The Neustadt Prize and the Framing Effect

42 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2016 I t seems apt that the homeland of the creator of the Neustadt Prize was Estonia. It was there that a young Ivar Ivask, poet and scholar, negotiated the linguistic tsunamis of Swedish, Polish, German, and Russian that accompanied invasions. The nation was, said Marek Tamm, “born out of translation” (Diplomaatia , March 2010). Despite all those colonizers , Ivask noted, the Estonian language survived , one of the oldest in the world. “One day all of us will be translated,” he wrote in a poem; “yes even from the Estonian // the most difficult verse forms // will not deter eager Americans // looking for something new.” If that note about “eager Americans” seems prescient, Ivask was by then teaching at the University of Oklahoma. He had finished a PhD at the University of Marburg (in art history and comparative literature), immigrated to the US, and already taught at St. Olaf’s College. In his new job, Ivask became editor of Books Abroad, founded by Roy Temple House in 1927. To look at the first 1927 issue today is to be struck by House’s purity of intent and the prescience of his choices. There were seventy-four reviews of literature in French, German, Spanish, and Italian. Publishing four times a year, the journal grew from 32 pages to 250 pages per issue by 1976. In that year Ivask wrote the half-century commemorative essay and laid out major changes. Books Abroad had become World Literature Today, he noted, and the prize he The Neustadt Prize and the Framing Effect by William Marling Tesla owns the expertise on electric cars, Picasso on cubism, and the Neustadt Prize on casting a large net to evaluate international literature in unbiased fashion. And in so doing, the Neustadt Prize has reframed the field for everyone else. essay That note of knowing “what will have happened” twenty years in the future was to become one of the Neustadt’s distinctions, its cultural capital. WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 43 had created in 1969 as the “Books Abroad International Prize” was going to be known as the “Neustadt International Prize for Literature .” The Neustadt family of Ardmore, Oklahoma, longtime benefactors of the university , had endowed the award in perpetuity . I like to think that in that moment Ivask, who had grown up looking into the calm, enduring forests of an Estonia “reframed” by other languages, seized the moment to reframe the very act of prize-giving. The Neustadt Prize As WLT executive director Robert Con Davis-Undiano has said, Walter Neustadt Jr. himself was marked by “a very special kind of innocence” that made it possible to set up the prize with a purity of intent. In a field already populated by nation- and language-specific literary prizes, the Neustadt Prize would take a higher road. Every two years it would recognize a living author, writing in any language (as long as a “representative portion ” of work was available in English), for that author’s lifetime achievement. The jury would be composed of the executive director of WLT and a changing cast of international authors. This gave a kind of loose framework to the process that was augmented by a large number of nominees, who would range from nine to eleven. The first class (1970) included Conrad Aiken, John Berryman, and Graham Greene but also Jorge Guillén, Pablo Neruda , and Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn (who never won). The eventual recipient was Giuseppe Ungaretti, a choice that in retrospect has a prescient, edgy quality. That note of knowing “what will have happened ” twenty years in the future was to become one of the Neustadt’s distinctions , its cultural capital. Women broke into the nominees’ circle comparatively early, with Nathalie Sarraute in 1972, a year that also introduced non-Romance languages with Finnish, Polish, and Serbian nominees (Paavo Haavikko, Zbigniew Herbert , Czesław Miłosz [an eventual winner], and Vasko Popa). Auspiciously, however, it was Gabriel García Márquez who won the Neustadt that year, ten years before he won the Nobel in 1982. It was the 1974 class that, in my view, solidified the Neustadt. Not only were there two women nominees (Doris Lessing and Anna Seghers of East

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