Interesting Facts about Nobel Prize in Literature and Languages

Last week, the different Nobel Academies announced the names of the Nobel Laureates of the different categories of Nobel Prize for 2018. However, for reasons that I am not going to mention, there is a category that will remain vacant this year: The Nobel Prize in Literature.

According to the official site, The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded “in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction “ (Excerpt from the will of Alfred Nobel). In Wikipedia, the original words in Swedish can be found: “ inom litteraturen har producerat det utmärktaste i idealisk rigtning “. Literature is related to the artistic use of languages.

I have read many sites where interesting facts about Nobel Prize in Literature are shown in different articles, but none of them is entirely dedicated to languages. Here is my contribution to this area:

1.    
       -The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to 114 individuals. The most common language of Nobel laureates is English.  The second most used language is French and German comes third. According to my own list (In the internet you can find this same topic with slight different numbers), There were 31 writers who used English, 15 who used French and 13 German. In an article in euronews, they use the same numbers I post here.

2.     

       -English is the most diverse language in terms of the nationalities of the laureates. Although most of the individuals awarded were British or American, there were those who came from Canada, Australia, Ireland, Nigeria, South Africa, and Santa Lucia. More diversity exists if we consider the facts that the Writer Sir Vidiadhar Naipaul presented himself as British and he was born in Trinidad and Tobago. The Great Bengali Poet, Rabindranath Tagore wrote also in English, but his main language and the one considered for his award was his Native Bengali. Most of the laureates who wrote in French and German were respectively French and German Nationals.

3.    -France is not only the country with the most recipients in this category of Nobel Prize, but is also the most linguistically diverse. Out of 16 laureates, 13 used French, but there were writers like Frédéric Mistral who wrote mainly in Occitan, Ivan Bunin who wrote in Russian and Gao Xinjian who writes in Mandarin. 

  

4.    - Minority languages have been considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. We just mention the case of Frédéric Mistral who wrote mainly in Occitan. Another famous case was Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote in Yiddish, a language that is not official in any country or region.

5.    

     - Selma Lagerlöf, was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. At this point, only 14 women have been awarded this prestigious Prize. English is also the language that leads here. 5 female writers who write /wrote in English have been awarded. Here German has the second place with 3 laureates. The rest were the only female writers to be awarded in their respective languages. No female writer has been the sole recipient of any language. Interestingly, not a single female writer who wrote in French has been awarded in this category.

6.    

     - There have been 3 winners who used more than one language in their works. I already mention the case of the poet Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote in English and in Bengali. We have also the case of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, who wrote in English and French; the Russian born American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky, who composed poetry in Russian and Prose in English.   

7.    

     - How is the process of nomination and selection of the candidates? The process can be read in the website of the Nobel Prizes. Members of the Swedish Academy, Professors of Literature at universities and colleges, Author societies and previous Nobel laureates in Literature can nominate. The Swedish Academy has a committee composed of 18 members who work in the assessment of the work and merits of each nominee. Finally, they select the winner. However, this leads to another situation related to languages: How are they going to assess the works of the nominees that might come in different languages? Are members of the Swedish academy proficient in the languages of the nominees? How many languages can the committee work with? Unfortunately, the committee that selects the winner of the prize is not as multilingual as we might believe. If we check the profiles of the members, most of them are fluent only in Swedish, English and another Scandinavian language, mainly Norwegian. Exceptionally, there are one or two members who are proficient in Chinese, Spanish, Russian and not many members know French. This means that most of the times, the members of the committee rely on translations to English or Swedish to do their job. This subject has originated scholarly studies and essays, I found one published by the University of Alberta called Translation, Littérisation and the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature, José Saramago, said: “Writers create national literature with their language, but world literature is written by translators “. This leads to the next point:

8.    

     - There were 59 laureates of this prestigious prize who used a Germanic language in their compositions. Here I place all those authors who used languages of this Indo-European branch like English, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Yiddish. This is more than half of the total 114 laureates.  Only 9 laureates used a non-Indo-European language (2 Chinese, 2 Japanese, one in Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Finish and Hungarian.

9.    

     - Not all the laureates of this Nobel Prize were awarded for their works in their mother tongue. Here we mention the case of Joseph Brodsky, who learned English being an adult and he used this language with his native language Russian. The Israeli writer, born in Ukraine, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, was raised in a Yiddish speaking home, but later, he chose to write in Hebrew only. Canadian American writer Saul Bellow was born in Montreal, a French-speaking city and was raised in a Yiddish speaking home, but he ended writing in English.