Poetry, memory and the smell of coffee in Madrid
Spanish play debates dramatic and idealistic image of Palestinian and Israeli life

Quote:

MADRID: For many years the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has repeatedly claimed to be "absent, but present" in Palestine. During two performances of the play "El Olor del CafŽ" ("The Smell of Coffee") at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid at the end of last month, the "poet laureate of Palestine" and contender of the Nobel Prize for Literature was "present, but absent."

One thing why Darwish won´t win the Nobel Prize is that awarding him would instantly be claimed to be a political act - the same would be claimed by reactionary forces, but not as aloud, if Amos Oz would win. In fact, giving (or not giving) the Prize has been used as a political act in the past, like during II World War. F.E. Sillanpää won it because of the war and Herman Hesse was denied it until 1946 because even as he was a Swiss citizen, he was born German. And of course, Winston Churchill would have never won it for literary reasons alone.

Another reason why Darwish or Adonis won´t win the Nobel Prize for Literature is the language they write their works. I doubt that there are many members of the Swedish Academy who can read Arabic and it´s a hard thing to go giving prizes for people when you don´t know how good their works are on in the original language. There are exceptions, even when it comes to Nobel Prizes, but the fact is that for an author like Darwish or Adonis, they have to be translated in large numbers to several major western languages - and Swedish - to have a chance to win the prize. This is one of the reasons why so few past winners wrote their works in other languages than in English, French, German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or Swedish.