When the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, it was a surprise, since no poet from the United States - if we discount Bob Dylan - had been awarded the prize since T.S. Eliot, in 1948. Louise Glück has died at the age of 80, her publisher Jonathan Galassi of Farrar, Straus reported yesterday
Influenced by Shakespeare, classical mythology and Eliot himself, his texts, often short and sprinkled with humor, form a poetics of everyday life (which merges with mythology) with themes such as family relationships, loneliness, divorce (va being married twice), problems with children or the death of loved ones. His aesthetic line moves in a restraint that allowed him to express very complex emotions, often enormously painful, in a flat, analytical and serious way. With apparent simplicity, he linked to the American tradition (Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, Eliot...) and made the reader feel that their private experiences mattered to everyone. His prose poems are polyphonic. The Nobel jury argued that "his unmistakable voice, with an austere beauty, makes individual existence universal".
Born in a suburb of Long Island, the daughter of Hungarian Jews, her father patented, among other things, the X-Acto precision razor and read Greek classics to her before putting her away. One of her sisters died before she was born, which she remembered in some of her works. He suffered from anorexia as a young man (experience collected in Dedicación al hambre) and relied on psychoanalysis to overcome his problems. Author of more than a dozen collections of poems, as well as essays and a fable, she suffered long periods of creative blockage and her books include El triumph d'Aquilles (1985), Ararat (1990), L'iris wild (1992) or Una vida de poeblo (2009), where he exalts a simple, natural life, claiming the tranquility of small communities. Avern (2006) adapted a work by Pushkin. His Nit fidel i virtuosa (2014) is dedicated to the family. Many of his essays are collected in the volume Tests and theories.
"For me it is so obvious that writing poetry is the most miraculous thing that can be done that I have to remind myself that not everyone in the world wants to be a poet - he stated in an interview. A lot of people aren't even remotely interested in poetry, but it's so clear to me that, of course, it's what I want to do...".
"Everything she writes - she added - is nourished by her first memories and the things that changed her, moved her or moved her in her childhood. My visionary parents read me the Greek myths, and when I could read on my own, I continued to read them. The figures of gods and heroes were more vivid to me than to other children in the neighborhood of Long Island. It was not as if I was resorting to something acquired late to give my work a kind of veneer of learning. They were my headline stories. And certain stories especially resonated with me, especially Persephone, about whom I have written on and off for 50 years. And I think I was as caught up in a fight with my mother as ambitious girls tend to be. I think that particular myth gave a new look to those struggles. I don't mean it was useful in my daily life. When I was writing, instead of complaining about my mother, I could complain about Demeter."
A university professor with a reputation for being demanding, she won all the important prizes in the USA, from the Pulitzer to the National Book Award or the National Humanities Medal that was presented to her in 2016 by President Barack Obama. She was also poet laureate of her country in 2003 and 2004.
The pandemic affected her, as she recently acknowledged: “I write very erratically, it is not a constant discipline. I had been working on a book that was tormenting me for about four years, Community Winter Recipes. Suddenly, in late July and August, I unexpectedly wrote some new poems, and suddenly I saw how I could shape this manuscript and finish it. It was a miracle. The usual feelings of euphoria and relief were compromised by covid, because I had to fight against my daily terror and the necessary limitations of my daily life.”
"The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if sharp enough, can last," she wrote, knowing that one day it would happen to her. "Beauty dies: it is the source of creation", he pointed to Ararat.
