Dylan delivers Nobel lecture
Meets obligation and receives nearly US$1M
NEW YORK • Bob Dylan has completed his Nobel course requirements.
The Swedish Academy announced Monday that it has received the mandatory lecture from the 2016 literature winner, enabling Dylan to collect US$922,000 in prize money. Spokeswoman Sara Danius described Dylan’s talk as “extraordinary” and “eloquent.” Nobel Prize officials said the 26-minute talk was recorded on Sunday in Los Angeles and an audio clip is posted on the academy’s website, www.nobelprize.org.
Danius said its delivery to the academy meant that “the Dylan adventure is coming to a close.”
Widely regarded as the most influential songwriter of his time, Dylan received the Nobel Literature diploma and medal in April but was still required to give a speech to receive the money. He took weeks to publicly acknowledge even winning the prize, which was announced in October and greeted with both joy and dismay that a rock star had received an honour previously given to William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Alice Munro. He did not attend December’s Nobel ceremony in Stockholm.
Dylan’s recording is a celebration of books and music and of the common language among art forms. In a raspy delivery, with lounge-style piano in the background, he called Buddy Holly his first musical hero, praised his “imaginative verses” and remembered seeing him in concert not long before Holly died in a 1959 plane crash.
“Something about him seemed permanent and he filled me with conviction,” Dylan said of seeing Holly on stage. “Then out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened, he looked at me right straight there in the eye and he transmitted something, something I didn’t know what. It gave me the chills.”
Dylan said that folk songs were his earliest musical vocabulary, but that books such as Ivanhoe and Don Quixote helped shape his view of the world and inspire him to write songs “unlike anything anybody had ever heard.” From the start, he believed in absorbing classical texts and the vernacular of the day.
He discussed three works at length: Moby Dick, (a reminder we “see only the surface of things”), All Quiet on the Western Front (in which “death is everywhere, nothing else is possible”) and“The Odyssey, a “strange, adventurous tale” he likened to such modern pop songs as Simon & Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound.