German Female Writer Wins the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature

Record Number of Female Winners

This is the 12th time a woman has won the Nobel Prize in Literature in its history, and it follows the Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine and Chemistry earlier this year, which also featured female winners.

In the history of the Nobel Prize in Literature, female winners include Pearl S. Buck and Toni Morrison. As of the 8th of this year, four women have won Nobel Prizes, making this the year with the highest number of female laureates in history.

It is worth noting that, unlike the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry, the Literature Prize is usually awarded to a single individual rather than shared. Since the first Literature Prize was awarded in 1901, the prize has been shared by two people only four times.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was established in 1901, and 102 people have been awarded to date. Last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a representative of the French "New Fable" movement in the second half of the 20th century.

Background: "Faces of the Lower Classes" Moved the Judges

The Romanian-born German female writer Herta Müller is a novelist, essayist, and poet. This award makes her the 12th woman to win the Nobel Prize since its inception. The Swedish Academy stated in its announcement that Herta Müller was chosen because "her writing has the concentration of poetry and the plainness of prose, depicting a landscape of the dispossessed." Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, pointed out that Müller’s creation "on one hand has a unique linguistic style, and on the other hand truly tells the state of people living under totalitarianism."

The 18 members of the Swedish Academy formed the jury. Since the beginning of this year, they had received nominations for over 200 writers. Herta Müller emerged from a final shortlist of five candidates to become the 106th laureate. Last year, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to French writer Le Clézio because "his writing opened up new literary fields, full of poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy."

The Most Distinctive Female Writer in Contemporary German Literature

Herta Müller was born on August 17, 1953, in Romania, to a German-speaking minority family. She studied German and Romanian literature at the University of Timişoara. After graduation, she worked as a translator and teacher. Due to her refusal to cooperate with the state security services, she became a freelance writer in 1984. In 1987, Müller immigrated to Germany with her husband and currently lives in Berlin.

Currently, Müller is one of the most distinctive female writers in contemporary German literature. In 1982, Müller published the German short story collection Lowlands (Niederungen). From the perspective of a child, this collection recreated the village life of the Banat Swabians and exposed the dark side of family and society, causing a sensation in Romania and becoming a banned book, sparking widespread controversy.

However, the German literary criticism community was pleasantly surprised to discover a new literary talent. Critics praised Müller for discovering a "New World" of literature—the German-speaking Banat region of Romania. Currently, four of her works, including The Land of Green Plums, have been translated into English.

Domestic Reaction

Central and Eastern European Literature is a Research Blind Spot

Famous poet Tang Xiaodu, scholar Zhi An, and Beijing Normal University professor and cultural critic Zhang Ning all expressed that they knew nothing about Herta Müller. Zhi An stated, "Herta Müller is the third Nobel laureate in recent years that Chinese readers know absolutely nothing about. Like Kertész and Jelinek before her, no one knew them before they won. All three writers come from Central and Eastern European countries. While we might ’not expect’ a Nobel laureate in English literature, we wouldn’t ’not know’ them. This shows that, so far, literature from this region has been a blind spot in research. China’s foreign literature research, translation, and publishing circles all face different issues."

Zhi An said that domestic publishers had not previously published Herta Müller’s works; only a single short story was published in Yilin magazine in 2002. Zhi An believes that the dissemination process of Kertész, Jelinek, and Herta Müller’s works in China proves that the vision of China’s foreign literature experts is not broad enough. One hundred years ago, when Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren published Collection of Foreign Stories, the main works they translated were precisely from Central and Eastern Europe rather than the Anglo-American literary world. Now, it is not even as good as it was then. Literature from Central and Eastern Europe has become a blind spot. On the other hand, while many people in the publishing industry go abroad every year, everyone generally keeps their eyes fixed on English literary works at the top of the Amazon rankings. "There are three reasons for this phenomenon: first, the neglect of non-English literature; second, focusing only on large countries and ignoring small ones; and third, the remnants of Cold War ideology—Herta Müller was a dissident when she was writing in Romania," Zhi An said. "The publishing industry buys copyrights like placing a bet, using the evaluations of writers in the US and UK as a standard. However, the Nobel judges have their own standards and logic, which are completely different from ours."

Zhang Ning believes that the harshest criticism of Western-centrism actually comes from Western countries. In recent years, the Western cultural community has paid great attention to the culture of developing countries and ethnic minorities. While we do not recognize Western-centrism, we have formed an overall model centered on Western culture in cultural exchanges, and then complain that others do not pay attention to us; this is a real paradox. "With so many universities and foreign literature research institutions in China, leaving such a large gap in the study of Central and Eastern European literature is truly unacceptable."

After the Swedish Academy awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature to the Romanian-born German writer Herta Müller, the first feeling for most people was: "Who is Herta Müller?"

This is true not only in the Chinese-speaking world, where almost none of her works have been translated (only one book, The Land of Green Plums, exists in Taiwan, and only a single short story was introduced in mainland China’s Yilin magazine), but even Yale University professor Harold Bloom, who always follows European literature, very awkwardly told reporters, "I have nothing to say because I have never heard of this person."

Undoubtedly, Herta Müller’s win is a "dark horse among dark horses," and she herself was shocked by it. However, the Swedish Academy does not hide that its continuous selection of European writers in recent years is to "return to the European literary tradition." Except for the 2006 award to Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, the winners over the last five years have all been European, and the trend toward "obscurity" is significant. Writers like Pinter, Le Clézio, and Lessing are considered to lack broad dissemination. American writers, who have not touched the Nobel Prize in Literature for over a decade, were dismissed by the Swedish Academy as "too narrow and too insular; Americans are not yet able to participate in world-class literary dialogue... You cannot deny that Europe is still the center of world literature."

The Swedes’ statement must have been a blow to American literary giants like Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, who were considered some of the most insightful writers in the world today. The former is well-known for The Human Stain, and the latter’s representative work is the critically acclaimed Bellefleur. The "Eurocentrism" emphasized by the Swedes also likely saddened favorites like Israeli writer Amos Oz and Japan’s Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood).

The Nobel Prize has always faced accusations of "bias, cronyism, and fragmentation." These accusations originated from skepticism toward social science awards and have now extended to natural sciences. For example, many scientists are puzzled by the Nobel Prize in Physics’ monotonous pursuit of "particle discovery" and question the scientific nature of the Nobel categories, believing they no longer reflect the rise of emerging disciplines and interdisciplinary complexity. But undoubtedly, the Literature Prize has always borne the highest level of scrutiny; it is not only awarded to too many unfamiliar names but has also missed many great ones.

However, frankly speaking, we do not believe the Swedish Academy is "dictatorial, closed, and possessed of an anti-market self-righteousness." They may follow an ancient peer-review system; they may have some eccentric feelings that elevate mediocre people; but they also radiate a unique vision, releasing great names that were previously circulating only in small circles.

Herta Müller is a Great Name

The Swedes stated in their award declaration that "the moral drive in Herta Müller’s literature makes it fully compliant with Nobel standards." The so-called "moral drive" refers to Müller’s criticism and exposure of the special political period in Romania. Müller’s "non-cooperation" with the Ceauşescu regime in Romania is well known; she was forced to flee Romania and live in Germany. The vast majority of her works analyze the stagnation of a totalitarian society, criticize the control of the secret police, the fear of intellectuals under high pressure, the nowhere-to-rest nostalgia, and friendships tainted by betrayal. In a sense, her time seems to have stopped in the "Ceauşescu era." Even today, when the confrontation between ideological camps no longer exists, her novel The Hunger Angel (Atemschaukel), published in August this year, still tells a secret and tortuous memory in the voice of a 17-year-old boy deported to a labor camp in Ukraine. Obviously, her political consciousness is like an "ancient dinosaur," blocked by a painful complex, and then grows savagely and distortedly into exquisite and warning images.

Her novels have the characteristics of self-confessional literature, but are filled with a large number of fictional imagery, just as Walter Benjamin said, "memory is the infinite capacity to falsify the past." In her most famous lecture, "How Perception Fictionalizes Itself," Müller frankly stated that strict censorship forced her to learn complex language strategies: defamiliarized paragraph construction, distorted expression of images, and psychological synesthesia. This led her to be "insulated" from clear and bright literature. She picked up the "Aesthetics of Ugliness" tradition from the French poet Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du mal) and developed a heavy gloom into a grand and precise aesthetic.

For example, her early work Lowlands can be seen as a village chronicle of the Banat border region. It is not a pastoral idyll, but a mixture of social control, terror, vendetta, vulgarity, violence, nationalism, and stale Catholic traditions. The protagonist is a child whose father is a drunkard and tyrant, mother is a submissive servant, grandfather is a hypocrite, and grandmother is an abusive shrew. Home to Müller is a shameful "filth of the native land" that cannot be saved.

The Passport (Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt) tells of a Banat man in a remote area of Romania applying to go abroad, facing various obstacles from officials. His daughter is raped by the village church elder. This poor man leaves his hometown after many hardships, no longer having the heart to return. Herta Müller intensified an unprecedented pain and despair—the double tragedy of home and country: the strict monitoring of nationalism and the patriarchal vices of the Banat village; national development has stagnated, and the village is filled with the breath of death.

In the subsequent Traveling on One Leg (Reisende auf einem Bein), Herta Müller pushed this atmosphere to the extreme. The Romanian immigrant Irene not only has the hidden pain of "home and country tragedy," but the place she moves to is not a paradise either. West Berlin’s capitalist society is impossible to integrate into: "In West Berlin I can see nothing, which makes me suffer miserably." Herta Müller not only pronounced a "death sentence on the hometown" as in the past, but also a death sentence on the pursuit of "escaping pain." This is an extremely dark attitude. Herta Müller quickly expanded the depth of despair. In The Fox Was Ever the Hunter (Der Fuchs war damals schon der Jger), she again pronounced the futile "death sentence" on the idea of immigrants returning to transform their homeland. The foundational work of her vast "aesthetics of futile resistance against despair" is her most famous novel The Land of Green Plums (Herztier), where a female college student from a poor mountain area struggles to climb up only to be murdered by a bureaucratic hierarchy, while another woman wins a jungle-style survival victory by constantly betraying friends.

The Nobel citation praised Müller’s "uniqueness in the use of minority languages," which gives her literary works the concentration of poetry. This is a well-deserved praise. In fact, the reason we are willing to seek Müller’s novels in other languages despite the lack of Chinese translations is precisely because her language has unparalleled texture, fantasy, and penetration. Despite the lesson that "beautiful prose is untranslatable," when you see the paleness of many Nobel novels after "Sinicization," Müller is far superior to the likes of Murakami, Rushdie, or Lessing. A single opening from a story in Yilin reveals her outstanding ability to construct imagery:

"The well is neither a window nor a mirror; if you look into the well for a long time, you often look into yourself. At that time, my grandfather’s face would rise from the bottom of the well and stop beside my face. His lips were water."

Herta Müller’s literature represents "values with nowhere to depend," a lingering gloom, and a growing "aesthetics of despair" now crowned by the Nobel Prize. Is this a metaphor for a changing era? Is a new era of coldness quietly unfolding? The global financial crisis triggered by the US subprime mortgage has completely "changed the flavor" of American-style capitalism. Many established principles—such as the value of "risking your own money and bearing the consequences"—have completely disintegrated. Capitalism doesn’t look like capitalism, social democracy doesn’t look like social democracy, Western democracy is "hollowed out," society is "speculative," the economy is revived by "re-blowing bubbles," and markets are stimulated by printing money. "Nationalization" can be randomly revived, and stable monetary philosophies have been thrown into the trash. Former role models have become dwarfed, and once-extraordinary measures have become "normalized." Just as Herta Müller tirelessly portrays, the homeland, the state, and other countries cannot provide a "stable value support for the human heart." Thus, an all-pervading blackness, an endless nightmare, is whistling and sweeping over. Perhaps defining this era in Herta Müller’s words is most accurate: a brutal black axis in endless motion keeps rotating, rotating the years. The faster honest and fresh things die, the faster it turns. The more deaths, the emptier it becomes, the faster time goes. The faster time goes, the more things die, helping to turn that axis...

09 Nobel Laureate Müller’s Translation to be Released in 3 Months

After exposing the lack of understanding of Central and Eastern European literature by not knowing the new Nobel laureate Herta Müller, the Chinese publishing industry has begun to move to the opposite extreme of radicalism. Some publishers have stated that they will release Chinese translations of Müller’s works as quickly as possible to satisfy domestic curiosity. However, those who know Müller slightly remind Chinese publishers not to act rashly.

This year, unlike previous years with Pamuk, Lessing, and Le Clézio, Chinese publishers did not "bet correctly," which frustrated them, but they quickly decided to catch up. Yesterday, three or four publishers told reporters that they had contacted Herta Müller’s copyright agent in Germany and expressed their sincere intention to purchase copyrights. One publisher said: "If it’s just about who pays more, it’s simple. After the copyright is bought, a book can be translated in one month, and can be on the market within three months." Müller’s works are not long, especially some short story collections and poems, which gives Chinese publishers confidence in "rushing the work." But anyone who knows Müller knows that "rushing the work" is a dangerous thing, mainly because her writing is profound.

Source:

http://news.sina.com.cn/z/2009Nobel/index.shtml

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