Answers: Poets and the Nobel Prize

1) While he was Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson began reciting this poem by a Nobel laureate at a most inappropriate location.

“For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to ————-

With a terse British ambassador warning him to stop, Johnson did not get to the controversial

“Bloomin' idol made o' mud
Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd”

Name the Nobel laureate, the poem (name of a former capital) and the location where Johnson began reciting the poem.

Rudyard Kipling, the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize (1907). The poem is Mandalay, which was Burma’s royal capital until the 19th century British conquest. Boris Johnson began his impromptu recital at Yangon’s Shwedagon Pagoda, the most revered Buddhist shrine in Myanmar. More with video here. More on Kipling here, here and here.

2) Who is the Nobel laureate (and the only person) to have written the national anthems of two different countries? Name the literary icon and the two countries

Rabindranath Tagore - poet, playwright, short-story writer, novelist, music composer, educationist, artist and filmmaker rolled into one. The 1913 Nobel winner wrote India’s Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh’s Amar Sonar Bangla. More on the West’s view on Tagore here and here. Tagore was the first non-European to win the Literature Nobel and the first non-white recipient of a Nobel Prize in any category.

Ananda Samarakoon, the writer-composer of Sri Lanka’s national anthem was influenced by Tagore and studied at his Visva Bharati. More here and here.

3) This poet was the first from her continent to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. From her thirties, she spent her life outside her country in various diplomatic positions. She was featured on the country's highest denomination currency note by a dictator, who packaged her as symbol of conservative morality. Name the poet and country.

(Hint: She took her pseudonym from an angel and the name of a wind that blows over the south of France)

Gabriela Mistral, Chile (1945 Literature Nobel)

4) While a schoolboy, this future poet was encouraged by the Nobel laureate in Question 3, who was then a school principal. She introduced him to Russian classics (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov). Just like her, he too worked as a diplomat and both were posted in Spain during the 1930s. His efforts ensured a place in his country for hundreds of refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War. While cancer was reported to be the cause of his death, investigations over the past decade have raised questions. Who?

Pablo Neruda, who died 12 days after his friend and Chilean President Salvador Allende was toppled in a U.S.-backed military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Questions have been raised about the official version that he died of cancer in recent years. More here and here.

More on Neruda’s efforts to bring hundreds fleeing the Spanish Civil War to Chile here and here. Recent critical examinations of his life and work have taken a toll on his reputation, especially amid the global #MeToo movement against sexual violence.

5) He was associated with nationalistic forces in his soon-to-be country, which is reflected in some of his popular poems. Later he toyed with fascism and eugenics, attempting to write marching songs for the fascist Blueshirts in his country. At one point he expressed admiration for Benito Mussolini (he did not fully embrace fascism however). Name the poet and country.

William Butler Yeats, Ireland. More on Yeats’ complicated legacy here, here, here and here. Yeats also wrote the introduction to fellow Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s first poetry collection in English.

6) 1963 Nobel laureate George Seferis served as his country’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1962 and played a major role in talks that led to the independence of another country in 1960 (some of his acclaimed poems are about this island). In 1969 he spoke out on the BBC World Service against the military rulers in his country, saying “This anomaly must stop”. Name Seferis’ country as well as the country he helped secure independence.

George (Giorgos) Seferis is from Greece and the country whose independence he helped secure is Cyprus. More on his funeral that turned into a rally against the then military dictatorship here. More on Seferis and Cyprus here and here.

7) This poet was a diplomat for his country and was first posted to India in 1952. He returned in 1962 to serve as Ambassador for six years. He wrote extensively about India and especially Delhi, describing a monument there as a ‘poem made not of words but of trees, pools, avenues of sand and flowers’. He resigned in protest in 1968 following a student massacre back home. Name the poet, his country, the monument in Delhi and the massacre that prompted his resignation

Mexico’s Octavio Paz is the poet-diplomat. The monument he describes is Delhi’s Humayun’s Tomb, the mausoleum of a Mughal emperor.

1968, a year of student protests across Europe and the U.S., also saw the massacre of unarmed Mexican students in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Plaza, just days before the city hosted the Olympic Games. More about Octavio Paz’s resignation here and here.

8) This Nobel laureate wrote a collection of experimental poetry and prose in 1966 called Tarantula. But it was published only in 1971 and was widely panned as incomprehensible and pretentious. (In recent years there have been more efforts in defence of this work). Name the author.

Bob Dylan. A contemporary take on Tarantula here and a scathing 1971 review here.

9) This 1960 Nobel laureate’s poems were published under the pseudonym Saint-John Perse. His real name was Alexis Leger and he was for a time the top official in his country’s foreign ministry. Leger was the top aide to the country’s Prime Minister for talks that ended in a notorious pact in the 1930s. Name the poet-diplomat’s country and the agreement (Leger’s citizenship was revoked in 1940 and he spent years in exile in the U.S.)

Munich Pact of 1938 signed by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, France’s Prime Minister Edouard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Alexis Leger was the top aide to France’s Daladier. The Munich Pact has been reviled as a key symbol of the appeasement policy to avert war that allowed Nazi Germany to annex Czechoslovakia. Leger stands behind Mussolini in the photo of the signatories. However, Leger was critical of the Nazis and had to flee France after the German takeover in 1940.

More on the poet St.‐John Perse here and here. T.S. Eliot brought Perse to English readers by translating Anabasis from French.

10) Nobel laureate Ivo Andric started his literary career as a poet. In his early twenties he was involved with the ‘Young Bosnia’ nationalist movement along with A, who was junior to him at school. Following a crucial step taken by A in 1914, Ivo Andric was arrested and spent three years in prison. Who is A? (Ivo Andric later became a diplomat for Yugoslavia in the inter-war years and was the Ambassador in Berlin in 1941 when Yugoslavia was swallowed up by the Nazis)

A is Gavrilo Princip, who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife in Sarajevo in 1914, which was a major trigger for World War I. More on Ivo Andric here, here and here. Andric’s most noted work is the novel The Bridge on the Drina, written during the Second World War when he was effectively under house arrest in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia.

Filmmaker Emir Kusturica has been building a town called Andricgrad on the Serbian side of Bosnia and Herzegovina, dedicated to Andric and The Bridge on the Drina. The project has come with its share of controversy. More here and here.

11) X is a poet whose best known work was inspired by the ancient Greek poet Homer. Fellow Nobel laureate Y is a literary giant from the same region as X and both were locked in a bitter feud for decades. X directly attacked Y in verse in his 2008 poem ‘The Mongoose’, starting with the lines 'I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/Or else I'll be as dead as ————-’s fiction.' Name X and Y

Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul. More on The Mongoose here.

12) This poem by Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska was read out at multiple science-related protests against President Donald Trump and his policies.

“The admirable —————-
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.”

What is the poem all about?

The number Pi. More about Wisława Szymborska here and here.

13) During his convention speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination Joe Biden quoted from a Nobel laureate’s poem

“History says, Don’t hope / On this side of the grave. / But then, once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme.”

These lines were also quoted by then U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1995, during a visit to the poet’s region, in a speech with significant political consequences. Name the poet and his region.

Seamus Heaney, Northern Ireland. More on Bill Clinton’s historic 1995 visit to Northern Ireland here. Heaney was conferred the Nobel Prize that year, just a month before Clinton quoted him during his speech at Derry.

14) This Nobel laureate in his acceptance speech spoke about his satirical response in verse to South Africa’s apartheid government comparing Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment to that of Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess.

“Got you! Trust the Israelis/I bet they flushed him out, raced him down/ From Auschwitz to Durban, and Robben Island/ Mandela? Mandel ... Mendel ... Mengel ... Mengele!/ It’s he! Nazi superman in sneaky ————- !

Name the poet and fill in the missing word in the extract from the poem

Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, the first black African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The missing word in the poem is blackface.