Dylan’s Nobel lecture draws fire
The whiff of plagiarism is blowin’ in the wind for Bob Dylan.
Phrases sprinkled throughout the rock legend’s lecture for his Nobel Prize in literature are very similar to phrases from the summation of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick on Sparknotes, a sort of online Cliff’s Notes or Coles Notes that’s familiar to modern students looking for shortcuts and teachers trying to catch them.
The saga began when writer Ben Greenman pointed out on his blog on June 6 that Dylan appeared to have invented a quote from Moby Dick, which Dylan discussed in the lecture along with Buddy Holly, The Odyssey and All Quiet on the Western Front.
Then Andrea Pitzer, a writer for Slate, delved into the supposed quote and said in a story Tuesday that the line was not in Moby Dick, but was very much like a line from the Sparknotes summary of the book.
Here’s Dylan: “Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness,”
And Sparknotes: “someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness.”
Pitzer went on to find, and The Associated Press has verified, 20 other sentences with traces and phrases from the Moby Dick Sparknotes. She cites no examples in Dylan’s discussion of the other two books, and the AP found none.
The cases Pitzer found are not blatant or explicit — there are no verbatim sentences, only identical phrases and similar phrasing.
Dylan and a spokesman for the Swedish Academy weren’t immediately available for comment.
Dylan has been accused of lifting lines from older artists for his songs in the past, though many fans dismiss it as simply reflecting the common borrowing of the folkand-blues milieus he drew from.
“It is nothing new that Mr. Dylan might take inspiration from a preexisting work to prepare something else,” Steven Weinberg, a copyright lawyer and musician, told the AP in an email. “Songwriters, including Dylan, have been borrowing from other literary works to turn pop phrases for ages. Consider Led Zeppelin’s ample use of Tolkien’s classic works in many of their songs.”
Dylan recorded the 26-minute lecture in Los Angeles and provided it to the Swedish Academy.
He was awarded the prize in October, bringing some controversy that an award reserved for top-flight novelists and poets had gone to a rock star. He took weeks to publicly acknowledge the prize, did not attend December’s Nobel ceremony in Stockholm, and left many wondering whether he would ever provide the traditional lecture, which is required to collect the approximately $1-million prize.