Writing vengeance

I will write to avenge my people, writes Ernaux.

Revenge, writes Szymborska.

Why do these Nobelists write vengeance?

Sixty years ago, Ernaux wrote a sentence in her diary, that was the springboard for her Nobel lecture:

‘I will write to avenge my people, j’écrirai pour venger ma race’. It echoed Rimbaud’s cry: ‘I am of an inferior race for all eternity.’ I was twenty-two, studying literature in a provincial faculty with the daughters and sons of the local bourgeoisie, for the most part. I proudly and naively believed that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of landless labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education, would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth…And so, without being aware of it at the time, that first book, published in 1974, mapped out the realm in which I would situate my writing, a realm both social and feminist. Avenging my people and avenging my sex would, from that time on, be one and the same thing.

Nobel lecture 2022 by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer

Writing in her diary as a student, Ernaux was clear who she wanted to avenge, and that writing was the way to do it. Decades later, she thought she’d been naïve – but when she had a worldwide audience, she started with the same thing. Vengeance.

Sixty years ago, Szymborska wrote a poem that ended like this:

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

The Joy of Writing by Wisława Szymborska, From No End of Fun (1967)
Translated by Stanisław Barańczak & Clare Cavanagh (1996)

Whenever I think about writing, I think of this poem, The Joy of Writing, or Radość pisania in Polish. I think of joy with power, and revenge. Of the joy in discovering Szymborska as a student, seeing how simple the words were and how complex the meaning was. And how amazing the translators were – a pair of poets writing another poet from one language to another. And that a woman like me, yet so different from me, can win the Nobel Prize for Literature. That was in 1996, when we wrote our translations with paper and pencil. Only later in my degree did we go into the library to type up our essays on the computer. I got my first laptop in 1998, to start my PhD. Writing changed. But the joy, power, and revenge have not gone. And I have moved outside the academy walls. Writing on retreats, I am trying to recapture the joy I first felt inside the academy, to preserve it for others in another space. To take revenge, perhaps, on a negative writing culture by creating a positive one.