2008 Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to ‘Avid Traveller’

French author Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio will soon be swimming in Swedish Krona. He won the 2008 Nobel Prize in literature today, lauded for being an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation.” The Telegraph describes him as an “avid traveller” who loves the work of two other great travelers, Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad. His overseas experiences altered the way he saw the world. Notes the paper:

In the late 1960s he travelled to Mexico and Panama where he spent several months among the Emberas Indians. It was, he later said, “an experience which changed my life, my ideas about life and art, ways of being with others, of walking, eating, sleeping, loving and even dreaming.”

Nice. But at least in the U.S., there’s sure to be more talk about the swipe at American literature taken earlier by an official with the Swedish Academy, which doles out the awards.

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” Horace Engdahl said, in suggesting that writing in the United States just couldn’t compete on the global stage. “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

Suffice to say, American writers were none too pleased. But I like the response of American novelist Junot Diaz. He told NPR:

“If this encourages the average American to read one more book in translation—if only to spite the kind of sneering Eurocentric elitism of this one individual—that’s not a bad thing.”

Here, here.

The IHT notes a number of the books by Le Clezio that have been translated into English.

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