Abstract
The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the work of the American poet, Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, with a discussion of what kinds of challenges her poetry might pose for translators. Very few people knew of her work in Lithuania prior to the Nobel Committee’s announcement. Her poems were only published in Lithuanian translation for the first time in July, 2020, and only a handful at that. This paper argues that her work has important similarities and differences to Lithuanian poetry of the twentieth century, and that despite her free-verse lyrics written in rather plain diction, there are still many challenges to rendering her work in another language. The Lithuanian translations reveal stumbling points over ambivalent word choices, surreal imagery caused by ambiguous syntax, and the need for careful attention to the tone of the narrative voice (the lyrical subject) of the poems.
Highlights
The winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature came as a surprise to many
Subsequent prizes had gone to Europeans, and before Dylan, we had seen a Frenchman and a Canadian take the coveted award, so it did not seem likely that a white North American rooted firmly in the Western tradition would get the nod
Louise Glück herself to give the prize to a rock star, many of us in that world felt that a bias against American literature had been confirmed: it was if they had said: none of your prize-winning writers can write nearly as well as this folk-rock singer, so there
Summary
The winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature came as a surprise to many. Few had placed the American poet Louise Glück among the front-runners. That ignorance is restraining.” (Goldenber 2008) That was the permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, Horace Engdahl, speaking to the Associated Press He stepped down from his role a year later, but when the committee in 2016 bypassed luminaries from the American literary world such as Phillip Roth, W.S. Merwin, and Louise Glück herself to give the prize to a rock star, many of us in that world felt that a bias against American literature had been confirmed: it was if they had said: none of your prize-winning writers can write nearly as well as this folk-rock singer, so there. Elliot: an American born, raised and educated, who wrote all of his mature poems while living in Britain, eventually becoming a British citizen) This was the first unquestionable American Nobel Prize in Literature for poetry, and only the thirteenth woman in its history: how did it happen?
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