In the second summer after the pandemic, John Maxwell Coetzee, the South African Nobel Prize winner, sang surprise. In duplicate. And, despite having suggested that the trilogy about Jesus, completed a year before the outbreak of the virus, considered its novel trajectory resolved, there it was, freshly cooked, a new work: The Polish. A romance between Witold, the acclaimed pianist who gives the book its title, and a well-to-do lady from Barcelona called Beatriz. That was the first surprise; his return to the ring. The second was that, despite having written the manuscript in English, Coetzee wanted to republish his translation into Spanish first. It was the third time he did it and, as the saying goes, two may be a coincidence but three make a trend. In other words: The Polish It consolidated Coetzee as the only living Nobel Prize winner, along with Mario Vargas Llosa, who when he looks out into the world on the shoulders of his literature, he does so in our language. The question arises by itself: to what do we owe such an honor?
To try to understand the reasons for such a decision, it is useful to know the evolution of Coetzee himself starting from the beginning: his origins.
Born in Cape Town in 1940, Coetzee grew up in a culturally Afrikaner but Anglophile family. One of those that mixed both languages, wow. And while it is true that he received his education in English, it is no less true that those responsible for it did not master the language. All of this, together with the tensions of a country torn into a thousand pieces due to identity disputes, meant that during his childhood he gained a fairly relative sense of roots.
However, despite all that confusion, Coetzee embraced youth, knowing very clearly that Shakespeare’s language represented a liberation from the oppressive and limited Afrikaans. That is why he studied English (and Mathematics) at the University of the Cape and that is why, upon graduating, he soon packed his bags and emigrated first to London and then to Texas, where he completed a doctorate on the writer Samuel Beckett. It was after finishing his thesis, while teaching classes in Buffalo, that he sat down to write his first novel. In English, of course.
Lands of Westeros It hit South African bookstores in 1973, with Coetzee already back home. Having appeared in the country’s ‘neutral’ language, it managed to sell several thousand copies and win a few local literary awards. However, what he achieved was little to our protagonist. Receiving applause in South African cultural circles was all very well, but what he wanted was to reach the ‘real world’. A world that could only be accessed, his head told him, by being read in two places: London and New York.
His following works—among which stand out Waiting for the barbarians (1980), The Master of St. Petersburg (1994) and Misfortune (1999)—took him to the place he wanted and even a little further: to the Nobel Prize in Literature. He achieved it in 2003, thus becoming the most important writer in South Africa.
Paradoxically, Coetzee received the news of the Nobel Prize in Australia, the country to which he had moved a year before, as a result of the fatigue generated by his own land. Although he cited mundane reasons, such as the crime rate, literary critic Jennifer Wilson points out that the writer had long complained about the pressure he received from local cultural elites who were looking for a novelist who could openly associate themselves with South Africa; to write “openly and directly” about the South African reality. And for Coetzee, Wilson adds, that insistence exhausted him. He did not want to become the representative of any specific place.
It was at that moment, it seems, that his relationship with English began to deteriorate and it is not usually perceived as a coincidence that in Misfortunea book from that time, put in the mouth of its protagonist that English is not always the best option when it comes to explaining certain realities. However, it was not until the end of the first decade of the new century that the deterioration became evident when public thanks were given to reading his translations, instead of the originals. Coetzee, seeing the questioning faces that his statements aroused, clarified that the essence of what he wanted to say was better transmitted in other languages and that is where his comment came from.
Far from subsiding, such deterioration was in crescendo until reaching its peak in 2018, when he decided to publish a collection of stories titled, precisely, Seven Moral Tales, in Spanish rather than in English. That is to say: he translated the manuscript before its publication, giving Spanish the honor of breaking into the market. Coetzee explained that decision that same year, at a literary festival held in Colombia, by presenting himself as someone willing to “resist the hegemony of English.” “I don’t like the way it drowns out the minor languages that cross its path; “I don’t like its universalist pretensions – I mean the way in which the world is understood as a mirror of English – and I don’t like the arrogance that all of this arouses among those who have it as their mother tongue,” he said.
His intervention at that festival in Colombia explains why Coetzee has stopped publishing in English. It seeks, as it says, to combat the hegemony of the most spoken language on the planet. Or—according to others—slam the door on his past self, in line with several of his literary references; writers characterized by their elusive nature. What it doesn’t explain is why do it in Spanish. A language that, as several of its critics have already pointed out, is not exactly minor. It is then, when presenting the question, that a place called Argentina comes into play.
Those who have followed his career closely say that Coetzee fell in love with the land of Borges, Cortázar and Victoria Ocampo about ten years ago and that the key to said love is none other than the audience he found there. An audience that, as he explained in a conference offered in 2015, “takes literature seriously and reads intelligently.” Something that, apparently, he doesn’t see often. From that moment on he decided to invest part of his energy in collaborating with the country’s cultural circles. He gave seminars at local universities and became part of the team of a small publishing house called Ariadne’s Thread, with which he continues to collaborate today, not only as the person in charge of one of its collections, his initial work, but also as author.
That’s right: it was Ariadne’s Thread who brought to bookstores, during the second summer after the pandemic, the work that much later would appear as The Pole in the shop windows of his once admired New York. The work with which Coetzee has consolidated himself, after giving priority to Spanish in that collection of stories and in the last volume of the Jesus trilogy, as the only living Nobel Prize winner, along with Vargas Llosa, who is presented to the world in our language.
#Coetzee #unexpected #ambassador #Spanish
