Showing posts with label Nobel Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nobel Literature. Show all posts

Sunday, August 19, 2018

BW34: The First Jasmines



Courtesy of Wikipedia
The First Jasmines

by




Ah, these jasmines, these white jasmines!
I seem to remember the first day when I filled my hands with
these jasmines, these white jasmines.
I have loved the sunlight, the sky and the green earth;
I have heard the liquid murmur of the river thorough the
darkness of midnight;
Autumn sunsets have come to me at the bend of a road in the
lonely waste, like a bride raising her veil to accept her lover.
Yet my memory is still sweet with the first white jasmines
that I held in my hands when I was a child.
Many a glad day has come in my life, and I have laughed with
merrymakers on festival nights.
On grey mornings of rain I have crooned many an idle song.
I have worn round my neck the evening wreath of bakulas woven
by the hand of love.
Yet my heart is sweet with the memory of the first fresh
jasmines that filled my hands when I was a child.

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 Our Brit Trip is taking us to Akemam Street and London. Our fifth leg of the journey brings us back to London again.

 Rabbit trails: 48 Doughty Street – Charles Dickens, British Museum , British Library


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Sunday, May 6, 2018

BW19: 52 Books Bingo - Nobel Prize Winners from Scandinavian Penisula

Stockholm
One of our 52 Books Bingo categories is read a book by or about a Nobel Prize Winner.  We have a few authors from the Scandinavian Peninsula who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.   

 Finland  
Frans Eemil Sillanpää -  1939
Norway
Sigrid Undset - 1928
Knut Hamsun - 1920

Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson - 1903
Sweden
Tomas Tranströmer - 2011
Eyvind Johnson - 1974
Harry Martinson - 1974
Nelly Sachs - 1966
Pär Lagerkvist - 1951
Erik Axel Karlfeldt - 1931 (posthumously)
Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam -1916
Selma Lagerlöf - 1909

 We don't need to limit our reading choices to Nobel Prize Winners to literature.  There are a number of people who won the Nobel Prize for Peace as well as Sciences from the Scandinavian Peninsula.  The complete list broken down by country is available here or on Wikipedia.

 10 Things you should know about Finnish Nobel Prize Winner Bengt Holmström

 The Nobel Prize: History and Trivia

 Culture Trip's Norway's Nobel Laureates 


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For our Brit Trippers currently on Ichnield Way on the way to Dorset:

Famed as one of the most beautiful locations of England, Dorset is located on the English Channel and was the birthplace of the novelist Thomas Hardy and poet William Barnes.

Rabbit trails: Sherborne Abbey,  History with the Black Plague

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Sunday, January 24, 2016

BW4: Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore 

 I finished A Suitable Boy and the story lead me on many rabbit trails looking up definitions of words, people and places in India.  Rabindranath Tagore has been mentioned quite a few times.  He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1913, mainly for his poetry.
"because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West"

 However, he also wrote short stories, dramas, essays as well as songs.  He was knighted by the British Government in 1915, but resigned the honor a few later in protest of British policies in India.

 I have enjoyed reading his poetry and will leave you with this  


Where the Mind is Without Fear


Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high 
Where knowledge is free 
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments 
By narrow domestic walls 
Where words come out from the depth of truth 
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection 
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way 
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit 
Where the mind is led forward by thee 
Into ever-widening thought and action 
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.


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Sunday, March 2, 2014

BW10: Armchair Traveling through France



Welcome to March which is beginning to look like a full month with Lent beginning on the 5th, daylight savings time beginning on the 9th,  St Patrick's day on the 17th and the first day of Spring on the 20th.  Plus the very first Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 1901 went to Frenchman Sully Prudhomme whose birthday is March 16, 1839.  In fact, other Nobel Prize literature winners from France include:

 Frederic Mistral 1904
Count Maurice Maeterlinck 1911 - Born in Belguim, lived and died in France 
Romain Rolland 1915 
Anatole France  1921
Henri Bergson 1927
Roger Martin Du Gard 1937
Andre Gide 1947
Francois Mauriac 1952
Albert Camus - 1957
Jean-Paul Sartre 1964
Samuel Becket 1969 - born in Ireland but moved and died in France
Claude Simon 1985
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio 2008

So while we are armchair traveling through France this month, consider reading a book or poetry written by one of the Nobel Prize Winners.   

I do seem to have one foot stuck in Italy and the other foot in France and have both Italian and French authors in my backpack.  And since I've delving into the 14th century this month,  Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, fits the bill perfectly. As well as his Foucault's Pendulum which actually is set in Paris.  Another author I've been meaning to try is Marcel Proust and discovered Swann's Way available for free on Kindle.  For fun I have 3 of Cara Black's books in her Aimee Leduc investigation mystery series as well.

For those who prefer a culinary approach to France, Nancy Pearl from Book Lust to Go recommends checking out Julia Child's My Life in France or Kathleen Flinn's The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry.  Take a food tour through France with Balzac's Omelette by Anka Muhlstein or Ann Mah's Mastering the Art of French Eating. 

For more ideas, check out Goodreads popular French Literature list with includes Camus, Voltaire, Dumas, Balzac, Verne and Sartre to name a few. 

Join me in reading all things French, with a little bit of Italian thrown in on the side.


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Sunday, December 8, 2013

BW50: Nobel Prize for literature challenge

Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Peace Prize



In 2010, I took a Nobel Literature class and thoroughly enjoyed it. Although it was a lot of work, I read several books that probably normally would never have considered reading including Jean Paul Sartre's Nausea, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, Gabriel Garcia 
Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude,and Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry.  After reading these books, it made me want to read more selections from the literature prize list. Since then, I've read one or two authors from the list each year.

The history behind the Nobel Prize for literature is quite interesting and well worth perusing when you have the time.  Alfred Nobel was Swedish and when he died, he requested the bulk of his fortune be used to establish a prize which would be divided in 5 equal parts. 

Excerpt from his will:

"The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows:

one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics;
one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement;
one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine;
one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction;
and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.

The prizes for physics and chemistry shall be awarded by the Swedish Academy of Sciences; that for physiology or medical works by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm; that for literature by the Academy in Stockholm, and that for champions of peace by a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting. It is my express wish that in awarding the prizes no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not."

He also specified who would be responsible for selecting the noble laureates and for literature, the responsibility was given to the Swedish Academy.  A big question has always been how do you get nominated.   Well, an author cannot nominate himself.   He must be nominated by what the Academy considers a qualified person.  Who is qualified?   

  • members of the Swedish Academy and of other academies, institutions and societies similar to it in membership and aims;
  • professors of literary and linguistic disciplines at universities and university colleges;
  • former Nobel Laureates in Literature;
  • presidents of authors’ organisations which are representative of the literary activities of their respective countries.
Then the academy gleans through the candidates, eventually narrows down the nominations to a select few, reads their works and decides whom will win the prize.   The members of the Academy don't always agree and it seems there have been some controversial and what some consider politically motivated awards handed out to writers.  Plus there has been controversy regarding some of the authors who haven't won, whom some considered better qualified.  And then you have some authors who didn't want to accept the prize because they considered it the death of their career.

And you have a group of 18 people who are interpreting Nobel's words "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction."   It depends entirely on their definition of ideal.   The members of the academy are a diverse group of linguists, literary scholars and historians.

My main thought while reading all this was where did the money come from. Was Alfred Nobel independently wealthy, did he inherit the money himself, where did all this money come from that is being used to fund the prize?   Long story short, in 1867 he invented Dynamite.  He had factories and laboratories in over 90 places in 20 different countries.  He had initially created dynamite to be used for mining and because it ended up being used for purposes he never intended, he created the Nobel Prize.


The Nobel Prize Winners in Literature 


Which Nobel prize winners have you read?

If you haven't yet, that's okay. I'll be adding Nobel Prize for Literature as one of the main mini challenges for 2014.   

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Sunday, September 1, 2013

BW36: RIP Seamus Heaney




Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 passed away August 30 at the age of 74.   You can read or listen to his acceptance speech here and learn more about him and his poetry here.

The Harvest Bow


As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.

Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall—
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser—
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm. 


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