Contrary to the bookmakers’ forecasts, the American poet Louise Elisabeth Gluck has been declared the next winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award was given to her “for apt poetic intonation and the ability to transform individual experience into a universal one.”
Poet Louise Gluck is very famous in the United States.
Let me remind you what the forecasts were. The five favorites looked like this: the leader was a French writer from Guadeloupe Maryse Condé, who received an alternative Nobel prize two years ago. In second place was the Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya. The third is the Japanese Haruki Murakami, who needs no introduction. On the fourth, Margaret Atwood from Canada became famous after the film success of her novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” and two Booker Prizes. Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiongo closed the top five.
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In the USA, Louise Gluck is a very famous poet, the author of 11 collections of poems, for which she received several awards.
Louise Gluck was born on April 22, 1943, in New York, into a Jewish immigrant family from Austria-Hungary. He currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University but did not receive her diplomas. She taught English at Williams College in Williamstown, as well as at Yale, Boston and Iowa University, Goddard College in Vermont. Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (1999). Laureate of the Bollingen Poetry Prize (2001). Poet Laureate of the USA (2003-2004). Prior to that, she was a Special Advisor for the Library of Congress’s Bicentennial. Wallace Stevens Award (2008). Fellow of the American Philosophical Society (2014).
The award was awarded “for apt poetic intonation and the ability to transform individual experience into universal”
The annotation to the book says: “A woman works in the garden. Clarifies relationships with herself, with the world, with men, with God. Flowers speak. Each one his own. God speaks. And a woman, of course. 54 monologues. Voices carry different messages, different things. Knowledge about the world sometimes sharply contradict each other, but sometimes it is not easy to distinguish them. Only monologues – the narrator is absent—polyphonic poem. Time flows from morning to night, from spring to autumn, from birth to death. Beauty and tragedy of life. Non-confessional mysticism without formal letters. Subtle psychologism. Stylistic simplicity “.
An example of Louise Gluck’s “stylistic simplicity” is the lines from the poem that gave the name to the entire collection – “Wild Iris”:
“At the end of misery
a door appeared.
Listen to me:
what you call death,
I remember.
Rustles from above, swaying branches.
And – failure. Dim sun
flickers over a bare surface.
Scary,
remaining conscious, to be buried in the black earth. “
Curiously, the first Nobel laureate in literature in 1901 was also a poet, only from France – Sully Prudhomme. However, his name is hardly widely known in the world today.
It is interesting
How did the Nobel Prize come about? In 1888, European newspapers went around an obituary entitled “The Merchant in Death is Dead.” It meant that the inventor and dynamite trader Alfred Nobel died. His brother Ludwig died. But then Alfred Nobel thought about how he would be remembered after death. This is how the Nobel Prize was born.
Numerous relatives of Nobel tried for a long time to challenge his will. Still, his nephew Emmanuel made the following argument: “The Russians call the executor of the will” executor, “that is,” representative of the soul, “he told the plaintiffs’ lawyers.” So act accordingly. “
