April 1, 2001
Acceptance Speech*
Prior to William Butler Yeats’s speech accepting the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature, Einar Lönnberg, president of the Academy of Sciences, addressed the Irish writer: “Mr. Yeats: A worthier tongue […]
April 1, 2001
Reality Requires
From the Polish. Reality requiresthat we speak of these things: life rolls on, near Cannae, and Borodino, in Kosovo, Guernica. A petrol station stands on a little Jericho square: in […]
April 1, 2001
Atlantis
From the Polish. They existed—or not— on an island, or no-island: sea, or no-sea, swallowed them up—or not. Was there anyone to love? anyone to fight? Everything happened, or […]
April 1, 2001
Cat in an Empty Apartment
From the Polish. Die—you can't do that to a cat. What is it to do, the cat, in an empty apartment, but climb the walls, and rub against the […]
April 1, 2001
Patrick White: Writing Towards Silence
The reputation of Patrick White is in that mysterious slump to which most writers are, for a while, posthumously consigned. The famous and “Australian” novels—The Tree of Man (1956), Voss […]
April 1, 2001
Form in Poetry: Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott in a conversation with Bengt Jangfeldt
Introduction by Bengt Jangfeldt In September 1993, two Nobel laureates in literature, Joseph Brodsky (1987) and Derek Walcott (1992), were invited to the University of Linköping in Sweden for a […]
April 1, 2001
Antipepsis*
And the number was uneven In the green of holy Stephen Where before the ass the cart Was harnessed for a foreign part. In this should not be seen the […]
April 1, 2001
W. B. Yeats
When awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet, playwright, essayist, mystic, and cultural activist, spoke from notes, but on his return to Ireland […]
April 1, 2001
A Voice from the Other World*
From the Arabic. 1. By God, what does this tomb want for the good things of a bygone existence? It is a fragment of life’s essence rich with lusciousness and […]
April 1, 2001
54 University Avenue, Yangon
Aung San Suu Kyi’s childhood home is a dilapidated, once-handsome bungalow that looks out on Rangoon’s Inya Lake—a picturesque tretch of water whose surface is dotted with water lilies and […]
April 1, 2001
Transmitting the Intangible: Thoughts on a Future Nobel Museum
Visitors to Sweden’s capital are often surprised to find that the Nobel Prize is really visible only once a year, during the December prize ceremony. Why isn’t there a Nobel […]
April 1, 2001
Editors’ Notes
Creativity—the drive to generate something new from the materials about us or from the materials within our own imagination, to discover what we didn’t know or couldn’t see or simply […]