2023-10-14 02:18:19
“A distinctive poetic voice that, with its abstract beauty, gives a universal character to individual existence.” This is how the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, three years ago today, described the American poet Louise Gluck, who passed away yesterday, Friday, in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, from cancer, in its statement announcing the award of the “Nobel Prize for Literature” in 2020.
It was a surprise win; Gluck’s name (1943 – 2023) was not included in the list of guesses and expectations that began weeks before the award was announced. Among the names circulated that year – as in other years – was the Frenchman of Czech origin, Milan Kundera, the Japanese Haruki Murakami, and the Kenyan. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Guadeloupean Maryse Conde, Canadian Margaret Atwood and other names.
The surprise was also that the International Literary Award went to a poetic voice in “The Time of the Novel.” Even the expectations were almost limited to narrative voices. However, otherwise, Nobel decided to return to poetry after more than a decade. The last poet to win was the Swedish Tomas Trönströmer in 2011.
Gluck, who became the first American to win the award since it went to African-American novelist Toni Morrison in 1993, expressed her reaction when she was informed of her win: “I was terrified at first, and then I thought I was hallucinating. But then I felt very proud.”
Before the Nobel Prize, she won many prominent literary awards. Such as: “National Book Critics Circle Award” (1985), “Pulitzer” (1993), “Lannan Literary Prize for Poetry” (1999), “Bollingen” (2001), and “US National Humanities Medal” (2000) She won the Griffin Poetry Award (2009) and the National Book Award (2014). She also held the title of Poet Laureate of the United States of America between 2003 and 2004.
Louise Gluck was born in New York to a family of immigrants from Hungary, and grew up on Long Island. When she was a teenager, she suffered from anorexia nervosa, which forced her to receive treatment for many years. This will leave a clear impact on her poetic experience. Due to her health condition, she was unable to enroll in university full-time, and her alternative was to take poetry lessons at Sarah Lawrence College, then at Columbia University between 1963 and 1965.
“The Maiden” (1968); Louise Glück’s first collection of poetry
Gluck was in her late twenties when she published her first collection of poetry in 1968, entitled “The Maiden,” which was followed by more than a dozen collections; Among them: The House in the Marshland (1975), The Garden (1976), An Approaching Face (1980), The Triumph of Achilles (1985), Ararat (1990), and The Savage Iris ” (1992), “The Meadows” (1997), “New Life” (1999), “The Seven Ages” (2001), and “Averno” (2006), in addition to critical books on poetry.
Louise Gluck’s poetry is dominated by themes of sadness, isolation, trauma, death, rejection, failure of human relationships, attempts at healing, desire, and nature, within poems that are a mixture of autobiography and myth. In many of her texts, she used Greek mythology, especially her female characters, and also the events she lived through. This is what made her described as an “autobiographical poet.”
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