Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to 10 women. With yesterday's announcement, the Swedish Academy in Stockholm has raised this number to a whopping 11. Congratulations, Doris Lessing!
Professor Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, made the announcement in five languages: Swedish, English, French, German and Russian. The fact that the announcement is multilingual is my favorite thing about it. Here it is:
Giving a Nobel Lecture is now pretty standard but in the early years of the Nobel Prize in Literature, most recipients only delivered a short Banquet Speech (and still do so in addition to the Lecture). Usually, the Banquet Speech consisted of little more than thanking the Academy but on some occasions, it was more comprehensive and contemplative. Selma Lagerlöf's Banquet Speech takes the form a dream story in which she imagines meeting her father in Heaven and discussing with him the debt she feels towards her audience and fellow authors. Wislawa Szymborska's delivered her very short speech in French. The only female writer for whom we have no Banquet Speech is the Sardinian novelist Grazia Deledda. I'm curious to know why that's the case but, at any rate, I've provided excerpts from the Banquet Speeches and Nobel Lectures of the 10 female recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Doris Lessing's speech will appear in the coming weeks.
Selma Lagerlöf (1909):
...I thought of my father and felt a deep sorrow that he should no longer be alive, and that I could not go to him and tell him that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize. I knew that no one would have been happier than he to hear this. Never have I met anyone with his love and respect for the written word and its creators, and I wished that he could have known that the Swedish Academy had bestowed on me this great Prize. Yes, it was a deep sorrow to me that I could not tell him.
Anyone who has ever sat in a train as it rushes through a dark night will know that sometimes there are long minutes when the coaches slide smoothly along without so much as a shudder. All rustle and bustle cease and the sound of the wheels becomes a soothing, peaceful melody. The coaches no longer seem to run on rails and sleepers but glide into space. Well, that is how it was as I sat there and thought how much I should like to see my old father again. (Banquet Speech)
Grazia Deledda (1926):
Destiny caused me to be born in the heart of lonely Sardinia. But even if I had been born in Rome or Stockholm, I should not have been different. I should have always been what I am - a soul which becomes impassioned about life's problems and which lucidly perceives men as they are, while still believing that they could be better and that no one else but themselves prevents them from achieving God's reign on earth. Everything is hatred, blood, and pain; but, perhaps, everything will be conquered one day by means of love and good will. (quoted in the Nobel Presentation Speech)
Sigrid Undset (1928):
I write more readily than I speak and I am especially reluctant to talk about myself. (Banquet Speech)
Pearl Buck (1938):
This award, given to an American, strengthens not only one, but the whole body of American writers, who are encouraged and heartened by such generous recognition. And I should like to say, too, that in my country it is important that this award has been given to a woman. You who have already so recognized your own Selma Lagerlöf, and have long recognized women in other fields, cannot perhaps wholly understand what it means in many countries that it is a woman who stands here at this moment. (Banquet Speech)
When I came to consider what I should say today it seemed that it would be wrong not to speak of China. And this is none the less true because I am an American by birth and by ancestry and though I live now in my own country and shall live there, since there I belong. But it is the Chinese and not the American novel which has shaped my own efforts in writing. My earliest knowledge of story, of how to tell and write stories, came to me in China. It would be ingratitude on my part not to recognize this today. And yet it would be presumptuous to speak before you on the subject of the Chinese novel for a reason wholly personal. There is another reason why I feel that I may properly do so. It is that I believe the Chinese novel has an illumination for the Western novel and for the Western novelist. (Nobel Lecture, "The Chinese Novel")
Gabriela Mistral (1945):
At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues. (Banquet Speech)
Nelly Sachs (1966, award shared with Shmuel Agnon):
In the summer of 1939 a German girl friend of mine went to Sweden to visit Selma Lagerlöf, to ask her to secure a sanctuary for my mother and myself in that country. Since my youth I had been so fortunate as to exchange letters with Selma Lagerlöf; and it is out of her work that my love for her country grew. The painter-prince Eugen and the novelist helped to save me....An Stelle von Heimat/ halte ich die Verwandlungen der Welt (Banquet Speech)
Nadine Gordimer (1991):
How does the writer become one, having been given the word? I do not know if my own beginnings have any particular interest. No doubt they have much in common with those of others, have been described too often before as a result of this yearly assembly before which a writer stands. For myself, I have said that nothing factual that I write or say will be as truthful as my fiction. The life, the opinions, are not the work, for it is in the tension between standing apart and being involved that the imagination transforms both. Let me give some minimal account of myself. I am what I suppose would be called a natural writer. I did not make any decision to become one. I did not, at the beginning, expect to earn a living by being read. I wrote as a child out of the joy of apprehending life through my senses - the look and scent and feel of things; and soon out of the emotions that puzzled me or raged within me and which took form, found some enlightenment, solace and delight, shaped in the written word. (Nobel Lecture, "Writing and Being")
Toni Morrison (1993):
Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference--the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. (Nobel Lecture)
I will leave this hall...with a new and much more delightful haunting than the one I felt upon entering: that is the company of Laureates yet to come. Those who, even as I speak, are mining, sifting and polishing languages for illuminations none of us has dreamed of. But whether or not any one of them secures a place in this pantheon, the gathering of these writers is unmistakable and mounting. Their voices bespeak civilizations gone and yet to be; the precipice from which their imaginations gaze will rivet us; they do not blink nor turn away. (Banquet Speech)
Wislawa Szymborska (1996):
It's not accidental that film biographies of great scientists and artists are produced in droves. The more ambitious directors seek to reproduce convincingly the creative process that led to important scientific discoveries or the emergence of a masterpiece. And one can depict certain kinds of scientific labor with some success. Laboratories, sundry instruments, elaborate machinery brought to life: such scenes may hold the audience's interest for a while...Films about painters can be spectacular, as they go about recreating every stage of a famous painting's evolution, from the first penciled line to the final brush-stroke. Music swells in films about composers: the first bars of the melody that rings in the musician's ears finally emerge as a mature work in symphonic form. Of course this is all quite naive and doesn't explain the strange mental state popularly known as inspiration, but at least there's something to look at and listen to.
But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens ... Who could stand to watch this kind of thing? (Nobel Lecture, "The Poet and the World")
Merci, dziêkujê, tack. (Banquet Speech)
Elfriede Jelineck (2004):
Is writing the gift of curling up, of curling up with reality? One would so love to curl up, of course, but what happens to me then? What happens to those, who don’t really know reality at all? It’s so very dishevelled. No comb, that could smooth it down. (Nobel Lecture, "Sidelined")