I woke up Thursday morning batting off the vestiges of a grisly dream: a lime-faced Bob Dylan had been swinging his guitar and showing a knobby leg to that famous Swedish conclave, hoping they’d tuck a Nobel Prize in his garter. Puffy and winded, I turned on my laptop to check the news on my BBC homepage, something I never do straight off after hauling myself out of bed. And there it was. The Nobel had been awarded, not to Dylan, but to the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. Brushing off the last hairs of the dream, I felt the need to cry. When the winner of the Nobel Prize happens to be your personal first choice, you feel at once elated and abashed, as if you’d discovered the ability to move silverware across the table with your mind, or the art of levitation. (It happened to me once before, with Orhan Pamuk: At the end of September, 2006, I picked up My Name is Red, thinking how fun it would be to be reading Pamuk when he won.)
It all gets to me more than it should, like football or soaps in other quarters. All day I found myself forgetting things, like eating breakfast, or returning a library book which had been set right where I’d have to trip over it to get out the front door. You should have seen me trying to count change at Starbucks. Lines from poems kept imposing on my thoughts:
Passing through walls hurts human beings, they get sick from it,/ but we have no choice. (“Vermeer”)
But those who glance enviously at men of action, people who/ despise themselves inside for not being murderers,/ do not find themselves in this music. (“Schubertiana”)
Like most poetry readers, I know very few people with whom I can share that delight, and among those even fewer who are acquainted with Tomas Tranströmer, so for most of the day I kept my delight to myself, which undoubtedly produced on my face more than one goofy abstracted look.
It’s been a hard winter, but summer is here and the fields want us to walk upright. Every man unimpeded, but careful, as when you stand up in a small boat. (“Standing Up”)
Me a sentimentalist? Nonetheless, on Thursday night I made Swedish meatballs, salty and scented with allspice and nutmeg, seared, then baked in a roux-and-beef broth gravy enriched, not with cream, but with buttermilk and a splash or two of dry sherry. Sam, also a great a lover of Tranströmer, made a Swedish “visiting” cake, rustic and golden. We celebrated as we could.
There will be those who feel this year’s Nobel prize was lost by Adonis. There will be those who will aim their snark guns at Scandinavians looking out for each other. There will be those who will use this award to a European as an excuse to raise the tired rant about the Nobel committee’s policy of stonewalling Americans. But, as more and more people use the occasion as impetus to discover Tranströmer for themselves, it will come clear that the only question to be raised against this choice is why it took so long.
So, in the interest of the whole betting pool you had, here’s a short explanation:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2096206,00.html
You know, if we’d put money down on it, you could have bought yourself a nice dinner!
What’s fun here is that Ladbrokes has created the perfect send-up of the Nobel Prize. Next year, they should just line everyone up and run them in heats. It would all be a bit more straightforward: Murakami would thrice lap the nearest contender while Roth would come in dead last, taking it out in his Depends. The whole show wouldn’t be all that much more ludicrous than it is now, only funnier, forestalling sober-sides such as myself from attaching more meaning to it than it merits. If all the Bob Dylan nonsense had actually been serious rather than cute – let’s say the ’60’s bard/poseur/moment-catcher/icon actually won – it would still have been nonsense, Tranströmer would still be the same great poet that he is. But, as I suggested in a previous post, it is idle to protest indifference; I’m very glad the Swedish master won, and it would have been highly amusing to collect. I’d like a nice dinner. Or a cell-phone with which I can actually text. Thanks for the link!