Claudia: As Andrew says, we're arguing taste here, which ultimately goes nowhere. But I disagree with your remark in two ways: 1) I just disagree. Many of his songs are among my favorite poems. 2) But he did set them to music. Your remark is something like saying Mr. Steinbeck would never have won this prize if he'd written Physics textbooks and Christmas cards instead of novels. Yeah, but he did write novels. Dylan did write songs. So are songs "literature?" (I say yes, but it's an interesting question...) And, if so, are Dylan's "great?" (For me they are the very greatest. I often have the experience of hearing one for the first time in ages and thinking that nobody--not even my very favorites, like Richard Thompson or Polly Harvey or whoever you would name--has ever written a song as good...and then hearing one BETTER later on the album. But, again, this is to argue taste...)

There is another point to discuss. The Nobel Lit Prize, although widely perceived as such, is not actually the top honor for being the very best at, like, writing. It also has a specifically political dimension--something about writing in an ideal or idealistic direction. This may have excluded some literary greats in the past, likely influenced the 2015 choice of a Belarusian journalist, and may be in play with Dylan.

Roger--"Popular song" was me putting words in Andrew's mouth, but it's close enough to stuff Dylan says about how he sees his calling.

Yeah. Hmmm. I'm not so opposed to including song writers/musicians, but opening up the category does make me wonder who may be worthier. Popular or not. You don't think Bob Dylan was popular music, Roger? "Literary sensibilities" is just taste, I think. (And perhaps generation.) I think Bob Dylan was great, with the music. Which is ok. (But there were better lyricists.)

From Wikipedia (I remember my whoop of joy upon hearing the Norton Anthology editors had selected this Dylan song):

"Boots of Spanish Leather" is a ballad written and performed by Bob Dylan, and released in 1964 on his album The Times They Are a-Changin'.[1]

Dylan's recording features him solo on the acoustic guitar, playing the song using fingerpicking.

Lyrically, "Boots of Spanish Leather" is a "restless, forlorn ballad for the ages and sages—a classic Dylan tale of two lovers, a crossroads, and the open sea."[2] The song is written as a dialogue, with the first six verses alternating between the two lovers; however, the last three verses are all given by the lover who has been left behind. Within these nine verses, one of the lovers - a woman - goes across the sea. She writes, asking whether her lover would like any gift, and her lover refuses, saying they only want her back. Towards the end it becomes clear that she is not returning, and she finally writes saying she may never come back. Her lover comes to realize what has happened and finally gives her a material request: "Spanish boots of Spanish leather." Michael Gray says there is a strong parallel between this line and the traditional folk song "Blackjack Davey," which Dylan arranged and recorded for his 1992 album Good as I Been to You, and in which footwear of Spanish leather also plays a significant role.[3]

The song is included in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, 5th edition, in the section titled "Popular Ballads of the 20th Century."

Stephen Metcalf's take, at Slate:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/...iterature.html

Nobel
 

I am not a Dylan fan. I find his voice irritating and his music sounds best to me when performed by other artists. But I have his lyrics 1962 to 2001 sitting on my poetry bookshelves between Stephen Dunn and Richard Eberhart. I take Dylan's lyrics out every once in a while and read a few pages. The man writes poetry. No one wants to give popular culture it's due. Dylan and the Nobel committee forces us to. I am not on the Dylan bandwagon. I just sit on the sidelines as it passes with my hands in my pockets but applauding nevertheless.

Bill

Thanks for the link, Max. I'm still reading. But I stopped at the Lennon/Dylan. Lennon was, of course, very influenced by Dylan, for a time (You've Got to Hide Your Love Away, etc), but it doesn't, imo, account for where he, and the Beatles, ultimately arrived. In other words, that's overstated. Maybe grossly overstated.

Hi, James,

In my very quick read of the beginning of the article, it seemed to me that Metcalf was crediting Dylan's influence with getting Lennon started putting more into his songs, not with his whole subsequent development.

I'm looking forward to peaking in on this discussion tomorrow. It raises interesting topics.

Max

Sure, Max. And I'm coming off as overly critical I think. Given John's upbringing, disposition, and a fairly creative environment with the Beatles (Paul McCartney's Eleanor Rigby has at least some literary merit), I'm just fairly certain he would have arrived there on his own. But who cares. Back to Bob and the Nobel.

It's surprising, but only because I thought the Nobel committee was much stuffier than this. Perhaps they're simply making an uncomprehending gesture toward broadmindedness. I don't know.

I've often compared Hafez to Bob Dylan — and I'm not the only one. For example the poet and Persianist Dick Davis writes:

"If we jump forward in time to a poet of a very different kind, Hafez’s poems can remind us of the songs of Bob Dylan, particularly his more meditative ones. Again, there is the music, and also the way a Dylan song often hovers at the edge of the paraphrasable, which might be because we don’t have enough background information to attempt the paraphrase, or because there isn’t a paraphrase, a back-story, to be found at all, simply a series of images that create a pervasive mood and suggest a thematic coherence. There is too the loathing of hypocrisy that comes through in some of Dylan’s songs, the earnest sense, casually conveyed, that life is too serious for posturing and lies. “So let us not speak falsely now, the hour is getting late” could easily be a line from Hafez."

I've also heard Sinologists, in private conversation, remark upon how similar Li Bai's poetry was to Bob Dylan's, and for similar reasons.

Russians often enjoy him a great deal in translation. And a look around the Russophone internet will turn up a staggering amount of literary translations of Dylan's lyrics.

There have been many recipients of the Nobel who deserved it far less than Dylan. I'm glad to see some prize-awarding entity that people take seriously acknowledging that artists like Dylan aren't "mere entertainers," and exposing the incoherent parochialisms which delimit the category "literature" as modern Western Europeans and more especially North Americans understand it (or more accurately, as understood by the Anglophone world and its closest European epigones, commonly conflated with the world as a whole.)

That understanding of literature is in some ways different from, say, how Eastern Europeans understand it. Note Russians' admiration for Vladimir Vysotsky, the great singerpoet (his occupation is listed as "Bard" on English Wikipedia — seriously, go check.) Figures like Vysotsky are numerous in the region. If Dylan were singing his lyrics in Russian or Lithuanian or Baltic Romani, his audience wouldn't have nearly as much difficulty processing his work as literature — and in the latter case likely wouldn't see the point in asking whether it is or isn't. It strikes me as sad, but also hilarious, that a translation of one of Vysotsky's lyrics could make it into, say, Poetry Magazine, but an opposite number of his like Bob Dylan never, ever could be. The very fact of this hypocrisy suggests not only the inability of Americans to apprehend Vysotsky's dimensionality as an oral artist, but that Americans themselves are the ones who have become deaf — in an almost literal sense — to some of what has made literature so meaningful to its audiences.

The narrow, and almost self-eviscerating, conception of literature is not unique to the Anglophone world. Versions or analogues of it have been pervasive in one form or another among many elites, and, even more than the elites, among those who aspired to be part of the elite and so made a cargo cult of exaggerating all the snobberies they though were necessary to attain higher stations — who took it for granted that what commoners responded to, or what was important to them, was inferior. This is also by no means always the case (medieval societies where courtly song was much prized are a bit of a different animal.) Regardless, it is, as I've said, especially virulent in the Anglophone world and its epigones. Most of all in the US. One of the most nauseating things about Americans, to put it bluntly, is that we are incredibly, embarrassingly uncultured in this way — such that we are all too ready to simply take the definitions or dimensions of literature (particularly non-prose) as handed down from on high at face value, whether by defenders of the traditional canon, or by the multiculturalists who think their elitism is somehow a virtue just for coming in all colors of the rainbow. It is philistinism turned inside out and upside down, a bit like a eunuch at an orgy who thinks that if he just imitates everybody else's amorous gyrations he'll be engaging in intercourse.

The result is injurious to language-art of all sorts, as it encourages those who partake of sung lyric not to ask too much of the stuff they listen to, because — they are made to believe — it's not where real greatness is found anyway (leading to a philistinization of song itself and to spoken word poetry that winds up seldom rising above an exercise in whiny affirmation and self-indulgence.) On the other hand it encourages written or self-consciously "literary" verse to look down upon anything that seems too much like you could set it to music.

(Note the borderline superstitious disdain, among Anglophone literary arbiters throughout a goodly portion of the late 20th century, for any and all rhymed verse unless it was written before WWII. This has slowly begun to change since the late 90s, though. Ironically those championing form in verse are also the ones most averse too much "deviant" English in it. The narrowness always just gets moved elsewhere. Like body fat being shunted from your viscera to your extremities as winter approaches.)

Not only does such an autoerotic hallucination generally refuse to admit sung or otherwise orally appreciated works unless and until they ditch the music, ditch the oral medium, and consign themselves to the undead lethe of philology and/or print, but preference is generally given to things in a language that has ceased to be fully intelligible to any but the cognoscenti. That way we can think "oh songsters and popular entertainers were great in the days of yore, like in Elizabethan England or 13th century Occitania, but now they're so vulgar." (Lost golden age much? Yeah, I've heard that one before. Sell it to Tolkien. I ain't buyin'.) Thank god Sappho managed to achieve a sufficiently de-musicked afterlife that people started thinking of her as a "writer."

I'll take Dylan over the preposterous Toni Morrison any day.