Looking at list below Montale through García Márquez is a pretty good run, if Elytis is as good as they say and I feel like giving Joseph Duemer his Milosz.
More non-Nobels:
Calvino, Perec, Sorrentino, Breton, Apollinaire, Pynchon. (No postmodern fiction of the US at all; no Oulipo, no surrealists)
Susan Howe. James Schuyler. Allen Ginsberg. (No NAP in the the Nobel!)
Jabès, Derrida, Blanchot.
No women modernists writing in English (Woolf, Stein, Moore, HD, Barnes, etc...).
René Char. Juan friggin Rulfo. Cortázar.
Did I mention Joyce, Proust, Borges, Woolf, Celan, Asbhery, and Char?
Did I mention Jabès, Borges, and Lezama Lima? Kenneth Koch, Lorca, and Borges?
Look, I won't say that some Norwegian or Danish writer I haven't read is unworthy of the prize, but it's very easy to come up with an alternate list of writers better than all but a very few.
I'll put in my two pfennigs for Nelly Sachs, by the way. One could argue that they should have given it to Celan instead, but Sachs is a powerful poet.
ResponderEliminarBut I meant to add that that is just quibbling, and your overall point is well taken.
ResponderEliminarPart of it, of course, is how the press treats the Nobel. What literary prize can you name that you couldn't make similar lists of the italicized minority?
ResponderEliminar1. Derrida? Hmmmm. Let me think on that one!
ResponderEliminar2. Did you know that Wallace Stegner threatened to have his name removed from the Stegner Fellowships is Stanford hired Sorrentino?
http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/sepoct/show/shelf.html
"if" Stanford hired ...
ResponderEliminar