Néstor Amarilla, the Invisible Man, and Joseph Brodsky’s “quiet Swedish joke”

It’s Nobel week, and the discussion of potential winners is becoming feverish.  At the Stanford News Service, we quietly prepare in case someone from the home team gets the honor.  Each day, we take turns waking up at 2 a.m.

If it’s one of our own, we haul ourselves out of bed, call the others, and ambush the unsuspecting winner in the pre-dawn haze, commandeering his cell phone for the duration.  We begin preparing press conferences, writing a profile, arranging interviews, acting as chauffeur and bodyguard — and, of course, feeding food to the new Nobel laureate, his or her family, the media, and ourselves. (You can read an abbreviated description of the chaos in “Dad, some guy is calling from Sweden,”  recalled by Stanford physicist Robert Laughlin‘s longsuffering wife Anita in Reindeer with King Gustaf: What to Expect When Your Spouse Wins the Nobel Prize.)

I will be waking up for the literature and the peace prizes. But I have wondered, during this sleep-deprived week, whether perhaps they should combine the two:  Ted Gioia alerted me to the possibilities, with the  Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

"Kill me, kill me"

Usually, however, I get to roll over and go back to sleep.  Stanford has yet to bag a Nobel in the humanities.  (Berkeley is ahead with 1 — Czesław Miłosz.)  Unless Tobias Wolff or Eavan Boland get lucky, I will only be suffering minorly from sleep deprivation.

Since Ladbrokes’ announcement on Wednesday, it’s interesting that the discussion in the blogosphere so far has obsessed on the surprising emergence of 79-year-old Tomas Tranströmer as a frontrunner, and then gnashed over the usual American lineup of Oates, Updyke, Pynchon, & co. — see the New Yorker blog piece here.

Everyone seems to be overlooking the equally unexpected development at Ladbrokes: the appearance of Adam Zagajewski in the #2 spot — which we discussed here.

Perhaps the world has grown tired of Polish winners — let’s see, there’s Henryk Sienkiewicz in 1905 (Susan Sontag called him “the worst writer in the history of the world” — but I haven’t read him), Władyslaw Reymont in 1924, then Czesław Miłosz in 1980, then Wisława Szymborska in 1996 (the last time, incidentally, a poet was awarded — the Nobel “poetry drought,” too, has been making news).  Not bad for a small nation of 40 million Polish-speakers.

My apologies, Señor Amarilla

The Literary Saloon, however, notes in its interesting discussion here:

Meanwhile, Tranströmer … I’m not familiar with his oeuvre, but I recall Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky dedicated a poem or two to him.  I can’t find it in my Collected.  Help me out anyone?  Elena?  Lora?

The effort to find it sent me back through my own Joseph Brodsky: Conversations, where I retrieved this nugget from 1975, during a Q&A after a reading in Iowa:

Mea culpa:  In my earlier post, I had identified Néstor Amarilla as “she.”  This photo contradicts me.  Given the recent choices of Bjørg-the-Cyborg, I still wonder if they’ll award the darkest of dark horses.  Literary Saloon says “there is no way this very young author can take the prize” — calling him “ridiculously young.”  Probably right.  The site suggests Bella Akhmadulina. as a dark horse alternative.