核心提示:Early this morning came the news that Bob Dylan, one of the best among us, a glory of the country and of the language, had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. 今早(美国时间)消息传来,鲍勃·迪伦,这位美国的骄傲、语言的宠儿,获得了今年的诺贝
Early this morning came the news that Bob Dylan, one of the best among us, a glory of the country and of the language, had won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
今早(美国时间)消息传来,鲍勃·迪伦,这位美国的骄傲、语言的宠儿,获得了今年的诺贝尔文学奖!
The 75-year-old rock legend received the prize "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".
这位75岁的摇滚传奇歌手因“在伟大的美国歌曲传统中开创了新的诗性表达。”而获奖。
And please: let’s not torture ourselves with any gyrations about genre and the holy notion of literature to justify the choice of Dylan; there’s no need to remind anyone that, oh, yes, he has also written books, proper ones (the wild and elusive “Tarantula,”the superb memoir “Chronicles: Volume One”).
The songs—an immense and still-evolving collected work—are the thing, and Dylan’s lexicon, his primary influence, is the history of song, from the Greeks to the psalmists, from the Elizabethans to the varied traditions of the United States and beyond: the blues; hillbilly music; the American Songbook of Berlin, Gershwin, and Porter; folk songs; early rock and roll.
Over time, Dylan has been a spiritual seeker—and his well-known excursions into various religious traditions, from evangelical Christianity to Chabad, are in his work as well—but his foundation is song, lyric combined with music, and the Nobel committee was right to discount the objections to that tradition as literature. Sappho and Homer would approve.
These songs of mine, they’re like mystery stories, the kind that Shakespeare saw when he was growing up. I think you could trace what I do back that far. They were on the fringes then, and I think they’re on the fringes now. And they sound like they’ve been on the hard ground.