Rabbit's Warren

Here is the story on BBC.

This was a surprising award; with the possible exception of Isaac Bashevis Singer, this is the first time someone who writes primarily short stories has won the Nobel Prize for literature. Even Singer is debatable; his bibliography lists around 20 novels, its just that a lot of people (like me) have said his short stories are his best work.

But Alice Munro (艾莉絲‧孟若) has written almost nothing but short stories. Her one novel, The Lives of Girls and Women, is basically seven or eight short stories held together by a common narrator and location, and is by no means her most popular or critically acclaimed work. In any case, the Nobel committee’s award specifically cites her as “master of the contemporary short story”, and that’s a description that has never been used before for a Nobel literature laureate.

I predict that this will be a very popular choice, simply because Munro is a very popular writer. She’s my favorite living short story writer, for sure. Unfortunately, the literature translation market being what it is in Taiwan (and China), she is very poorly represented in Chinese at the moment; short story collections are hardly ever translated because they sell so poorly. This is true in English, as Munro has often ruefully observered, and triply true in Taiwan and China. To my knowledge, the only one of Munro’s books available in Chinese is Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, translated as Ganqing youxi 感情遊戲 by Chang Jang 張讓, and published by China Times Publishing in 2003. Oh, there is also a partial translation of “The Lives of Girls and Women” by Lan Ya-chieh (藍雅婕), done as part of her MA thesis on Munro (Chi Nan University Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literature, 2004); this is currently the only thesis that has been done on Munro in Taiwan.

In literature classes, one of the most difficult things to explain to Chinese speaking students is the difference between “irony”, “satire”, and “sarcasm.” Apparently distinguishing these is not always easy even for native speakers, but on the Chinese side, virtually every English-Chinese dictionary translates these as one thing: 諷刺. Yet the differences are vast.

This came back to me very sharply when my fiction class this semester read the stories “Gift of the Magi” and “The Diamond Necklace”; my question for the reading response began: “These two stories are both ‘ironic’ as we discussed in class…” One student’s response was 這兩個故事說不上是諷刺。比較像是 surprise ending，就是會覺得解果怎麼會是這樣，滿意外的…鑽石項鍊比較偏向諷刺，但是智者的禮物反而沒有諷刺的感覺，覺得有點可愛，好笑.

Naturally the student gets full credit for not cravenly surrendering her reasoning powers to the teacher, but as I said in my comments on the homework: “I said ironic, not 諷刺.” This is what “failure to communicate” really looks like.

Afterthought: Actually, now I’m wondering whether I got this wrong. Is the Gift of the Magi not ironic? We can at least say that, even though Jim and Della’s gifts to each other were useless in the end, they were not totally in vain. The gifts they chose revealed how much they cared for each other, and Jim, for one, took consolation in this. In “The Diamond Necklace”, however, the revelation of the necklace’s true value at the end destroys whatever consolation Mathilde has found. Does this make it more ironic?

In fact, even “The Diamond Necklace” was not ironic to some students, just silly: “Why didn’t Mathilde just tell Madame Forestier the necklace was lost instead of wasting ten years?” Good point. [That’s sarcastic, guys.]