Henryk Sienkewicz grew up within a revolutionary family in Poland in the middle of the 19th Century, and learned how to match his father’s political beliefs with his mother’s passion for history. He spent a lot of time in the library, but this curiosity did not translate to a love of school. He left college early to write full time. After successful short stories, he started writing about his experience traveling the world (including into the United States, a rarity for the time).
After returning to Poland and starting a family, he started writing full length novels including a historical trilogy about life in Poland a hundred years before (creatively titled: The Trilogy), but his most popular and enduring work came ten years before his Nobel with the book Quo Vadis. His talents were so impressive, that he won the Nobel for, simply put “his outstanding merits as an epic writer”. As if that wasn’t enough, the people in Poland took up a collection to buy his family’s old castle for him.
Works
““It seemed that out of every tear of a martyr new confessors were born, and that every groan on the arena found an echo in thousands of breasts. Caesar was swimming in blood, Rome and the whole pagan world was mad.” —Quo Vadis (all of these are from Quo Vadis)
“Why does crime, even when as powerful as Cæsar, and assured of being beyond punishment, strive always for the appearances of truth, justice, and virtue? Why does it take the trouble?” —Insert trenchant current event observation here
“For when a man is in a book-shop, curiosity seizes him to look here and there.” —This may also serve as my life’s motto
“A home without a book is darker than one without a lamp.”
Message
Having read that most popular novel, one that captures the conflict between a brutal Roman Empire and the fledging Christian church, I was shocked at how much a 130 year old Polish man captured my sense of faith. Above all, faith requires just that: faith. There has never been and never will be an easy answer for those confronting the conflict between ideals and life. Simply appreciating that struggle both around and inside you is worthwhile.
Position: #5 Center Back
Sienkewicz is probably my favorite century old writer that I’ve come across, and while his books really are epic sized, his style is wonderfully simple and direct, with just the expected touch of violence. As such, he seems to me like a no-nonsense, efficient defender, and one who could be mature and kind hearted enough to be team captain like Michael Boxall is.
Here’s my traditional request for you to engage with this blog beyond clicking the like button. Have you read the author? Do you love soccer? Any and all comments welcomed!
Next Time: Special Bonus Laureate!! 1905 Peace Honoree Bertha Von Suttner
(The only non literature laureate who was given their award specifically for writing a book)
Quick Points Update: Han Kang was not on any of my lists for this years Nobel FC Draft. But She still gets the full star treatment here.
Background
Winner Han Kang as a young girl (2nd from left, not making wild face) From Kang’s Father (Han Seung-Wong far Left) and reprinted in the Korean Times
Han Kang was born in a literary family in the Korean city of Gwangju to a family that survived several traumatic childbearing experiences. That difficult experience that marked her context before birth appears throughout her writing.
So too does a love of literature as her father is both a novelist and a professor. Kang has said she grew up thinking of books as though they were “half-living beings” and to read her work is to see the ideas grow and develop and carry with them tragedy and hope in one fell swoop. (Likewise her hometown became the site of a brutal attack by a dictator against pro-democracy activists creating another trauma to grow through.) Growing up with migrane headaches, she was not very physically active, and so she built a long standing love of reading and literature.
Kang’s first work was published as poetry, though she grew into more complex and frequently meditative literature which focused on ideas, feelings, and impressions rather than plot. When she was awarded the Nobel Prize (“for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life”) she quickly became one of the youngest people to ever win as well as the first Asian woman.
Works
Swaddling Bands, white as snow are wound around the newborn baby. The womb will have been such a snug fit, so the nurse binds the body tight, to mitigate the shock of its abrupt projection into limitlessness.
Person who begins only now to breathe, a first filling-up of the lungs. Person who does not know who they are, where they are, what has just begun. The most helpless of all young animals, more defenceless even than a newborn chick.
The woman, pale from blood loss, looks at the crying child. Flustered, she takes its swaddled self into her arms. Person to whom the cure of this crying is yet unknown. Who has been, until mere moments ago, in the throes of such astonishing agony. Unexpectedly, the child quiets itself. It will be because of some smell. Or that the two are still connected. Two black unseeing eyes are turned towards the woman’s face – drawn in the direction of her voice. Not knowing what has been set in motion, these two are still connected. In silence shot through with the smell of blood. When what lies between bodies is the white of swaddling bands.
–“Swaddling Bands” The White Book
“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.”
—The Vegetarian
Message
Far be it from me to read two stories and claim to be an expert…except that’s exactly the premise of these posts. If I were to name a theme in Kang’s work it would be that pain has a beauty all its own and pushes us to question what we fear. In both The Vegetarian and The White Book she explores the nature of human endurance and suffering and yet remains open to and appreciative of it in a way that confounds rigid societal expectations around her and her genre of the moment. The Nobel emphasized that trauma and fragility and to me this is very much akin to that notion, but far more appreciative and less dour.
Position: #8 Midfielder
For the second straight year the Swedish Academy opted to go with a stream of conscious adjacent writer. And just like with Jan Fosse last year, I’m declaring that good enough for me to see Han Kang as a box to box midfielder, capable of both a cutting pass and a crunching tackle. She also gets bonus points from me to move her ahead of Fosse in the Starting XI because she was more comprehensible than Fosse was.
I really liked Han Kang, but I really didn’t like the delay that held me back from finishing this post for two months. Still, here it is and you can argue with me below.
Next Time (Rewind the Clocks, it’s time to start on the ’05s) 1905 Honoree–Henryk Sienkewicz
In just a few days, the Nobel committee will announce the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. Just like last year, they will join an elite group of writers from around the world, and a small selection of those writers who we have read, reviewed, and classified as members of Nobel FC: The only Fantasy Football team where the Fantasy is that these people would ever play.
I’ll try to read the author in question as soon as I can, and write their post by the beginning of November, but I wanted to take a moment for the second year in a row to consider who will be joining this august group.
How does the “draft” work
First a recap for those who somehow found this website but are unfamiliar with both “drafts” and “The Nobel Prize” (just how deep an internet rabbit hole have you gone down, my dudes and dudettes?)
In American professional sports there are annual “drafts” where teams select from a collection of players not yet in the league. Teams study and examine player abilities, debate the best choice, and then “draft” someone to become a part of their organization.
The Nobel Prize is a little like that. The “Team” in question is the Swedish Academy (of Literature). They collection of players not yet in the league is literally everyone on earth, who has yet to be awarded the Nobel, is living, and who wrote something. (Literally, they have awarded a prime minister for stirring speech writing, and a folk singer for his lyrics.)
That’s a big field, so they take in nominations from other Academies of Literature around the world, professors of universities, living laureates, and presidents of Authors’ guilds. That is still a very big field so they narrow it down to five finalists: study and examine the writers abilities, debate the best choice and then “award” someone the Prize.
This process has been a little controversial over the years. After all, why do the Swedes get the final vote? (Alfred Nobel said so) Does the fact that the Swedish Academy is mostly old, white, male, Europeans explain the fact that most of the laureates in history have been old, white, male Europeans? (Yes) Will they try to be more inclusive in the future? (Yes, though they kind of had to after a pretty ugly scandal).
So Who Could be “Drafted” This Year?
We don’t know the top 5 candidates, or even the top 100 candidates who got nominated, and we won’t for another 50 years (long after the internet, including this post becomes a time capsule for aliens). But we have a list of likely candidates from gamblers and prognosticators. (I’ll toss out 11 here)
Last year’s 11 now off the list:
Jon Fosse won last year’s award, making him only the fourth Norwegian to win (tell me there’s no bad blood between the nordics…I bet the Swedish academy is just bitter about having soggy krumkake). While Fosse won a place in history books (or at least an extra line on Wikipedia), I won two nonsense points. My goal is to hit 11 points with 5 points if I correctly predict either on the *will win* or should win; 2 points if they’re on either “honorable mentions” list, and 1 if they’re in my 11 top candidates).
None of my other candidates lost their eligibility due to the unfortunate state of being dead…but I have decided to drop Frenchman Pierre Michon as he has slipped behind other French writer Helene Cisoux and the French have already had a major cultural moment this year with the Olympics as well as a recent laureate, I’m putting both Michon and Cisoux towards the middle of the queue, just outside this list.
Leading Candidates:
The leading favorites are Can Xue, a Chinese author who frequently challenges the increasingly authoritarian establishment in Beijing. Her style has some parallels with other challenging stream of conscious writers like Elfriede Jelinek and John Fosse, and while the committee likes to hit similar styles she would offer a distinct cultural and linguistic perspective, especially given the absence of awards to Asia in the last 10 years. There’s also been a surge of popular sentiment around Syrian poet Adonis who is often on these lists, and would represent a first winner from the arab world since 1988, while also drawing attention the ongoing issues in Israel with both Palestine and Lebanon. Lyudmila Ulitskaya is another political context pick who was briefly atop the rankings this year given her position as a strident opponent of Vladmir Poo-head (sorry, that’s Alex’s name for him). But she has slipped as well, particularly as the unrest in Israel grows.
Returning Candidates:
Then there are the popular picks, like Haruki Murakami, who has a wide following in seemingly every country on earth. However, given that the Nobel likes writers who court a little political controversy, Murakami seems less likely than Xue. The same could be said of other popular writers from often awarded regions and languages like: American Thomas Pynchon, Global Indian/Brit/American Salman Rushdie, Canadian Anne Carson and Australian Gerald Murnane. The Academy has seemed to be breaking apart from its old habit of just cycling through the West’s biggest culture factories, but that doesn’t change the fact that these broadly appealing writers are perennially near the top of the betting odds and in wide circulation at the Swedish library.
If they wanted to award a Western literary heavyweight but NOT someone who writes in a frequently awarded language, then they could consider Romanian novelist Mircea Cartarescu. Caratescu just won the Dublin Literary award (which represents the biggest financial prize for one book rather than a series). But as there’s no real link between awards and the Nobels seem to see themselves as separate entities, it may not work. Since they went to this well with Fosse last year, I’d put this as the least likely candidate.
Beyond Europe and Asia, the oddsmakers and the pundits don’t have many options. Perennial contender Ngui wa Thiong’o of Kenya looks to represent Subsaharan Africa and at 84 may be running out of time, while Mexican poet Homero Aridjis is a widely appreciated poet from Latin America (an area of the world not awarded since 2010), odds makers have him running behind Argentine poet (Cesar Aira), but with a limit of 11 picks, and several pundits pointing out Aridjis popularity among committee members for the last few years, I opted to keep Aridjis on the list. Like Cartarescu he also is coming off a prize win for the Griffin Poetry Prize from Canada (though that was more about his translator George McWhirter than an award for himself).
Analysis: Who will it be? Who should it be?
In articles analysing a team’s draft-day decisions, writers look at two things. What they think the team leaders will do, and what the author themselves would do if they had a chance.
Having already read books by Murakami and Rushdie as well as selections from the other returners, I read a few well-recommended lines from my two new names (Adonis and Ulitskaya) and came with the following suggestions.
The Academy Will Pick
The Swedish Academy tends not to prioritize the best selling or most widely acclaimed author available, they prefer those who have something artistic to offer in their work and especially if they have something beyond the purely personal to uncover. At times that leads them to revel in awarding obscure writers, and in the last four years, awarding more diverse picks, with a significant increase in female laureates.
So I think they will pick: Can Xue. I only read very brief excerpts from her work…but even that seemed weird and obtuse. Critics claim her work is often plotless, but that’s not a negative in the hands of the Nobel Committee, in fact it makes a nice counterpoint to Jon Fosse’s more linear stream of conscious win from last year and an echo of Elfreide Jelinek. She’s got art, she’s got style, she’s got a point of view. She’s the favorite for a reason.
If left up to me, I would try to award a writer from outside the common-sphere of Nobel winners (ie Western Europe/America and white men). A more diverse writer with a point of view that connects to the wider world would be the ideal for me. Artistry is something I think lies in the eye of the beholder, so better to be clear than artful in my eyes.
While I liked what I read from this year’s new comers, I don’t see enough reason to step away from my same pick last year: Homero Aridjis. Admittedly, I only looked at four of his poems, but he evokes a universality similar to Paz and Neruda, while also considering the broader scope of history and nature–which might suit the climate change conscious Academy/myself to boot.
Honorable Mentions: Ludmilia Ulitskaya, Salman Rushdie (I still think of him as an Indian writer despite his increasingly American identity)–BONUS: I’m going to keep pushing Louise Erdrich out of stubborn loyalty.
Who would you pick?
Leave a comment below, please, even alien overlords, comment with your pick.
UPDATE!
Next Time…I rush to judgement on whomever our winner isSouth Korean writer, and youngest Nobelist in 37 years…Han Kang
Nonsense Point total: 2/11
I was nowhere near Han Kang in all these names, so zero points to me…next year should see a massive drop in chances for Xue and Murakami though, so it’s going to be different for sure
Elfriede Jelinek is the first female writer we’ve covered in our Nobel Laureate reread project, and she is a truly distinctive voice in contrast to what else we’ve read in this project.
Jelinek was born in Austria shortly after the fall of the third reich but with a family that connected both to Austrian high society and Czechoslovakian Jewish community. She began her writing career as a poet before moving into fiction and then drama, all the while maintaining frequent poetic interludes that border on free verse stream of consciousness (the kind that is…challenging to parse). While she has long been widely appreciated in German literature, but less widely known in translation. She was taken aback by being given the Nobel in 2004: “for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power”. She was not alone as one member of the Swedish academy resigned following her prize calling her work: “whining, unenjoyable public pornography”, and “a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure”. She’s also had a documentary that calls her a “linguistic terrorist”.
Jelinek still writes, but as someone who struggles with agoraphobia and paranoia, she did not accept the award in person (like Jean Paul Sartre 40 years before).
Works
“Erika distrusts young girls; she tries to gauge their clothing and physical dimensions, hoping to ridicule them”–The Piano Teacher
“We made these nothings [athletes] into greats, into disturbers. Into heavyweights. We commoners, we who can never get used to our lives. The quiet want to be loud, but the loud don’t want to be quiet”–The Sports Play (Die Spielstruck)
“As much as football can cause war, it can also cause peace; football is a kind of Geiger Counter of civilization, a catalyst for good as well as bad.” (2012 Interview)
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Elfriede Jelinek is a truly combative writer. While the Nobel committee first cited her musical flow, I found myself considering another aspect of her writing the committee also noted. Her works “present a pitiless world where the reader is confronted with a locked-down regime of violence and submission, hunter and prey.” The psycho-sexual drama of The Piano Teacher (as seen in the well regarded 2001 film) is all about hunter and prey. While sports is all about two opponents, her play about sports builds that to an extreme degree leading to violent confrontations and ideological duels. To me, her writing seemed to revolve around a rather dark and dire message: we must constantly struggle–with one another for power, and with ourselves for control.
Position: #3 Left Back
That combative confrontational tone put me in mind of a defender, especially an aggressive one who might both attack down the flank and also have to rush back to stop others, so I’m going to play Elfriede as a fullback. (I’m also tipping my cap to her socialist politics by putting her on the left side, and using the colors of my favorites at Freiburg who also have a fondness for defensive Austrians.) While there’s some real powerful ideas in Jelinek’s work it is also QUITE difficult to understand and “mass of text shovelled together” seems a fair critique to me. I’ll gladly acknowledge she can do some impressive things, but it’s often hard to wade through the confusion to find it.
Now there are definitely flaws with my assessment so…for the 14th time, I invite someone, anyone to write a comment rather than just leave a like. Would I see it differently if I saw her work performed on the stage or the radio? Would it be different if my German was stronger? If I wasn’t blinded by my masculinity? Seriously, anybody, help me out here…
Next Time, 2024 Honoree ??
We’ll cover the possible contenders at the start of October and review the winner in November. Then start this whole mishagosh over again in January with the 20 year cycles of ’05 Winners
Jaroslav Siefert spent most of the 20th century being buffeted by some of the greatest forces of social upheaval you could imagine. A Czech student who saw the shell shocked and pained soldiers return from the Great War only to watch in horror as the Nazis siezed his country there after and then hail the Russians as liberators only to sour on them and confront the Soviet explotaition of Czechoslovakia as well. Seifert loved poetry, and while he made his living as a journalist it’s his poetry that won him international recognition and respect, culminating in the 1984 Nobel Prize “for his poetry which endowed with freshness, sensuality and rich inventiveness provides a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man”
Works
“Life is a beautiful long dream if you just live what’s in front of you”
–About Childhood (translated by me with help of Google Translate)
“I cannot tear my eyes away from that picture. It is mine, and I also believe it is miraculous.”
“Old Tapestry”
Message
In a lot of what Seifert writes, there’s a sense of difficult and being weighed down (see Background for a sense as to all the stuff that weighed him down). But at the same time there is a joy and inspiration that he culls even from these moments of bleak oppression. I translated the “About Childhood Poem” illustrated above and read it to the boys (as I had intended to from the start of this project). While Owen saw it literally as watching your kids in a river bank, Alex thought it was more about not giving up, and I saw it as appreciating the moment. Honestly, chances are that we’re all right: there’s beauty in every moment, despite the cruel whims of politics.
Position: #7 Left Winger
Seifert’s ability to speak to both trauma and hope, both defensiveness and optimism, makes him an ideal attacker who can still be an asset on both sides of the ball. He doesn’t seem to have the breadth or scope of a central midfielder, but he seems like an ideal attacker who can make the needed moves both with and without the ball. In addition to the Eastern European heritage I can easily imagine him in Vozdovac highlight reels, so his colors reflect that team.
Obviously, reading a dozen or so poems by a man doesn’t make me an expert. Come on Czech literary geniuses bring on the criticism, I’m ready!
Next Time, Contraversial 2004 Honoree: Elifriede Jelinek
Sartre is a byword for an entire philosophical school one of the leading voices in the Existentialist movement wondering what is the purpose of life and can our freedom ever be truly purely experienced. Born and raised in Paris, he used the city of lights as his home base as he dove head long into the serious questions of the day. His award was given “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age,” a big phrase that in this case, might just be an understatement.
Works
“In football everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.”
Sartre’s best known quote about soccer
“Every movement of a [teammate]…is decoded in the very movement which it occasions in another fellow member….Mediation for a given goalkeeper or center-forward is the pitch itself in so far as their common praxis has made it a common practical reality…As soon as [a player] takes up [one position] the common situation of the whole team is also modified.”
–Critique of Pure Reason, page 473 (This is the real idea, the other one is just a footnote)
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I mean, there’s a tonnage of them. Existentialism concerned itself with the nature of life itself, so there was…plenty of ground to cover. In reading his plays again though, the thought that came back to me again and again is how control is power, power is control. Humans simultaneously want it and fear it.No Exit plays with the question of how much anyone can control the (after)lives of others. The Respectful Prostitute considers how the “immoral” individual is at once dependent on the powerful authorities, and yet also able to overwhelm the authorities with their own powers (be they sex or truth). Dirty Hands covers the power of idealism and the power of compromise–both how people wield them, and how they are slaves to them. With all this in mind I’m putting Sartre at the heart of the team.
Position: #10 Attacking Midfielder
Sartre was a football fan (how much of a fan seems to be up unclear), but when you consider the fantasy of him lacing up a pair of boots and heading on to the field himself, you have to reckon with the fact that he clearly had more creativity, ideas and invention than anyone else. He could do more with power and control than anyone else I’ve read for this project, so it makes sense to put him at the center of the offense (and in the role with the greatest history of being a diva) the #10 job.
Think about his soccer quotes (given above). In Sartre’s eyes a team is made up of where all the players are in a moment, but every moment a player moves (which is pretty much all the time) it is changing. There’s no absolute reality or permanence, it’s always something new and different. So you have to focus on existing in the moment rather than worrying about the past or the future.
I genuinely think this would make him a superb attacking midfielder: creative, inventive, able to dismiss past hurts or future worries and just make the play he thinks is right in the moment. But I suppose others might see it as a limitation–he might have a hard time anticipating challenges, or be impossible to coach…(after all, he is the only Literature laureate to refuse to turn up for his award) so while I rate him highly, I don’t know what others would say.
What do you think? Is Sartre the free-wheeling creative force that this team has been waiting for? Or are would he have been so indifferent and apathetic that any moments of brilliance would have been undone by him announcing that he’d rather ponder a dandelion on the field than receive a pass from TS Eliot?.
Jennsen (far Left) in Singapore in 1902 (denstoredanske.lex.dk)
Jensen was a bit of a nomadic spirit in an age of expanding empires. He went from a medical student to a foreign journalist to a historian, poet, and novelist. After a hiatus during the second world war, the Nobel committee made him its first new recipient in five years: “for the rare strength and fertility of his poetic imagination with which is combined an intellectual curiosity of wide scope and a bold, freshly creative style”
The day exposes mercilessly The cold rails and all the black mud, The waiting room with the chocolate vending machine, Orange peel, cigar stubs and burnt-out matches, The day gapes through with spewing gutters And an eternal grid of rain, Rain I say from heaven to earth.
How deaf and irremovable the world is, How devoid of talent its creator!
The day dawned so mournfully, But look – the rainfall gleams now!
Do you grudge the day its right to fight? After all, it is light now. And the smell of soil sets in between the rusty iron struts of the platform Mixed with the rank breath of the rain-dust – A hint of spring. Isn’t that consoling?
They Caught the Ferry
Message
It was a little hard to track down Jensen’s work (even in Danish it wasn’t easy to come by). If I were to judge by my extremely limited sample, I might say that he focuses on the ebb and flow of emotion is a universal experience. At times he’s bubbling over with hope, at times he’s mindful only of loss. The characters in his short film are confident, crazed, and terrified in short order. He seems to know that each emotion will only last until the net one comes.
Position: #3 Left Back
Like a daydreaming kid with equal turns doom and hope, I can see Jensen running down the flank thinking about a possible attack, only to realize he’s out of position and go screaming back the other way, and yet…being totally happy and natural doing it. I may never write like him…but that’s exactly how I played soccer during my youth, so I appreciate it.
As ever we’d love to hear from people with other thoughts. I see you clicking like, why not write the words “I liked it” below. Or give me a link to more of Jensen’s work so I can get a fuller understanding of him.
Next Time, OH BOY, One of the guys I already read: 1964 Honoree–Jean Paul Sartre (But to have some fun, I’ll try reading him in French)
Wladyslaw Reymont had a rather adventurous life for a failed tailor. He scrupulously studied his family’s struggles with money, but rather than try to provide for them, he ran off to join a travelling theater group (don’t get any ideas Owen). When he failed there he returned to Warsaw, wrote somewhat successfully and then got his big break when he got in a train accident and landed a nice settlement. With that financial independence, he had more time to write, and delivered his award winning works including the specifically namechecked: “great national epic, The Peasants“. (I read the first volume of The Peasants)
Works
‘The wind is always blowing in the face of the poor’
“In front of the crowd, and of the twinkling sinuous lines of tapers moving on, there gleamed a silver crucifix; following this came the holy images, dimly seen through a haze of cambric, and surrounded with flowers and lace and ornaments of tinsel. The procession arrived at the great church door, through which the sun irradiated the clouds of incense that it pierced; and the banners stooped to pass, the breezes made them float and flutter and flap, like the wings of some great green and purple birds”
Wladyslaw Reymont (trans. by Michael Dziewicki) p. 68
“Ah me! for in this world there is naught but trouble, and wailing, and woe! “And evil increases and multiplies, as doth the thistle in the woodlands! “All things are vain and to no purpose…like tinder-wood, and like the bubbles which the wind maketh on the water and driveth away. “And there is no faith, nor hope, save in God alone”
Wladyslaw Reymont (trans. by Michael Dziewicki) p. 179
Message
Is it possible to have the message that everything stinks? It seems overly simple, but that’s the biggest takeaway I had from reading Reymont. I’m not alone, the Nobel website itself notes that his other work presents a similarly “dark vision of man”. The whole book I read seemed to obsess with pointing out how the “simple farmers” were petty, venal, greedy, bitter and cruel to one another. Sadder still, the volume of The Peasants that I read might have been his peppiest, even though the climactic celebration of a wedding allows people to ignore the brutal and lonely death of a farm hand (yeah…it gets worse for characters after that). Just to ice the stink cake, he makes sure to throw in a healthy dollop of anti-Semitic stereotypes that go beyond the general “everyone stinks” to really castigate (and in other works specifically blame) people of a different faith.
Position: #5 Center Back
Reymont’s cynicism brings to mind the brutality of Central defenders whose primary value seems to lie in fouling other people right before they score. Like the legendary Spanish Cynical-Foul Folk hero Sergio Ramos…only, you know…much, much worse…and injured…and even more unlikable. Man, I’m hoping I can find literally anyone who will replace this schmo.
Did I totally misread Reymont? Is his writing more anti-capitalist than anti-Semitic? Did I get a cruel translation? Come on Polish literary scholars…let me hear from you.
Jose Echegaray might have been the smartest person we’ve read about yet. He seems to have been able to do pretty much everything. He read classics by age 12, was an engineer, a diplomat, taught himself German so he could read philosophy treatises and was working on massive Mathematics textbooks when he passed away. Throughout that whole time he was also a writer, specifically of plays which many likened to an Iberian Ibsen*. He shared the 1904 honor with Frederic Mistral, but was honored for his unique works, including “the numerous and brilliant compositions which, in an individual and original manner, have revived the great traditions of the Spanish drama”
*Not to be confused with an Iberian Ibson, which would make them a Spanish substitute for local Minnesota legendary midfielder Ibson.
Works
Echegaray’s works are all high level 19th century melodrama, and were ideal for the early days of cinema (though mostly in Spain only). But he had a keen ear for conversations and confusions between characters, as shown in the piece I read for this project: Son of Don Juan.
Don Juan: What are you thinking of? Ah! Pardon! I must not disturb you. Lazarus: You don’t disturb me father. I was thinking of nothing important. My imagination was wandering, and I was wandering after it. Don Juan: If you wish to work–to write–to read–and I trouble you I shall go. Ha. I shall go….Do you want me to go? for here I am…going.
Son of Don Juan, Act II aka You kids dealing with me in 10 years.
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Echegaray’s style is…a bit much for a modern reader. He seems to have a penchant for melodrama in that, he wrote a bunch of melodramas. In the modern age, melodrama is a bit silly, a bit farcical and a bit easy to dismiss, but for a long time that was the style, and Echegaray did it better than almost anyone. For someone as immersed in complicated high brow pursuits as Echegaray clearly was it is apparent that he was, at the root of it all someone who had no shame in his feelings. It’s good to have big feelings.
Position: #11 Winger
Echegaray certainly seems to have been a thoroughly talented master of all trades, it would make him an excellent attacker who can link with other players, but the melodramatic tendencies make him also a prime candidate for Nobel FC’s resident flopper. I just picture someone touching his monocle chain and leaving Echegaray writhing in mid-air like a final tongue of smoke leaving a doused fire. While he was a life long Madrista, I have him in Oaxaca’s colors, as their flair for the dramatic look seems best for our purposes.
Am I too harsh on Echegaray? Do you think he belongs elsewhere, or at least would have been more of an engineer constructing things than a ham emoting all over the place?
Born to a long line of passionate defenders of Provence in southern France, Mistral retained his devotion to his homeland even while nations rose and France, the French language, and Parisian culture overwhelmed the pastoral south. Though he often ran away from school in his childhood, he found a love of learning and especially his local language. Eventually his commitment to writing in and raising awareness of the Provencal dialect earned this award from the Swedish Academy: “in recognition of the fresh originality and true inspiration of his poetic production, which faithfully reflects the natural scenery and native spirit of his people, and, in addition, his significant work as a Provençal philologist”
Works
Mistral’s poetry is fairly wide ranging, but the most recognized works are some long form narrative poems. In that spirit I read his most widely known work Mireio. It tells the story of a simple young love story in pastoral Provence, but also manages to weave in harvest song, murders, sea monsters, and family strife. Naturally, it was made into an Opera.
Production of Mirelle (From Phil’s Opera World)
“We’d climb the turret-stair, my prince and I, And gladly throw the crown and mantle by, And would it not be blissful with my love, Aloft, alone to sit, the world above? Or leaned upon the parapet by his side, To search the lovely landscape far and wide,
“Our own glad kingdom of Provence descrying, Like some great orange-grove beneath us lying All fair? And, ever stretching dreamily Beyond the hills and plains, the sapphire sea; While noble ships, tricked out with streamers gay, Just graze the Chateau d’If, and pass away?”
From Canto III of Mistral’s Mireio
Message
Mistral seems bound and determined to challenge the assumptions of the powerful. Parents want to control their kids, but the kids might be right. The Parisian upper crust might sneer and the peasant folk, but the peasant folk have as much poetry and artistry as the hoity toity. Also, Provence is great…but that’s less a literary theme and more just his personal mantra.
Position: #2 Right Back
Granted, as our first French writer honored, I may be leaning on my adoration of the Grenoble defense and their stalwart ways, but Mistral also seems to have a truly daring instinct, a flair for the dramatic and the dangerous. At times it makes his return to more standard romantic fare deeply disappointing. In that way I kept picturing him running head long down the sideline twisting up defenders and playing gorgeous passes, only to suddenly remember he also had to defend and being forced to haul buns back to defense. Maybe there’s some deep running connection to Mathys Tourraine I don’t yet know about.
Mistral might be my new favorite discovery of this project. I’d go so far as to say I’d rather cover Mireo than Romeo and Juliet with students, and I’d rather have the chaotic joy of Mistral on the wing than sturdy solidity in defense. Am I nuts? Hit up the comment section below and state your case.
Next Time, the Nobel couldn’t make up their mind so we’ll do this again with the other 1904 Honoree–Jose Echegaray
MacKenzie's Boot Room 