中譯文在後
Most prestigious literature prize goes to Canadian known for genre-crossing works such as Autobiography of Red.
The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to the Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson, the Swedish Academy has announced.
The academy cited the author’s “bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature”.
The Nobel prize, regarded as the most prestigious award in global literature, is awarded for a lifetime body of work. The winner receives 12m Swedish kronor (£900,000).
Ingrid Carlberg, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said she had told Carson of the award on the phone shortly before the news broke. “She had time to tell me that she is, for the moment, in Iceland, where she is listening to the wind,” Carlberg said. “She was taken by surprise but very happy. I could hear that in her voice.”
Born in Toronto in 1950, Carson is known for work that moves freely between poetry, prose and translation, drawing heavily on the literature and mythology of the ancient Greek world. She has been a professor of classics at various institutions including Princeton, New York University and McGill University in Montreal. She is the 19th woman to win, out of 123 literature laureates.
Carson’s first book, Eros the Bittersweet, was published in 1986 and combined literary criticism with an exploration of desire and the ancient Greek tradition.
Her best-known work is Autobiography of Red, a 1998 novel in verse inspired by the fragments of the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus. It reimagines the myth of Geryon, the red-winged monster killed by Herakles, as the story of a modern teenage boy navigating heartbreak and desire.
In 2001, she became the first woman to win the TS Eliot prize, for her collection The Beauty of the Husband. She has also been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships.
The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, congratulated the poet on X after the announcement. “With wit, imagination, and a style entirely her own, Canadian poet Anne Carson has reimagined the classics. She has brought ancient stories to new audiences and transformed the way we think about literature,” he said, adding that it was a “proud moment for Canada”.
David Leonard, the executive director of the Writers’ Trust of Canada, said: “Anne is such a brilliant writer. Her work is broad, but also extremely smart.” Calling Carson’s work “intoxicating”, he said her four-decade career had resulted in a peerless collection of poems and essays. “They’re beautiful, they’re smart, they’re true and they are humane. It’s exactly what we need in our writing.”
Carson’s work has attracted praise from fellow writers including Susan Sontag, who once said: “She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote. If there’s a magazine that has something of hers in it, I buy it automatically.”
Anders Olsson, the chair of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel Committee for Literature, praised Carson for work that had “broken away from lyrical poetry bound to the narrative self and inspired new forms of contemporary literature”. He said: “This method of writing leads to playful and ironic works that move not only between classical and modern poetry but also between different genres and artforms.”
Carson’s books have ranged widely in form. Men in the Off Hours combined verse essays, poems, epitaphs and prose about artists and historical figures, and won the inaugural Griffin poetry prize in 2001. Decreation, another eclectic work, brought together poetry, essays and an opera.
Nox, published in 2010, is particularly characteristic of Carson’s avant-garde approach to literature – the book takes the form of an accordion-fold box containing a reproduction of a notebook Carson made after the death of her brother. Her later works include Red Doc> and Float.
In a Guardian review of Red Doc>, Sarah Crown wrote: “To engage so fluidly, so originally and compellingly, with a story first told more than 3,000 years ago, is astonishing: her ambition is one thing; the fact that it is so completely achieved is, frankly, something else.”
Much of Carson’s work has emerged from her fascination with language itself. The Swedish Academy noted: “Almost all her literary production has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning,” adding that Carson had identified the etymology of words as “the starting point for all her work”.
Asked why she continually moved between forms, Carson said in an interview: “Boredom, I guess. There is a restlessness. There are a lot of forms to try.”
She has acknowledged the difficulties that come with her experimental style. “[My work] does fall apart a lot,” she said in a 2018 interview. “It gets just too weird for anyone to care about reading, or else it gets diluted into a sort of parody of itself.”
Ira Wells, the president of PEN Canada, said Carson’s win felt “particularly significant at a moment in which Canada and Europe are strengthening cultural ties amidst broader global disruption”. He added: “On an aesthetic level, Carson’s verse vibrates on profound human frequencies, at a moment in which more and more language is formulated by machines.”
Carson has generally kept her personal life out of interviews. However, in an August 2024 article for the London Review of Books, she disclosed that she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded on 118 previous occasions since 1901. Recent laureates include Annie Ernaux, Bob Dylan, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Louise Glück, Peter Handke and Olga Tokarczuk. Last year’s recipient was the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai, known for his dystopic and avant-garde writing.
Carson, 76, will formally receive the medal and diploma in a ceremony in Stockholm in December.
轉載自《The Guardien》
安妮卡森榮獲2026年諾貝爾文學獎
最負盛名的文學獎頒給了以《紅色自傳》等跨界作品聞名的加拿大作家。
瑞典學院宣布，諾貝爾文學獎頒給加拿大詩人兼散文家安妮卡森（Anne Carson）。
瑞典學院在頒獎理由中稱讚這位作家的作品「大膽且富有創意，透過與古典傳統的靈動對話，為當代文學開創了新的形式」。
諾貝爾文學獎被視為全球文學界最負盛名的獎項，旨在表彰作家一生的創作成就。獲獎者將獲得1200萬瑞典克朗（約90萬英鎊）的獎金。
瑞典學院常任秘書英格麗德·卡爾貝裡（Ingrid Carlberg）表示，在消息公佈前不久，她已透過電話將獲獎喜訊告知卡森。 “她告訴我，她此刻身在冰島，正在聆聽風聲，”卡爾貝裡說道，“她感到既驚訝又高興，我能從她的聲音裡聽出這份喜悅。”
卡森於1950年出生在多倫多，以其遊走於詩歌、散文和翻譯之間的創作風格而聞名，作品深受古希臘文學與神話的影響。她曾在普林斯頓大學、紐約大學以及蒙特婁的麥基爾大學等多所學府擔任古典學教授。在歷屆123位文學獎得主中，她是第19位獲此殊榮的女性。
卡森的首部著作《愛神：苦樂參半》（Eros the Bittersweet）出版於1986年，該書將文學評論與對「慾望」及古希臘傳統的探討融為一體。
她最廣為人知的作品是1998年出版的詩體小說《紅的自傳》（Autobiography of Red），該書靈感源自古希臘詩人斯特西科魯斯（Stesichorus）的殘篇。作品對格律翁（Geryon）——那個曾被赫拉克勒斯（Herakles）殺死的紅翼怪獸——的神話進行了現代重構，將其演繹成一個現代少年在經歷心碎與慾望的過程中不斷成長的故事。
2001年，她以詩集《丈夫之美》（The Beauty of the Husband）成為首位榮獲T.S.艾略特獎（T.S. Eliot Prize）的女性。此外，她還曾獲得古根漢獎學金（Guggenheim Fellowship）和麥克阿瑟獎（MacArthur Fellowship）。
消息公佈後，加拿大總理在社群平台X上向詩人表示祝賀。他說：「加拿大詩人安妮卡森（Anne Carson）憑藉其機智、想像力以及獨樹一幟的風格，重新詮釋了經典。她將古老的故事帶給了新一代讀者，並改變了我們對文學的思考方式。」他補充道，這對加拿大而言是一個「值得驕傲的時刻」。
加拿大作家信託基金會（Writers’ Trust of Canada）執行總監大衛·倫納德（David Leonard）表示：“安妮是一位才華橫溢的作家。她的作品既宏大廣博，又極具智慧。”他形容卡森的作品“令人沉醉”，並指出她長達四十年的創作生涯造就了一系列無與倫比的詩歌與散文佳作。 “它們優美、睿智、真誠且充滿人文關懷。這正是我們在文學創作中所需要的特質。”
卡森的作品贏得了包括蘇珊桑塔格（Susan Sontag）在內的眾多作家的讚譽。桑塔格曾評論道：“在用英語寫作的作家中，她是極少數幾位讓我願意閱讀其所有作品的人之一。只要某本雜誌刊載了她的文章，我就會毫不猶豫地買下來。”
瑞典學院諾貝爾文學獎委員會主席安德斯·奧爾森（Anders Olsson）盛贊卡森的作品「擺脫了那種局限於敘事性自我的抒情詩傳統，並激發了當代文學的新形式」。他說：“這種創作手法造就了充滿戲謔與反諷意味的作品，它們不僅遊走於古典詩歌與現代詩歌之間，更跨越了不同的體裁與藝術形式。”
卡森的作品形式多樣，風格各異。 《閒暇時刻的男人們》（Men in the Off Hours）融合了詩意隨筆、詩歌、墓誌銘以及關於藝術家和歷史人物的散文，並於2001年榮獲首屆格里芬詩歌獎（Griffin Poetry Prize）。另一部風格兼收並蓄的作品《解構》（Decreation）則匯集了詩歌、散文和一部歌劇。
2010年出版的《諾克斯》（Nox）特別體現了卡森前衛的文學創作手法——該書採用手風琴式折疊盒裝設計，內含一本複製的筆記本，那是卡森在兄長去世後親手製作的。她的後製作品還包括《紅醫生》（Red Doc）和《漂浮》（Float）。
《衛報》在評論《紅醫生》時，薩拉·克朗（Sarah Crown）寫道：“能如此流暢、新穎且引人入勝地演繹一個源自三千多年前的故事，著實令人驚嘆：她的雄心壯志是一回事，而她能如此完美地實現這一目標，坦率地說，則是另一回事。”
卡森的許多作品都源自於她對語言本身的濃厚興趣。瑞典學院指出：「她幾乎所有的文學創作都圍繞著一個交匯點展開：即語文學家對詞語的痴迷與詩人對新意義的追求。」學院還補充道，卡森將詞源視為「她所有創作的起點」。
當被問及為何不斷變換創作形式時，卡森在一次採訪中說道：“大概是因為厭倦吧。內心有一種不安分感。而且，還有許多形式值得嘗試。”
她也承認自己的實驗風格伴隨著種種挑戰。她在2018年的一次採訪中表示：“（我的作品）經常會‘散架’。有時它變得太過怪異，讓人提不起閱讀的興趣；有時它又被稀釋，變成了對自己的一種拙劣模仿。”
加拿大筆會（PEN Canada）主席艾拉·威爾斯（Ira Wells）表示，在當今全球動盪不安的背景下，加拿大與歐洲正致力於加強文化聯繫，卡森的此次獲獎顯得「意義非凡」。他補充說：“從美學角度來看，當越來越多的語言由機器生成時，卡森的詩作卻能與人類內心深處的情感產生強烈共鳴。”
卡森向來不願在訪談中談論私生活。不過，在2024年8月為《倫敦書評》（London Review of Books）撰寫的一篇文章中，她透露自己已被診斷出患有帕金森氏症。
自1901年以來，諾貝爾文學獎已頒發118次。近期的獲獎者包括安妮·埃爾諾（Annie Ernaux）、鮑勃·迪倫（Bob Dylan）、阿卜杜勒-拉扎克·古爾納（Abdulrazak Gurnah）、路易絲·格呂克（Louise Glück）、彼得·漢德克（Peter Handke）和奧爾加·託卡爾丘克（Olga Tokarczuk）。去年的獲獎者是匈牙利作家拉斯洛·克拉斯納霍爾凱（László Krasznahorkai），他以反烏托邦和先鋒派的寫作風格而聞名。
現年76歲的卡森將於12月在斯德哥爾摩舉行的頒獎典禮上正式領取獎章和證書。
(Google 翻譯)
