Goran Malmqvist's (
The Swedish Academy, which awards the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature every year, has only one member who can read Chinese and that person is Malmqvist.
His literary taste took on national importance in Taiwan in 1978, when news coverage of the Nobel Prize for Literature caused some problems for two newspapers: the United Daily News and the China Times. In the ensuing years, the literary editors of both papers would start a "Nobel countdown" -- two weeks before the annual announcement -- by running full-page profiles of the hopefuls, accompanied by a choice selection of their works. Thanks to this annual ritual of rounding up the usual suspects, Taiwanese readers were exposed -- for the first time -- to the works of such writers as Graham Greene, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joyce Carol Oates, Doris Lessing and Milan Kundera. When, news of the Nobel winner came out -- always in the evening in Taiwan -- translators would be set to work, couriers would be dispatched to fetch books from libraries and international telephone calls would be made. If they couldn't get the Nobel laureate himself on the phone, his colleagues or neighbors would do. Of course, Malmqvist would also have to be called and asked for his opinion for the umpteenth time about "why it wasn't a Chinese writer this year."
When the inevitable question was asked, " Who is the most likely Chinese to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in the future?" Malmqvist would be obliged to drop one or two names.
The Nobel countdown craze peaked in 1991, when the China Times flew a group of writers, critics and literary editors to Stockholm on the eve of announcement. And with taxpayers' money, too. Many people around the world have made tourist attractions out of Hollywood's Academy Awards ceremony and the Olympic Games, but Taiwan is probably the only country that has ever tried to turn the Nobel announcement into a travel destination!
The Nobel Prize for Literature's biggest impact on book publishing here came in 1980, when three publishing houses announced a luxury set of the Nobel winners' works. In those piracy-happy days, all three firms published translations of the literary gems -- without bothering to pay royalties to the author.
And all three paid dearly for it. The rivalry turned into a bloodbath, driving two of the three out of business. Even today, the remaining firm, Vistas (遠景), has yet to recover from "the Nobel Curse."
No one would mistake literature as Taiwan's national pastime. Serious literature is still an underpublished field here. A master storyteller like Cheng Ching-wen (The Three-foot Horse) has to clerk in a bank and keep writing fiction as a hobby.
This year's winner was announced on Thursday: Guenter Grass, from Germany. Once again, the winner was not a Chinese.
The story was covered in full by Taiwan's Chinese-language newspapers again, but by now the literary editors are weary of asking the same old "Chinese question."
Disappointment still lingers here, among intellectuals and publishers and writers and editors. It is not easy for a people who boast the longest continuous literary tradition in the world to swallow their concerns over why their modern literature has not produced a Marquez or a Grass or a Llosa or a Fuentes.
Joyce Yen (
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