Salvatore Quasimodo arrives in Stockholm for the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony. He is interviewed by Giacomo Oreglia and talks about the joy of being in Sweden again, and how his communist background is unfortunately emphasized more in the press than the importance of the prize he has been awarded. He also praises the Swedish Academy for the courage to choose authors like Hemingway, Faulkner, Camus and Pasternak for the Nobel Prize in Literature, authors that don’t fit into any fixed system. The Academy rewards an active culture, not a stiff and immobile one like in many places in Europe, Quasimodo says. He also regrets that he doesn’t know much about Swedish literature, as only a small sample is translated into Italian.

From Aktuellt 1959-12-08