诺贝尔奖颁奖典礼上，文学委员会主席帕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。瓦斯特伯格的颁奖辞全文如下：
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.
莫言是一个撕下程序化宣传海报，将凡夫俗子一个个推上台面的诗人。他以冷嘲热讽的笔致抨击历史及其作伪，以及剥夺的行为和政治伪装。他戏谑地揭示了人生境遇中最阴暗的方面，漫不经心地摸索出极富象征力的形象。
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.
高密县东北乡体现了中国的民间故事和历史，不通过此类故事，你几乎很难脚踏实地地进入一个驴吼猪叫淹没了党政领声音的国度，在那里，爱和恶的呈现已达到超自然的程度。
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.
莫言的想象飞掠整个的人生境遇。他是描绘自然的能手；有关饥饿的方方面面，他几乎全都熟知。中国在20世纪中的暴虐无道，也许还从未如此直白地被他描写在他那些英雄、恋人、施虐者、强盗，特别是坚强无畏的母亲的故事之中。他向我们呈现了一个没有真理，缺乏常识或同情心的世界，其中的人群都显得鲁莽、无助而荒诞。
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.
中国历代反复出现的人相食现象就是这一悲惨世界的证据。在莫言的笔下，它还呈现为毫无节制的消费，大肆铺张，胡说八道，食色之乐，以及种种难以言说的欲望，唯独莫言能够冲破所有的禁忌限制，试图将那一切阐述出来。
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.
在他的小说《酒国》中，最精致的美味是三岁孩童肉烧烤。男童肉成为高级食品，而女童，则因被鄙弃不顾而得以幸存。这一反讽直刺了中国的独生子女政策，正是这一政策导致女胎被大量堕掉，堕掉的女胎多不胜数，以致多到了不配食用的地步。《蛙》这部小说从头到尾所写的就是这样的事情。
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 fulfill their lives and burst the cages they have been confined in by fate and politics.
莫言的故事富有神话和讽喻的旨趣，所有的价值在这些故事中都全然改观。在莫言的笔下，毛时代的中国众生相绝非那种常见的模式化理想人物，他们全都显得生气勃勃，为充分发挥他们的生命力和打破那囚禁他们的命运和政治牢笼，他们的行事甚至采取了非道德的步骤和方式。
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.
莫言所描写的过去年代与中共所发行的那些宣传画中的历史有所不同，他使用夸张和戏仿的笔法，以及取材神话和民间故事的内容，对以往那五十年的宣传作出了可信而严苛的修正。
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.
《丰乳肥臀》是最引人注目的一部小说，书中整个地贯串了女性视角，对大跃进和1960年的大饥荒作出了令人锥心的细节描述。他揶揄妄图拿公兔给母羊配种的革命派伪科学试验，而在当时，凡对此类事情表示怀疑的人都会被打成右派。小说以新资本主义勃兴的90年代作结，那时候某些靠出售美容品发了大财的骗子们仍妄图通过杂交的方法养出凤凰。
In Mo Yan, a forgotten peasant world arises, alive and well, before our eyes, sensually scented even in its most pungent vapours, startlingly merciless but tinged by joyful selflessness. Never a dull moment. The author knows everything and can describe everything – all kinds of handicraft, smithery, construction, ditch-digging, animal husbandry, the tricks of guerrilla bands. He seems to carry all human life on the tip of his pen.
莫言大笔淋漓，勾绘出一个被遗忘的农民世界，其中的一切都被写得活灵活现，即便它的氛围乌烟瘴气，也弥漫有肉欲的气息，其中虽充斥惊人的残忍，却仍浸润着欢快的无私；读起来从不让人感到枯燥乏味。各种手工艺，铁匠活，盖房，挖渠，养殖，土匪伎俩——所有这一切他无所不知，无所不写，人世间的一切几乎都被他罗列到笔下。
He is more hilarious and more appalling than most in the wake of Rabelais and Swift — in our time, in the wake of García Marquez. His spice blend is a peppery one. On his broad tapestry of China’s last hundred years, there are neither dancing unicorns nor skipping maidens. But he paints life in a pigsty in such a way that we feel we have been there far too long. Ideologies and reform movements may come and go but human egoism and greed remain. So Mo Yan defends small individuals against all injustices – from Japanese occupation to Maoist terror and today’s production frenzy.
继拉伯雷和斯威夫特以及当今的加西亚马尔克斯之后，还很少有人能像莫言这样写得妙趣横生，惊世骇俗。他那辛辣的文笔是麻辣味的。他勾绘了近百年中国的历史长卷，其中既无麒麟呈祥的景象，也无少女欢跃的幸福。但那里面的猪圈生活却让他描绘到令人难以忍受，却又欲罢不休的地步。意识形态和改革运动尽管搞来搞去，人们的唯我意识和贪心始终都革除不掉。所以莫言要为保护藐小的个人而抗拒一切不公正的行为——从日本侵华直到毛时代的暴政和今日大搞生产的狂热。
For those who venture to Mo Yan’s home district, where bountiful virtue battles the vilest cruelty, a staggering literary adventure awaits. Has ever such an epic spring flood engulfed China and the rest of the world? In Mo Yan’s work, world literature speaks with a voice that drowns out most contemporaries.
在莫言的家乡，富饶的德行一直都在与最邪恶的残忍交战，对那些有勇气闯进去一窥其究竟的人士来说，所面临的将是一次步履艰难的文学冒险之行。中国，乃至世界的其他地方，何曾经受过这样一种史诗春潮的波澜冲击？在莫言的作品中，“世界文学”发出了让众多的当代人倾倒折服的声音。
The Swedish Academy congratulates you. I call on you to accept the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature from the hand of His Majesty the King.
瑞典文学院祝贺你。恳请你从国王手中接过2012年诺贝尔文学奖。