Poet Laureate and other honours and/or prizes bestowed on writers (poetr and prose)

[Danik 2016]

Some time ago I wondered about why there were so many Poets Laureate in US, what it meant to be one and how they were appointed.
This link posted by tS
https://blogs.loc.gov/catbird/2012/08/how-is-the-poet-laureate-selected/ at
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?2379-name-association-game&p=1336056&viewfull=1#post1336056
showed to my astonishment that the task of laureating a poet devolved on the Librarian on Congress.
As Bob Dylan has also finally collected his Nobel Prize in a very discreet ceremony, I am curious to know how you relate to this and what kind of honours and prizes the writers receive in your country.

[YesNo]

The groups that give prizes are interested in making themselves look good. The winner of a prize is able to market materials more widely.

[Danik 2016]

I agree with you. Here in Brazil it has become an editorial matter. If an nacional or foreign author gets an important prizes he immediately is translated and edited here.

[YesNo]

I suppose there is no alternative to these prizes. One thing that bothers me is when reading a survey of some scientific research area the author will often mention that this or that scientist won a Nobel prize. I am now in the habit of asking myself, "So what?" Does that mean that the scientist has been ordained into some priesthood and can no longer be questioned?

[Danik 2016]

If a scientist or a writer gets one of the big prizes like the Nobel, or is distinguished by a special honour one supposes not that he can´t be questioned any more I think but that his work has been very carefully examined and evaluated by qualified peers.
But is that still the case?

[Dreamwoven]

I didn't know Bob Dylan had been given the Nobel prize already, obviously, in a very discrete ceremony. It doesn't fit his popular image to dress up in bow tie and tails.

Sorry, Danik, I couldn't copy your post into mine as I used to be able.

[Danik 2016]

I agree.

Never mind, DW.

[YesNo]

If a scientist or a writer gets one of the big prizes like the Nobel, or is distinguished by a special honour one supposes not that he can´t be questioned any more I think but that his work has been very carefully examined and evaluated by qualified peers.
But is that still the case?

That is what it implies. Same for a poet becoming a poet laureate.

[Danik 2016]

I noticed that in US you have many forms of prizes and honours for writers.
In Brazil the most important prize for a writer is the yearly Jabuti.
There are some other prizes like Portugal Telecon, which selects a best author among Portuguese and Brazilian writer.Updating: since 2014 the prize is called Oceanos-Prêmio de Literatura em Língua Portuguesa-and open to all Portuguese speaking countries.
The greatest honour is to be included into the Academia Brasileira de Letras, where some curious figures rub shoulders with some of our best authors.

[YesNo]

Who are some of the "curious figures" and who are the best authors in the Academia Brasileira de Letras?

[JCamilo]

Actually, the Brazilian Academy is a farse those days. You have some relevant author in specific roles (for example, grammar, or drama), but it is filthy with political names such as former president José Sarney and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and amazing, a pseudo-journalist and economist who never did anything worth except lick Fernando Henrique's balls and even the right-wing defenders mock his predictions, Merval Pereira. It is a disgusting institution those days, unable to do anything but political back up to conservative and right wing neo-liberal politicians.

[Danik 2016]

I agree with you. In a sense the Brazilian Academy was always conservative in spite of the great names that belonged to it. One anecdote that ilustrates this conservatism:
It is said that much of the planing for the foundation of the Academy was done in the "Green Salon" of D. Júlia Lopes de Almeida. D. Júlia herself was a journalist and a writer, not a great one (specially if compared to her English peers) but she had very advanced ideas specially about farming, social work and enviroment and was a best seller of the beginning of the 20C. So someone wanted to include her in the Academia. But no, the Academia was for men, women were not allowed. So as a kind of consolation prize, they chose her husband, Filinto de Almeida, a poet and a journalist anyway.
Another anecdote related to the Academy might interest Yes/No, as it is an uncanny story:
In 1963 the great writer João Guimarães Rosa was elected by unanimity into the Academy. He postponed his acceptance for 4 years out of a strange foreboding. He died of a stroke in 1967, three days after accepting the honour.

[JCamilo]

Well, matter of fact, our academy missed more important XX century writers than the Nobel did. Guimarães was a rarity.

[Danik 2016]

I shouldn´t wonder if some of them didn´t want to be indicated.

[YesNo]

I'll see if I can find something by João Guimarães Rosa or maybe the better question, what would be a good Brazilian writer to read that I might find translated into English?

[JCamilo]

Guimarães was translated, but I dunno how easy/hard to find. The point is that Rosa is the "Joyce" of Brazil, mixing a lot of local language, so I have no idea how well it was translated (Rosa always said his best translations were the german translations, and he knew all main western language well, so he probally knew something about it).

Machado de Assis was translated, but again, hard to find. Recently, Clarice Linspector received some attention and new translations in english, probally the easier target.

[Danik 2016]

I found this excerpt of Grande Sertão Veredas, Rosa´s masterpiece. I liked it, you get the rythm of the original somehow. And Rosa possibly is much easier to understand than Joyce, in spite of the regionalism.
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/july-2016-brazil-beyond-rio-grande-sertaeo-veredas-joao-guimaraes-rosa

Gutenberg always surprises one. I found this. "The fortune teller" is one of Machados most famous short stories:
http://www.archive.org/stream/braziliantales21040gut/pg21040.txt

These two stories of Clarice Lispector I already posted on another link, but I wouldn´t be able to find it now. Her books are all on Amazon now in new translations:
https://jennymcphee.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/two-stories-by-clarice-lispector-translated-by-elizabeth-bishop/

[YesNo]

The selection from Grande Sertão Veredas was understandable. There's a devil the narrator doesn't quite believe in, but others appear to, who has started causing trouble. The story could be told more clearly.

I remember Clarice Lispector's "The Hen". She writes better than Rosa and has a more interesting story to tell.

I will read Machado's story tomorrow. Thanks for the recommendations!

[JCamilo]

Dont get the wrong idea, but as good as Clarice is, Rosa is in another level. He is one of the most likely greatest writers in portuguese ever, certainly one to be mentioned in the same breath as Garcia Marquez, Faulkner, or Joyce while talking about modern romance. (And he was also a great short story writer, his second most famous book, Sagarana, is a collection of short stories).

I saw the translator compared to Finnegans Wake, but it would be more precise to compare to Ulysses. There is a clear plot in Grandes Sertões (the english title is also a bad choice, the devil in the story is really a minor character) and what Rosa did was similar to what Joyce did in Ulysses. He carefully took to his work a regional version of portuguese and tried to make it believable in the book, not like Finnegans with the idiom plays reducing the words to phonems. When you read it in portuguese you get the impression you are floating in this orality, and while this "regional" portuguese can be hard to be understood (it is from where I live, except in the countryside, and we have the tendency to speak very fast, eating pieces of the words, and putting them together) the confusion about the devil is because his existense (the main character does a pact) is something doubtful (think of Thomas Mann Doktor Fautus). The main character also is confused because during all book he feel atracted to another character - literally in love - but the other character is a woman under disguise. He is constantly putting himself in doubt.

All this quasi-magical setting gets interesting because many of those sittuations and characters are real. Rosa came from the countryside and returned there many time. Grandes Sertão is a great homage to oral storytelling, in his city there is a group of kids trained to recite experts of Grande Sertão to the tourists and in some performs, and Rosa language is living, mesmerizing.

The guy was a freak genius and he really hit the jackpot with Grande Sertões.

[YesNo]

I usually understand things better when I hear them than when I read them. The selection was very short. If I heard Finnegans Wake I might understand it better. Even Ulysses was fine up to about page 20 or 30. After that Joyce lost me.

Machado's story about the fortune teller was interesting, but I preferred Lispector's style. I expected a tragic ending. This sentence stands out regarding the author's view of fortune telling: "For, the unknown present is the same as the future." This story was written in the 19th century during the most bullish period of materialism so I would not expect to see anything different. The fortune teller ironically got the fortune correct because the couple would be dead shortly.

[Danik 2016]

The selection from Grande Sertão Veredas was understandable. There's a devil the narrator doesn't quite believe in, but others appear to, who has started causing trouble. The story could be told more clearly.

I remember Clarice Lispector's "The Hen". She writes better than Rosa and has a more interesting story to tell.

I will read Machado's story tomorrow. Thanks for the recommendations!
I think you got the general idea of the plot by reading with your sensibility more than with your reason. It´s all about a cangaceiro who being retired from the Cangaço(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canga%C3%A7o)looks back on the active part of his life trying to answer the one big question: did he or didn´t he at one crucial point of it make a pact with the devil? And he is steeped in a culture, mostly of the backlands of Minas Gerais,(but the expert here is Camilo, who lives in this region, though in the capital),
a region rich in popular legends and supersticions. To tell this story more clearly would strip it of all its richness and, yes I love the expression, its different level of meanings: a cangaceiros story, a virtual, implied love story, the story of a man in quest of his inner truth, a story about power and conquest, an so on. I once saw a film, Camilo probably knows it, which, in its endevour to tell the storu clearly, reduced the plot to an action film.
It was Grande Sertão without Guimarães Rosa.
"The Hen" I put up again because a certain other hen and our discussions about the antromorphization of animals. I think Clarice is poking a bit of fun at this family, who suddenly treats the hen as a kind of house pet (and later forgets all about it).

[Danik 2016]

Dont get the wrong idea, but as good as Clarice is, Rosa is in another level. He is one of the most likely greatest writers in portuguese ever, certainly one to be mentioned in the same breath as Garcia Marquez, Faulkner, or Joyce while talking about modern romance. (And he was also a great short story writer, his second most famous book, Sagarana, is a collection of short stories).

I saw the translator compared to Finnegans Wake, but it would be more precise to compare to Ulysses. There is a clear plot in Grandes Sertões (the english title is also a bad choice, the devil in the story is really a minor character) and what Rosa did was similar to what Joyce did in Ulysses. He carefully took to his work a regional version of portuguese and tried to make it believable in the book, not like Finnegans with the idiom plays reducing the words to phonems. When you read it in portuguese you get the impression you are floating in this orality, and while this "regional" portuguese can be hard to be understood (it is from where I live, except in the countryside, and we have the tendency to speak very fast, eating pieces of the words, and putting them together) the confusion about the devil is because his existense (the main character does a pact) is something doubtful (think of Thomas Mann Doktor Fautus). The main character also is confused because during all book he feel atracted to another character - literally in love - but the other character is a woman under disguise. He is constantly putting himself in doubt.

All this quasi-magical setting gets interesting because many of those sittuations and characters are real. Rosa came from the countryside and returned there many time. Grandes Sertão is a great homage to oral storytelling, in his city there is a group of kids trained to recite experts of Grande Sertão to the tourists and in some performs, and Rosa language is living, mesmerizing.

The guy was a freak genius and he really hit the jackpot with Grande Sertões.
As much as I love Guimarães Rosa, and I love his poetic prose, I wouldn´t put him so much above Clarice, who is also an author of universal dimension. Each has his very personal style and subjects and they tend to attract different readers. The same is with Machado de Assis. His irony doesn´t necessarity appeal to any one.
Another point I would like to make: I don´t agree with you that the devil is a minor character in the book. The devil pervades all the story in all possible forms, even the disguise of the loved one could be called devilish in a way, but as the main character, Riobaldo, one isn´t even sure if he is a concrete character at all.

[JCamilo]

Well, the difference of level between good writers is small, but will be always there. Clarice is a great writer, Rosa is a genial writer. But it is fine, she has nice company of Mário de Andrade, Bandeira, Lima Barreto and we do not have to read only Rosa, Drummond and Machado.

I only mention this because YES/NO mentioned the objective Clarice writes better than Rosa, which is different to what he said about Clarice and Machado (he prefered).

Well, i call the devil minor because of that, he is neither Riobaldo (not exactly, as he may be riobaldo subconcious) or Diadorim. He is indeed all over the work, like Hamlet's father, but not a main character (if a character at all).

[Danik 2016]

I agree with you. There are so many writers. I have read very little from recent writers, but there is Milton Hatoun from Amazonos and the jewish Moacyr Scliar from Rio Grande do Sul.

[YesNo]

I don't know if Clarice is better than Rosa or not. It just my impression from what little I read of either. You two are better at assessing the value of these writers since you have read them in the originals.