北京时间昨晚11点30分，2012年诺贝尔奖颁奖典礼于斯德哥尔摩音乐厅举行。0点16分许，中国作家莫言正式领取了今年的诺贝尔文学奖，莫言从瑞典国王卡尔十六世·古斯塔夫手上接过2012年诺贝尔文学奖获奖证书及金质奖章。今年诺贝尔奖奖金为800万瑞典克朗(约合114万美元)。
随后，在斯德哥尔摩市政厅举行的诺贝尔晚宴，与大约1300名客人一起共同庆祝这一荣耀并发表5分钟左右的获奖感言。瑞典公共电视台SVT1台以及诺奖官方网站对颁奖典礼进行了直播。
诺贝尔奖颁奖典礼上，诺贝尔文学奖评委会提名小组主席佩尔·瓦斯特伯格介绍了莫言的作品，阐述了授予他诺贝尔文学奖的原因。他介绍说，莫言是个诗人，粉碎了陈腔滥调，让茫茫人海中的个体得以升华，莫言的想像力翔越了人类存在的全部。瓦斯特伯格的颁奖辞全文如下：
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 Award Ceremony Speech
Presentation Speech by Per Wästberg, Writer, Member of the Swedish Academy, Chairman of the Nobel Committee, 10 December 2012.
Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Esteemed Nobel Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Mo Yan is a poet who tears down stereotypical propaganda posters, elevating the individual from an anonymous human mass. Using ridicule and sarcasm Mo Yan attacks history and its falsifications as well as deprivation and political hypocrisy. Playfully and with ill-disguised delight, he reveals the murkiest aspects of human existence, almost inadvertently finding images of strong symbolic weight.
North-eastern Gaomi county embodies China’s folk tales and history. Few real journeys can surpass these to a realm where the clamour of donkeys and pigs drowns out the voices of the people’s commissars and where both love and evil assume supernatural proportions.
Mo Yan’s imagination soars across the entire human existence. He is a wonderful portrayer of nature; he knows virtually all there is to know about hunger, and the brutality of China’s 20th century has probably never been described so nakedly, with heroes, lovers, torturers, bandits – and especially, strong, indomitable mothers. He shows us a world without truth, common sense or compassion, a world where people are reckless, helpless and absurd.
Proof of this misery is the cannibalism that recurs in China’s history. In Mo Yan, it stands for unrestrained consumption, excess, rubbish, carnal pleasures and the indescribable desires that only he can attempt to elucidate beyond all tabooed limitations.
In his novel Republic of Wine, the most exquisite of delicacies is a roasted three-year-old. Boys have become exclusive foodstuff. The girls, neglected, survive. The irony is directed at China’s family policy, because of which female foetuses are aborted on an astronomic scale: girls aren’t even good enough to eat. Mo Yan has written an entire novel, Frog, about this.
Mo Yan’s stories have mythical and allegorical pretensions and turn all values on their heads. We never meet that ideal citizen who was a standard feature in Mao’s China. Mo Yan’s characters bubble with vitality and take even the most amoral steps and measures to fulfil their lives and burst the cages they have been confined in by fate and politics.
Instead of communism’s poster-happy history, Mo Yan describes a past that, with his exaggerations, parodies and derivations from myths and folk tales, is a convincing and scathing revision of fifty years of propaganda.
In his most remarkable novel, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, where a female perspective dominates, Mo Yan describes the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine of 1960 in stinging detail. He mocks the revolutionary pseudo-science that tried to inseminate sheep with rabbit sperm, all the while dismissing doubters as right-wing elements. The novel ends with the new capitalism of the ‘90s with fraudsters becoming rich on beauty products and trying to produce a Phoenix through cross-fertilisation.
