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s most recent books, The Temptation of the Impossible, is a study of Hugo'

s Les Misérables. Last week also revealed that, however much we may discount the Nobel Prize, we still prize it. No matter how many times the worthy losers console themselves with their fellows―who wouldn'

t rather be in the company of Proust, Auden, and Nabokov than of Erik Axel Karlfeldt and Henrik Pontoppidan?―we'

d all still take the meatball if the Swedes would only offer it. You would have thought that the second-rate nature of some prize-winners would have produced a general degradation of the prize. If you give the Oscar to the likes of Ordinary People and Chariots of Fire often enough, won'

t your prize be worth a bit less? Just the opposite: the more often an established prize goes to a dubious candidate the more valued it becomes. A kind of Devil'

s Theory of Value seems to rule: A prize is always assumed to be shining, intact;

it is those wrong prize-winners who are discredited by it. When we win it, the world will be restored to its proper balance. We blame the winners, not the prize, for the errors. Why should this be so? The bleakest theory is that the purpose of a literary prize is not to reward the deserving but to provoke conversation and controversy within a community. When a prize goes to a Brodsky or a Milosz or a Walcott, the way that once in a blue moon a decent apartment goes to a newcomer in Manhattan, it keeps the game alive. The real reason that literary prizes are so prized, however, is that prize-giving is intrinsic to the purposes of poetry. From birds to bards, the urge to outdo the other singer is what makes us sing. Since the first strum on the oldest lyre, literature has been about competition and the possibility of recognition. Pindar, the father of lyric poetry, took as his chief subject the winning of games, and the spirit of the end-zone dance has been with us ever since. Horace satirized everything except his own appetite for fame. Milton mourned Lycidas not because he stood beyond all prizes but because he died before the prizes could be won. The subtlest souls still show up in Stockholm to make the speech. Fame, honor, the laurel, and the bays, this more even than getting back at the girls, or the boys, who left you for another―the writer'

s other great motivation―is the poetic passion. (Even the idea of posthumous fame is merely the thought of a prize given while we are sleeping, and have left our muttering to others.) In the past decade, one of the enduring axioms of literature has been finally, jarringly broken, and that is Dr. Johnson'

s No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. Now the Internet overflows with those who write for glory and a name alone―and not all of them are blockheads. But the opposing axiom, that people write for prizes, survives. Why write? Because you may someday win a prize given by Scandinavians of unknown names and demonstrably uncertain taste? Apparently so. At least, so the writers'

spouses think, and, sleepless in September, they should know. 一等奖作品 得奖与写作 英语学院2009级 翻译3班 周新迪 是恩古吉・瓦・提安哥?胡安・戈伊蒂索洛?还是阿多尼斯?在过去的几周里,失眠的作家们深更半夜地向他们熟睡的另一半嘀咕这个名单的某种版本,琢磨着又一个诺贝尔奖要去不该去的地方,也就是说花落别家而不是被自己收入囊中.(即使得了奖,竞争的火焰也不能平息.虽然索尔・贝娄于1976年获得了诺贝尔文学奖,但据说之后的每个10月他都愁眉苦脸的,因为一个人只能拿一次奖.)并不是只有那些成功获得提名的明日之星们才会嘀咕,几乎每位健在的作家,有个文字处理器就认为自己有机会得奖.(埃德蒙.威尔逊说,詹姆斯.瑟伯希望诺贝尔奖能颁给幽默作家,哪怕只有一次;