Very Nobel: Dylan will let friend pick up his prize

UNITED STATES: When they first announced their decision to award Bob Dylan their prize for literature, the Nobel Committee was met by a chorus of cheers and jeers from the literary establishment and an awkward silence from the musician himself.

Nearly two months later, on the eve of a week of prize-giving ceremonies, the Swedish academy announced glad tidings: though Dylan will not attend the festivities, he has deigned to write them a speech, to be read in his absence.

Instead, Patti Smith, his friend, sometime collaborator and fan, will appear, as a sort of ambassador from the land of Dylan.

She will speak at a conference of Nobel laureates, scientists and policymakers and at the Nobel banquet on Saturday she will perform one of the many Dylan songs that the academy regarded as literature. ‘‘Patti Smith will perform Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall at the #NobelPrize Award Ceremony,’’ the academy said.

Recorded for the 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which also contains Blowin in The Wind , it is a protest song that speaks, in the style of the Book of Revelation, of sad forests, dead oceans and the end of days.

In an interview in 1996, Smith, a fellow poet of Greenwich Village who emerged as a leading figure of New York’s punk movement, said: ‘‘To me, Dylan always represented rock’n’roll - I never thought of him as a folk singer or poet or nothing.’’

- The Times