Mobile Nobel (but this time, digital)
This article was originally published in glorious newsprint as part of The Strand Newspaper’s 2012 fall magazine, In Transit.
MOBILE NOBEL (Nov 18, 2012)
The mixed reception to the presentation of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature to Chinese author Mo Yan illuminates the ways the award can shape our idea of “world literature.” When there is a recognized global standard for excellence in literature, such as the Nobel Prize, the standard becomes a way of defining what we can call world literature.
Often literature that is well-read across the globe requires the cross-language movement of stories and text: the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature determines what becomes highly translated, and rewards texts which have already gained a global reputation.
In the case of Mo Yan — an author with a pre-Nobel global reputation — the criticism surrounding the author’s prize has centered on his closeness to the Chinese government, that he hasn’t spoken out enough against the establishment, and that his writing isn’t politically inflammatory enough to warrant such a prize.
The idea that a literary award for excellence should be given to those whose body of work shows political resistance is dangerous to our understanding of the landscape of world literature. Just dismissing certain aspects of our cultural experience because of an item’s commercial success or popularity can give us an incomplete picture of our cultural surroundings.
Part of the controversy surrounding the Award for Literature has been based on its favouring of writers with strong voices of political resistance, equating a successful career with a rebellious voice. Certainly an artist should be awarded if their work provides an alternative way of thought or an insightful critique of their nation’s governmental flaws, but there is no reason why quality and rebellion should always intersect.
When the Nobel Prize acts as an authoritative mark of quality world literature and the catalyst for a text’s translation into a globally consumable text, requiring political dissent from recipients can be harmful and limiting to the outsider’s perspective of a nation.
The award is a certain guarantee that an author’s body of work will see an increase in readership and sales. Often the recipient of the award has already been widely translated and garnered a global reputation for their work. In other instances the award has also acted as a cue for translation, and in that translation, protection.
1988 Laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s award of the prize incited a trend to translate many of his texts into English, and following his win, some Arab countries who had banned his works lifted the restrictions. Thoughts surrounding 2006 recipient, Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, expressed the potential political motivations behind choosing Pamuk, who had been charged with speaking out against the Republic only one year previous.
By acknowledging Pamuk as a literary success, the Nobel committee effectively granted him protection through the peaked global interest which inevitably ensued his receiving the prize.
Translation and the Nobel prize are intimately linked: they each encourage an author’s success and propagate the movement of a text or body of work through languages. Through translation, a work gains new properties attributed to the language; it develops the language’s perspective, tones, and nuances as well as providing the reader another way of looking at the world.
It is a re-writing of a story that does its best to capture the music of the language and transpose it into another.
In an interview with The Browser, a well-reputed literary translator, Edith Grossman, stated that “translation is the cement that holds literary civilisation together.” While we undoubtedly need to constantly translate and transpose our literary surroundings to better understand them, the process of recognizing literary excellence marginalizes our contemporary canon of must-reads.
This creates a global demand for a particular author’s work, and in translating based on demand our literary civilisation becomes quite selective.
When translated works and the idea of world literature are closely tied to literary awards, it can become quite easy to construct a very narrow image of the diverse landscape of world literature. What is rewarded becomes translated, and what has been translated can be rewarded.
One example of how “major” languages can be perceived as the watermark for mainstream success is how our selective literary civilisation is also linked to the predominance of Anglophone or European authors as recipients of the Nobel Prize.
But what happens to the national identity of an author once his or her work has been translated and dispersed through the global market? As was the case with Orhan Pamuk, there is a sense of national betrayal that can follow a work’s translation: global reception of certain ideals may contradict a large ideology of a body of people and stir up national displeasure.
Translation is authoritative. Though a presence on the European circuit is not analogous with an author’s quality of work, the movement of texts through languages onto an accessibly global stage is undeniably powerful. When literary awards, such as the Nobel Prize, play a role in the shaping of world literature, it does well to consider just how much of the world we are looking at.
