Notebook: (1) Translation

That a prize known for the size of its haul should be translated literature’s one moment in the American sun seems either ironic or fitting …

Last week, the relatively youthful (at fifty-four) and commercially successful South Korean novelist Han Kang received the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature. Journalist Alex Shephard, who has for years run a highly diverting Nobel watch for The New Republic, wrote with n+1 editor Mark Krotov that “the fact that the Academy has alighted on a deserving, interesting winner of the prize continues to be strange and miraculous.” Author Amber Sparks tweeted that Han Kang’s win “seems to have united literary twitter in approval? Shockingly? Everyone is happy?” Alex Shephard and Mark Krotov continued cheekily that recently the Swedish Academy, the institute that does the literary selecting for the Nobel Foundation,
has done its best to act as a redoubt for capital-G global, capital-L Literature. When we started writing our little jokes about the Nobel Prize in Literature nearly a decade ago, there was a lot to make fun of … [for instance] sensing growing irrelevance, that Prize staggered randomly (and, if the reporting is to be believed, drunkenly) between relative unknowns and global superstars and genres.

But now, the Prize constitutes a kind of defense of literature in an era where it is constantly sullied and devalued. The Swedish Academy has cast itself as an island of seriousness in a swirling ocean of garbage and filth. Making fun of the Nobel Prize in Literature is, and will always be, fun to do: It is incredibly funny that a group of stuffy academics who live in a fake country that has only produced one worthy piece of art (ABBA Gold) get to give a prize for being the best at doing literature. But this iteration of the Swedish Academy does sometimes make it hard, in large part because they are doing a kind of service: Highlighting meaningful, resonant work from across the world in an era where … that just doesn’t happen very often [ellipsis theirs].