call her a beauty, exactly. The curve of her neck is quite attractive and the look in her eyes is open and friendly. She wears light, natural-looking makeup, and her white blouse is neat, uncreased. Thanks to that smart impression, which one might reasonably expect to attract curiosity, attention is deflected away from the faint shadows clouding her face.
translated by Deborah Smith
This came top of my survey of books set in South Korea, and contribute to the author winning the Nobel Prize for Literature last year; and it also came strongly recommended by a number of friends in whose judgement I generally have faith. It’s the story of Cheong Yeong-hye, who decides to stop eating meat, to the dismay of her extended family who eventually commit her to a mental hospital. It’s told in three parts, by her husband, her sister’s husband and then her sister, so that we get the events of each part retold and reflected on by the next narrator.
It’s not really about the merits or demerits of meat. It’s much more about shame, choice, illness and desire, and it’s very closely and intensely written. It really does stick in the mind. You can get it here.
Han Yang is the only Nobel Prize winner for Literature who is younger than me (born in 1970). She celebrated her 54th birthday between the announcement last November and receiving the award in December. She was the youngest writer to win it since 1987 when it went to Joseph Brodsky, then 47; Orhan Pamuk was a few months past his 54th birthday when he won in 2006.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer and my top unread book by a woman. Next on those piles respectively are The Birds, by Daphne du Maurier, and The Water Outlaws, by S.L. Huang.
Les deux grandes villes de par chez nous, Le Havre et Rouen, suscitent moins d’appréhension, elles font partie du langage de toute mémoire familiale, de l’ordinaire de la conversation. Beaucoup d’ouvriers y travaillent, partant le matin et revenant le soir par « la micheline ». À Rouen, plus proche et plus importante que Le Havre, il y a tout, c’est-à-dire des grands magasins, des spécialistes de toutes les maladies, plusieurs cinémas, une piscine couverte pour apprendre à nager, la foire Saint-Romain qui dure un mois en novembre, des tramways, des salons de thé et des grands hôpitaux où l’on emmène les gens pour les opérations délicates, les cures de désintoxication et les électrochocs. À moins d’y travailler comme ouvrier sur un chantier de reconstruction, personne ne s’y rend vêtu en « tous-les-jours ». Ma mère m’y emmène une fois par an, pour la visite à l’oculiste et l’achat des lunettes. Elle en profite pour acheter des produits de beauté et des articles « qu’on’ ne trouve pas à Y. ». On n’y est pas vraiment chez nous, parce qu’on ne connaît personne. Les gens paraissent s’habiller et parler mieux. À Rouen, on se sent vaguement « en retard », sur la modernité, l’intelligence, l’aisance générale de gestes et de paroles. Rouen est pour moi l’une des figures de l’avenir, comme le sont les romans-feuilletons et les journaux de mode.
The two big cities from around these parts, Le Havre and Rouen, arouse less suspicion; they are inscribed in the linguistic memory of all families and belong to ordinary conversation. Many factory hands work there, leaving in the morning and coming back in the evening on the micheline, a small local train. In Rouen, the larger city, closer to us than Le Havre, they’ve got everything you need – department stores, specialists for every type of complaint, several cinemas, an indoor pool for learning how to swim, the Saint-Romain festival lasting the month of November, tramways, tea rooms and huge hospitals where people are taken for major operations, detoxification programmes and electroshock treatment. Unless you happen to be a labourer working on a building site, you would never go there in your ‘everyday’ clothes. My mother takes me there once a year to visit the eye specialist and buy me a pair of glasses. She takes advantage of the trip to purchase beauty products and other articles ‘you can’t get in Y’. We never feel quite at home there because we don’t know anyone. People appear to dress and speak better than in the country. In Rouen, one always feels slightly ‘at a disadvantage’ – less sophisticated, less intelligent and, generally speaking, less gracious in one’s body and speech. For me, Rouen symbolizes the future, just like serialized novels and fashion magazines do.
Translated by Tanya Leslie
Out of curiosity, because Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, I went to Filigranes near my office and got hold of this – I think because it was the cheapest on the shelf of English translations of her work. It’s a very intense story of a teenager in provincial Normandy in 1952 and the poisonous relationship between her parents – the very first sentence is “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” The environment is dominated by social inequality and unthinking piety, not a million miles or a million years from the Catholic Belfast where I grew up. Clearly autobiographical, and I understand it’s rooted in Ernaux’s bigger project of re-examining her entire life in fictional form. But I suspect this is a good taster, at only 85 pages. You can get it here (and here in French).
