Literature

Two Nobel laureates for literature in 2019 — but do we need Nobel Prize any more?

Toni Morrison
Tagore’s bust at his ancestral home at Joransankho, Kolkata

Last year after the Nobel Prize was cancelled and an alternative Nobel Prize in Literature, also known as Academy Prize, was given to Marys Conde, a Guadeloupean ( a region of France in the Carribbean), this year the Nobel committee is announcing two awards as if to make up for lost time.

The award was first given in 1901, by the will of Alfred Nobel, to  “the person who, in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction”, judged to be French poet, Sully Prudhomme, that year. Tagore, VS Naipaul, Wole Soyinka, Kenzaburō Ōe,  Toni Morrison have been among the luminaries of this award. This year the winners will be announced on Thursday 10 October, 2019.

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This will surprise you: Do you know why Thai literature is one of the least translated literatures in Asia compared to Japanese, Chinese and Korean lit?

IMG_0583
The colonial map of Asia, 1921, courtesy Wikipedia. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 

Thailand was probably the only state in South East Asia to have escaped colonial rule. The country evaded colonial rule  because the French and the British decided to treat it as neutral territory to avoid conflict of interests. The policies enacted by King Chulalongkorn of the Chakri Dynasty , which continues to hold sway in Thailand to this date from 1782, also helped.

The resultant effect, says a report, is “the lack of English readers in the country — which reflects the absence of Western imperialism in Thailand, along with the linguistic colonialism it facilitated.”

The numbers from University of Rochester’s Translation Database, which track original literary translations published in America show that Japanese literature leads the way, with 363 books since 2008, followed by Chinese, with 254, and Korean, with 141. Whereas only five Thai novels have been translated to English.

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