Sizing up the competition

They announced this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Ever the bridesmaid. All right, maybe not a bridesmaid, but I’ve been in church. Well, maybe not exactly in church, but I know someone who knew someone who dated an usher.

Even if I took the baby steps – wrote a book, for instance – it would never be enough. And that’s because those who sit on the Nobel committee are a lot like the dudes who vote in a new pope. The short list addresses immediate geo-political concerns. His holiness will never hail from Memphis. Fresno may be the land of certain kinds of opportunity, but I doubt we'll ever see a Pope Matt.

Of all the book awards, the only one I believe is the Newberry. From ages five to ten, I read all the Newberry winners, and every one was a ripping good yarn. I could always identify with the hero, though I had never been a sharecropper’s son, or a princess, or a mouse.

I think what unites the best in literature, for whatever age, is the clean, just-brushed-my-teeth prose. And the humanity. I find no qualitative difference between a Dahl and a Kundera.

Aside from Pinter, the last Nobel writer who took my breath away was a Polish poet; she won the prize in 1996. So I leave you with something of hers:

Hitler's First Photograph
Wislawa Szymborska

And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?
That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitler's little boy!
Will he grow up to be an LL.D.?
Or a tenor in Vienna's Opera House?
Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose?
Whose tummy full of milk, we just don't know:
printer's, doctor's, merchant's, priest's?
Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander?
To garden, to school, to an office, to a bride,
maybe to the Burgermeister's daughter?
Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honeybun,
while he was being born a year ago,
there was no death of signs on the earth and in the sky:
spring sun, geraniums in windows,
the organ-grinder's music in the yard,
a lucky fortune wrapped in rosy paper,
then just before the labor his mother's fateful dream:
a dove seen in dream means joyful news,
if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come.
Knock knock, who's there, it's Adolf's heartchen knocking.
A little pacifier, diaper, rattle, bib,
our bouncing boy, thank God and knock on wood, is well,
looks just like his folks, like a kitten in a basket,
like the tots in every other family album.
Shush, let's not start crying, sugar,
the camera will click from under that black hood.
The Klinger Atelier, Grabenstrasse, Braunau,
and Braunau is small but worthy town,
honest businesses, obliging neighbors,
smell of yeast dough, of gray soap.
No one hears howling dogs, or fate's footsteps.
A history teacher loosens his collar
and yawns over homework.