The big literary story in the British papers this week has been the comment by Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, that American literary culture is “too isolated, too insular” to participate in the literary conversation carried on among other world cultures. The Guardian’s headline on the subject blares out “No Nobel prizes for American writers: they’re too parochial,” and the story is accompanied by a photo of Philip Roth standing nonchalantly in the middle of Broadway, without fear, apparently, of being run down by cabs or Swedish academics. I gather that some American writers and critics have taken this personally, and Harold Augenbraum, who oversees the National Book Awards, has reportedly offered to send Engdahl a reading list of contemporary American literature, but it doesn’t sound to me as if Engdahl intended his remarks as a dismissal of American writers as much as an indictment of American publishers and readers for turning their back on the rest of the world. Here’s what he said, according to the Guardian story:
There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world“not the United States. The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature“ That ignorance is restraining.
Would anyone seriously argue with the claim that Americans don’t read enough literature written in other languages? All we need for evidence is the annual scramble among journalists, critics, and readers to find translations of the latest Nobel winner. Major commercial publishers in the US seem uninterested in anything not written of, by, and for the audience of Oprah, and while small literary publishers and websites like Words without Borders do their best to bring us the world of writing beyond our shores, they can only do so much to make up for this lack of interest in literature in translation. I’ve seen it argued that the Nobel committee risks irrelevance by awarding the prize to obscure writers. Engdahl’s point, as I understand it, is that one shouldn’t call these writers “obscure” simply because they are unknown to American readers, and that it is we who risk irrelevance by allowing this ignorance to continue.
The irony here is that if you ask any serious American writer to name his or her influences, the list will quickly include writers they’ve first ??? or only ??? read in translation. American writers, like all writers, read voraciously, looking for new ways to imagine our lives or to tell the stories that help us to emerge from our isolation. It’s American publishers — and the readers they herd from fashion to fad ??? who risk sliding into a form of intellectual isolationism. So if Engdahl’s comments make you angry, then prove him wrong: pick up a book not written in English and not authorized for US publication by the Nobel prize committee. As readers, we may not be able to change the world, but we can certainly allow it to change us.
In other news, there’s new evidence that “literary immortality” is more than a writer’s myth: several British newspapers have reported that Friedrich Schiller received a second reminder from “Germany’s tenacious TV license-collecting agency,” the GEZ, to pay his monthly ???17.03 television fee. The bill was mailed to the primary school in the town of Weigsdorf-K??blitz bearing Schiller’s name, even after a letter from the school’s principal notified the GEZ that the poet had been dead since 1805. I can’t help wondering if German radio and TV has been paying out royalties every time they play Schiller’s Ode to Joy, set to music by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony. The school should issue a demand letter on his behalf.
And finally, a small story in the financial pages of the Guardian (yes, there are still small stories in the financial pages) reports that scientists in Cambridge have launched a three-year project to create the next generation of e-paper, “which may herald the arrival of fully interactive, all ???colour computerized newspapers and magazines.” The story notes that the project is working with Plastic Logic, a US company which unveiled a prototype e-paper last month that looks much more like conventional paper than the screens of current electronic books. Watch this brief video: one can literally turn the page. The new technology this consortium is developing will take that idea further, producing an e-paper that would be lighter, more flexible, quicker to load, and capable of displaying color and running video, crucial functions for moving newspapers and magazines from print-on-paper to an electronic medium.
When you can fold down the edge of the page, I’m in.