(Award ceremony speech) Presentation Speech by Professor Anders Olsson, Member of the Swedish Academy, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature

Respectable Mr President,

Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -

so much depends
upon

In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris
Rainer Maria Rilke

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Nobel Prize laureate in literature for this year bears a name of unusual sound, which he chose at first to protect himself from the curious.

How was the first poem written and by whom?

Poetry is about silence. Sometimes it is silence itself. The main quality here is that poetry can deal with hidden and indescribable things in its own way.

(On 29th of March watch a lecture "Age of changes, new opportunities in Kazakh poetry" from Ardak Nurgazy as a part of ‘STYQ Online program.)

En tering from the glare
Of the mid-monling traffic, we assume

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye,
’Gainst whom the world could not hold argument,

It’s spring in 1827, Beethoven
hoists his death-mask and sails off.

When you read a poem, the word sometimes feels heavy, as if you are falling from the sky.

From whichever direction we approach it - as plain readers of poetry, as critics or literary historians, as biographers or sociologists, or as translators - Pau

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a

Ode to a NightingaleMy heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

In the selection of pretenders, a new ‘king maker’ takes part, it is ritual legitimation, the ability to rely on ritual, to fulfill it and use it, to allow oneself, as it were to be borne aloft by it . . .

YES because he never did a thing

We imagine a girl and cat

Sometimes it is really hard to distinguish poetry and philosophy.

A well-known poet Ardakh Nurgaz...

A well-known poet Ardakh Nurgaz...