Knockin’ on history’s door

BOB DYLAN might not seem to have much in common with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and William Butler Yeats. But as of October 13th, they are bound together by the Nobel prize in literature. The Swedish Academy has awarded the medal annually since 1901 “to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”, as requested by the will of Alfred Nobel. Mr Dylan won this year’s accolade “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. Few people would challenge that description of his impact on popular music. Many have questioned the decision to recognise it with the same honour that was once bestowed upon George Bernard Shaw, Jean-Paul Sartre and Rudyard Kipling.

Giving a prize that is usually reserved for writers of literature to a world-renowned musician might seem as daft and gimmicky as awarding Barack Obama the Nobel Peace prize less than a year into his presidency. But not all past recipients of the literary award have been famed for writing novels, plays or poems. Winston Churchill collected it in 1953 “for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”. Philosophers Bertrand Russell and Henri Bergson are both on the list of laureates. Indeed, Mr Dylan isn’t even the first songwriter to win. Rabindranath Tagore, whose creative output included thousands of Bengali songs, was chosen in 1913 for his “sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse”.

Sara Danius, a professor of literature at Stockholm University and the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, justified this year’s choice by comparing him to Homer and Sappho: ancient Greek poets whose verses were “meant to be performed, often together with instruments”. Though the link might seem tenuous, literary history is well stocked with works that were penned with listeners in mind. Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and Robert Burns all wrote for live audiences and produced plenty of song lyrics, too. The idea that contemporary singers belong in that lineage is gaining support in bookish circles. Sir Christopher Ricks, a former professor of poetry at Oxford University and one of the most famous living literary critics, wrote a book about Mr Dylan’s verse with a particular focus on his allusions to T. S. Eliot and John Keats. Sir Salman Rushdie described Mr Dylan today as the “brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition”. Yet it is hard to imagine either man rating the singer above Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, James Joyce or Anton Chekhov. None of those names appear on the roll of honour.

Regardless of what you think about Mr Dylan’s fitness to join the ranks of John Steinbeck and William Faulkner as American Nobel laureates, you cannot deny his influence on modern song-writing. Popular tunes tend to have bland, clichéd lyrics. As Mr Dylan was recording his first singles, radios across the land blared “round, round, get around, I get around” and “she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah”. His protest songs brought him to fame—he performed during the March on Washington in 1963, where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech—but he was not the first popular musician to dabble with more weighty topics. Woody Guthrie sang in defence of labour unions in the 1940s, around the same time that Billie Holliday was lamenting lynchings in “Strange Fruit”. What made Mr Dylan exceptional was the way that he phrased his thoughts.

Words in his songs rarely go together conventionally. At times the result is gibberish. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” might sound anarchic, but it is hard to make sense of “jump down a manhole / Light yourself a candle / Don’t wear sandals”. “Tarantula”, his book of stream-of-consciousness poetry, contains such oddities as “the chief of police holding a bazooka with his name engraved on it coming in drunk and putting the barrel into the face of a lawyer’s pig”. Occasionally, when recording a time-honoured ballad or a tale of injustice, his lyrics are straightforward and bare. But at his best, every word has been chosen deliberately to produce a complex, unusual effect. “Blowin’ in the Wind” might have the simple language of a parable; it is hard to imagine somebody before Mr Dylan, however, describing a white dove sailing many seas before she sleeps in the sand. Most of his compositions are made up of similar images, viewed one after another. 

His contribution to music has been the understanding that lyrics don’t have to follow the rules of everyday speech.  He has inspired generations of song-writers to combine words in unusual and interesting ways. When Paul Simon wrote that he had “squandered [his] resistance for a pocket full of mumbles”, or when Bruce Springsteen recalled “soul engines running through a night so tender in a bedroom locked in whispers”, they were mimicking Mr Dylan’s eccentricities. He once described the experience, with characteristic obscurity, as like disappearing through the smoke rings of his own mind. It is a journey that many others have repeated.

Bob Dylan: Nobel văn chương 2016

Bob Dylan wins Nobel prize in literature 2016 – live
The 2016 Nobel prize in literature will be announced today at 1pm CET (that’s midday in the UK). Follow the build up and all the reaction after the announcement here
Guardian Live
8m ago 12:01
And the winner is...
Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/13/bob-dylan-wins-2016-nobel-prize-in-literature

Bob Dylan was named the surprise winner of the Nobel prize for literature in Stockholm today “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
Speaking to reporters after the announcement, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius said she “hoped” the Academy would not be criticised for its choice.
“The times they are a’changing, perhaps”, she said, comparing the songs of the American songwriter, who had yet to be informed of his win, to the works of Homer and Sappho.
“Of course he deserves it – he’s got it,” she said. “He’s a great poet – a great poet in the English speaking tradition. For 54 years he’s been at it, reinventing himself constantly, creating a new identity.”
Danius said the choice of Dylan may appear surprising, “but if you look far back, 5000 years, you discover Homer and Sappho. They wrote poetic texts which were meant to be performed, and it’s the same way for Bob Dylan. We still read Homer and Sappho, and we enjoy it. We can and should read him.”
The winner of the Nobel prize for literature is chosen by the 18 members of the Swedish Academy, who are looking for “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”, according to Alfred Nobel’s will. The award itself admits on its website that “Alfred Nobel’s prescriptions for the literature prize were quite vague”, adding that “in fact, the history of the literature prize appears as a series of attempts to interpret an imprecisely worded will”.
Major writers believed to have been in the running for the award included the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the American Don DeLillo and the Japanese Haruki Murakami.
Danius advised those unfamiliar with the work of Dylan to start with the 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. “It’s an extraordinary example of his brilliant way of rhyming, putting together refrains, and his pictorial way of thinking,” she said. When she was young, she admitted, she was “not really” a Dylan fan, preferring the works of David Bowie. “Perhaps it’s a question of my generation – today I’m a fan of Bob Dylan,” she said.
Dylan becomes the first American to win the Nobel prize for literature since Toni Morrison took the prize in 1993. His triumph follows comments in 2008 from Horace Engdahl, then permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, that “the US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature ... That ignorance is restraining.”
Today, a jury now headed by his successor has obviously changed their mind.

Hy vọng Nobel năm nay không bị chỉ trích.
Lẽ tất nhiên xứng đáng. Ông ta là nhà thơ lớn, trong dòng tiếng Anh. Có thể có tí ngạc nhiên, nhưng nhìn lại coi, 5 ngàn năm trước, có Homer, có Sappho.
Người Mẽo đầu tiên được Nobel, sau Toni Morrison, 1993. Mẽo quá cô lập, một hòn đảo, đâu phải 1 đại lục, đếch chịu dịch dọt, đếch thèm tham dự vào những cuộc lèm bèm lớn lao về văn học, viên thư ký thường trực Horace Engdahl chẳng đã dè bỉu, nhưng uỷ ban Nobel sau ông có thể đã thay đổi cái đầu.
Thay đổi cái đầu, có, nhưng vưỡn đếch cho nhà văn Mẽo!

The choice of Dylan follows speculation about disagreement amongst the judging panel. The prize was expected to be announced last week, in the same week as the science medals, and the Academy’s Per Wästberg said the different date was a matter of logistics. But Bjorn Wiman, cultural pages editor at Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter, told the South China Morning Post that “if you ask me, it’s absolutely not a ‘calendar’ issue. This is a sign there’s a disagreement in the process to select a winner.”
Major writers believed to have been in the running for the award included the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the American Don DeLillo and the Japanese Haruki Murakami. At Ladbrokes, where the singer was at 16/1 from 50/1 when betting was suspended, spokesman Alex Donohue said that “a lot of people scoffed when his odds came in to 10/1 from 100/1 in 2011. Looks like there was something blowin’ in the wind after all.”
Danius advised those unfamiliar with the work of Dylan to start with the 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. “It’s an extraordinary example of his brilliant way of rhyming, putting together refrains, and his pictorial way of thinking,” she said. When she was young, she admitted, she was “not really” a Dylan fan, preferring the works of David Bowie. “Perhaps it’s a question of generation – today I’m a lover of Bob Dylan,” she said.

Đúng ra Nobel văn học được công bố tuần trước, nhưng có 1 sự không đồng thuận giữa mấy ông Hàn.
Sara Danius, nữ thư ký thường trực cho biết, hồi còn trẻ, bà không thích ông này, nhưng già thì lại mê. Trong nước, tờ VHTT net phán, cho Bob Dylan, vì là 1 Einstein của quần chúng. Đây là 1 ví von, khi anh ca sỡi được Ô Bá Mà vinh danh, không mắc mớ đến Nobel. Thứ nào thứ đó. Vòng hoa Nobel là vòng hoa Nobel, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”, đã sáng tạo ra những cách diễn tả mới trong truyền thống lớn lao của dòng ca nhạc Mẽo.
Nhảm
http://www.dw.com/en/the-einstein-of-pop-music-bob-dylan-at-75/a-19278557
Culture
"The Einstein of pop music:" Bob Dylan at 75
As Bob Dylan's birthday is widely noted, music experts wonder whether there could ever be a worthy successor to him as poet, musician and cult figure.
        Bob Dylan has two honorary doctorates and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 in recognition of his enormous influence on pop culture. In 2012, US President Barack Obama awarded him the country's highest civil distinction: the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Now he is also a Nobel Prize laureate.

‘I Is Someone Else’

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/03/10/i-is-someone-else/