An announcement of the Nobel Prize for literature is almost necessarily accompanied by columns listing those distinguished writers who were passed over, as well as more than a few clunkers who were not. As for the roster of the omitted, since the Russians Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) and Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) were both alive when the award was established in 1901, they are obvious examples of neglect. But one may include such other lasting authors slighted for the Nobel, like Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), James Joyce, Marcel Proust, all the French surrealist poets (some of whom would have turned the prize down as a dishonorable badge of bourgeois approval), and, scandalously, Jorgé Luis Borges.
The latter omission points up the neglect of great Spanish writers until the Latin American “boom.” The choice of the now forgotten Jacinto Benavente, a Spanish playwright who won in 1922, hardly shines as an example of literary judgment, although the excellent Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral won in 1945 and the exiled Spanish Republican Juan Ramón Jiménez (who resided in Puerto Rico) in 1956. Jiménez was one of only two representatives of the great “generations of 1898 and 1927” from Spain to receive a Nobel, followed by Vicente Aleixandre in 1977. The whole apparatus of the Nobel Prizes has been morally tainted by its political compliments to American-hating leftists, most notoriously in 1971 when it was awarded to Pablo Neruda, memorialist in verse of Joseph Stalin.
