So we can remove another name from the list of potential Nobelpriskandidater. When a significant writer goes away without having received this award, it is a habit to complain a little. But consider how fun it would be if the opposite was the case – that there were fewer truly important writer than the price to distribute?
The australian poet and essäisten Les Murray went away on the Monday, 80-year-old. He has at least twenty years emerged as the favorite in the Nobelprisspekulationerna, after a hard-working group of translators – Jonas Ellerström, Lars Ahlström, Stewe Claesson and Lars-Håkan Svensson – started to make his poems and essays available in English.
For many, he has also, in a rather unfair way, become the face of modern australian poetry. It is also linked with that he has so clearly identified itself with the country as such, or perhaps rather with a special, nostalgic version: the geeky nybyggarlandet where the man built his own hut and cultivated the land in their brows sweat.
himself as the anti quite a lot of things; he liked not the cities, the left, feminists, really disliked the he most the expressions of the new movements, and social change. Time and again, the unhelpful critics tried to dismiss him as a reactionary unique – which is not possible when you read his poems, which often has an autobiographical starting point and have a straight and very powerful tone.
He grew up in the hinterland between Brisbane and Sydney, a region which remained the place he returned to both in his poems and in his life. But it was no idyll, which shaped him, without a harsh upbringing marked by a depressed mother, and a strong sense of exclusion, as särlingen and bysnillet from the edge. It was a position he cultivated all his life, even if he himself increasingly figured it.
On a plane, he must be described as a happy poet. He was much read and appreciated far beyond the library’s lyrikhylla, much in the way that Tomas Tranströmer is it in Sweden today. He could support himself on his writing and became a kind of national poet. But his poetry takes its point of departure in the skavandet against a efterkrigsvärld where he had to penetrate from the side.
While the other wrote until just the change, snorting enthusiastically as Whitman or lucid pure as Heaney, wanted Murray never accept it.
books are the essay ”The black dog” (in Swedish 2008) where he wrote about his own depression. It hit him suddenly, after he has been confronted with one of the bullies at a reading. Everything burst, he became a plague to his family, and he asked at one point a police officer to shoot him. But ”the dog” retired, and Murray thought he had got a key to itself by the aspbergerdiagnos his doctor asked.
But the darkness in his poems is not the result of any sudden life crisis. How would the bullied, poor landsbygdsstudenten be able to embrace the urban, the changing, modern – but at the same time, deny himself, and everything he came out?
the conflict between tradition and the modern is in so much of the best modernist poetry, even if we rarely want to see it – the case of poets such as Walt Whitman and Seamus Heaney, the name that is often mentioned in the same breath as Les Murray. But while the other aforementioned names wrote just the change, snorting enthusiastically as Whitman or lucid pure as Heaney, wanted Murray never accept it. There, he stands closer to Emily Dickinson. The world is not changing. It just is.
he portrays just the stagnant, unchanging present moment as a sort of lens where the light is broken the same way for the living as for those who went before us. It is not conservatism, it is despair solidified into amber.
Read more: Poet and author, Les Murray is dead