Akademins språk hånas – "floskler"

Förra årets Nobelpris i litteratur till Jon Fosse har satt tydliga spår i intresset för hans pjäser, bara inte i Sverige. Man får resa utomlands för att ta del av hans drömska dramaturgi som utmanar vårt krav på att få veta, skriver Leif Zern.

Förra året tilldelades Norges Jon Fosse Nobelpriset i Litteratur, åren innan gick priset till franska Annie Ernaux. Årets pristagare Han Kang, 53, får Nobelpriset för ”hennes intensiva poetiska prosa som konfronterar historiska trauman och avslöjar mänsklighetens bräcklighet.” Kang är den första sydkorean som tilldelas Nobelpriset. Hon började sin karriär 1993 med publiceringen av ett antal dikter i tidningen Litteratur och samhälle. Hennes prosadebut kom 1995 med novellsamlingen ”Love of Yeosu”. 2016 vann hon International Booker Prize för romanen ”Vegetarianen”, som blev en stor succé världen över. Han Kang är den yngsta Nobelpristagaren sedan Joseph Brodsky tilldelades priset 1987. Då var han 47 år gammal. Bokaffärsägaren: Gissade på Kang På Bokvärlden i Malmö är stämningen god när priset tillkännages. I bokaffären finns också tre exemplar av Han Kangs ”Jag tar inte farväl”. Många stammisarna har inte läst Han Kang men delägaren Theresa Benér är inte förvånad över att sydkoreanen får priset. – Det lustiga är att jag gissade på det igår när jag gick igenom bokhyllan men tänkte att nej, det blir nog inte. Men faktiskt, ja, säger Theresa och fortsätter: – Det är ett jätteroligt val. Jag är glad att det har kommit utanför Europa, jag är väldigt glad att det är en kvinnlig författare. Och att det här är ett jätteintressant författarskap.

Ett misstag att kalla hans litteratur abstrakt, skriver…

Företag och techbolag har använt texter skrivna av Nobelpristagare för att träna AI-verktyg, visar en kartläggning av SR:s Kulturnytt. Det gäller bland annat den norske Nobelpristagaren Jon Fosses verk. – Vi tycker att det här rätt och slätt är stöld. Det är ett sätt att använda upphovsrättsligt material utan tillåtelse, säger Brynjulf Jung Tjønn vid Norsk författerförening till radion.

Texter skrivna av Nobelpristagare som Jon Fosse, Abdulrazak…

I den tredje och sista delen av romansviten ”Septologin” framställer Jon Fosse människorna i en enkel och tyst jublande högtidlighet. Det är en roman som antar mytologiska proportioner, skriver Ulf Eriksson.

Jon Fosses signeringskö var pinsamt kort på bokmässan.

”Någon som pratar Nynorska?” Att The Economist inte är nöjd med årets Nobelpristagare i litteratur går inte att ta miste på. Enligt tidningen visar valet av norrmannen Jon Fosse på att Nobelpriset är prestigefyllt och lukrativt, men också godtyckligt och ”knäppt”. Tidningen vänder sig bland annat mot juryns process, där hundratals författare ska sållas ned till en på ett par månader. Lägg därtill svårigheten med att en del av ett verks storhet kan gå förlorad i översättningar. Enligt The Economist tenderar priset att fokusera alltför mycket på Europa – av 120 pristagare kommer 100 från Europa eller USA. Detta är dock något som Svenska Akademin sägs vara medveten om. Ångrar man rent av att man gick med på att dela ut ett så svårbedömt pris? frågar tidningen sig. Lifting the veil on how literature’s most coveted award is judged reveals its arbitrariness By The Economist October 5, 2023 The announcement of the winner of the Nobel prize in literature usually prompts one of three reactions. The first is “Who?”; the second is “Why?”; the third—and by far the rarest—is “Hurrah!” This year, the reaction was firmly in the first two camps. On October 5th Jon Fosse, a Norwegian, was awarded the most prestigious writing prize in the world. Most literary buffs had never heard of him. Mr Fosse writes mainly in the Nynorsk language, which is, even among Norwegian writers, a minority pursuit. His best-known (but still little-known) trilogy is called “Septology”, which touts itself as a “radically other reading experience”. In some ways awarding this prize is a simple process. As is customary, Mr Fosse was telephoned, just before 1pm Swedish time today. As is also usual, he picked up the phone to hear a Scandinavian voice telling him that he had won the coveted prize, which comes with SKr11m (around $1m). Like many Nobel winners, he may have assumed it was a hoax. Like many, he may then have opened the champagne. Or perhaps, as Doris Lessing did, he may simply have sighed and said: “Oh, Christ.” In almost every other way the prize is a nightmare of complexity. Judging anything, even a 100-metre race, can be hard. Judging literature—a symphony, not a sprint— is much harder. Aristotle might have been briskly able to outline what makes a piece of writing great in his “Poetics”; few others have felt so confident. “Posh bingo” is how the writer Julian Barnes once described the Booker prize, another literary prize awarded annually for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. (He was shortlisted for it three times before his fourth proved to be the charm.) Prize judges can seem less like they are making measured, critical decisions than picking names out of a hat. When, in 2016, the Swedish Academy’s Nobel committee for literature picked Bob Dylan, the American singer and songwriter, there was an international outcry. As Anders Olsson, the current chair of the committee mutedly observes: “We always get criticism.” In its very first year, the Nobel committee caused outrage when it failed to give the accolade to Leo Tolstoy and offered it to the poet Sully Prudhomme instead—a name almost as underwhelming then as it is now. “So many fantastic writers” were not only not chosen, admits Mr Olsson, but not even nominated: Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf among them. Jorge Luis Borges, Henrik Ibsen and Henry James also failed to win (though they were, at least, nominated). Some may have sympathy for the judges. For one thing, the Nobel’s judging criteria are at best esoteric; at worst they are wholly opaque. Alfred Nobel—a man who was better at chemistry than writing—stated in his will that one of the prizes in his name was to be awarded to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Whatever that might mean. The field of potential competitors for the literary prize is vast. Authors do not actively enter to be considered for the Nobel. Instead, the judges must choose from all living writers, writing in every language in the world. Given that there are 7,000-odd languages, the number of potential competitors is vast. It is, acknowledges Mr Olsson, “an immense” task. And, naturally, a nonsense one. The six members of the judging committee are not really considering the oeuvre of every Irish author writing in Gaelic or every Papua New Guinean one writing in Hiri Motu. Judges are, however, considering quite a lot of them. Each year, the committee sends around 4,000 invitations to literary organisations across the world requesting nominations by February 1st. These nominations become a longlist of 200 authors who are whittled down to a shortlist of 20 by April. By May, they have produced a yet shorter list of five candidates (which, like all the other lists, is kept secret for 50 years). Then the judging and the reading begin in earnest. It is as fair as it can be, which is to say, extremely unfair. Choosing between books is “very, very hard”, says Neil MacGregor, a former director of the British Museum and the chair of the Booker prize committee in 2022. Books are so very different. According to Mr MacGregor, judges must adjudicate between a book on the Sri Lankan civil war here and the inward musings of a middle-class American woman there. In other words, they are picking between literary “apples and oranges”. It is even harder than that again. The question for a judge is not merely: do I, as an individual, like this book? It is: can we, as a group, accept it? What is required for a book to win a prize is not individual enthusiasm but “general assent”, says Mr MacGregor: it is “a bit like a criminal jury”. And at times the atmosphere on prizes can be as fun as that makes it sound. Judging the Booker prize led Joanna Lumley, a British actress, to conclude that the “so-called bitchy world of acting” was a “tea party compared with the piranha-infested waters of publishing”. Judging books presents other difficulties, too. The longlists for modern prizes are just that: long. Booker judges must wade through around 170 books in seven months; Nobel judges through the output of 200 authors in just two. In truth, most do not. “I don’t believe they can,” says Michael Wood, a historian who has chaired a different contest, the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction. Each judge has her own method; some read 30-40 pages of each. Others scan them to see if they are a contender. Happily for judges (if not readers), all too often the answer is a flat no. The author Malcolm Muggeridge withdrew from judging the Booker because he was “nauseated and appalled” by the entries. Mr MacGregor, more mildly, on several occasions found himself putting down books and wondering, “How could anybody have thought this was worth publishing?” The Nobel presents other difficulties. Unlike many prizes, it considers works in translation—and poetry, as the saying has it, gets lost in translation. Prose does not do that brilliantly either: even “Je ne sais quoi” loses a certain je ne sais quoi when it is in English. Some works are so poetic, so tied to their own language that they are untranslatable and therefore out of the running. Internationalism offers other complexities. The prize purports to be worldwide but has tended to be Eurocentric: of the 120 winners to date, around 100 have come from Europe or America. This is a bias of which the Academy is acutely—and, you sense, uncomfortably—aware. The difficulties with the prize were, in fact, numerous and clear to the Swedish Academy from the beginning. When they were offered the donation from Nobel, the Academy had “some hesitations” about accepting it, according to Mr Olsson. Given the criticism that the Academy has sometimes faced, perhaps it wishes it had not. Naturally, all Nobel prizes have had controversies—but few as ferocious as those raised by the literary one. Though not everyone is cross. As Mr Barnes mused, writers might see prizes as a lottery—until, that is, they win them. Then they realise that those cursed prize judges are, in fact, “the wisest heads in literary Christendom”. © 2023 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.

Norska kulturkritiker jublar över att författaren Jon Fosse – som skriver på nynorska – tilldelats årets Nobelpris i litteratur. ”Det är överväldigande att litteratur som är så förankrad i norska Vestlandet färdas med sådan enkelhet över världen”, skriver NRK:s kulturkommentator Inger Merete Hobbelstad. VG:s Sindre Hovdenakk beskriver det som en ”storslam” för nynorskan. Fosse är Norges viktigaste och mest inflytelserika prosaförfattare, menar Hovdenakk. ”Så sorry, Dag Solstad, där gick nog sista tåget till Stockholm”, skriver han om det andra norska författarnamnet som länge förekommit i Nobelspekulationerna. Norge har två officiella skriftspråk, bokmål och nynorska. Endast 10-12 procent uppges använda sig av det senare.