Stockholm – Rock legend Bob Dylan, the 2016 Nobel Literature Laureate, was cited for changing “the idea of what poetry can be” at the Nobel award ceremony Saturday.
Swedish Academy member Horace Engdahl gave a presentation speech on Dylan, in which he said “great shifts” often take place when “someone seizes upon a simple, overlooked form, discounted as art in the higher sense, and makes it mutate.”
He reminded that “in a distant past, all poetry was sung or tunefully recited, poets were rhapsodes, bards, troubadours; ‘lyrics’ comes from ‘lyre.'”
Engdahl said Dylan “dedicated himself body and soul to 20th century American popular music, the kind played on radio stations and gramophone records for ordinary people, white and black: protest songs, country, blues, early rock, gospel, mainstream music.”
However, Dylan’s lyrics “came out differently,” he added. “In his hands, the material changed. From what he discovered in heirloom and scrap, in banal rhyme and quick wit, in curses and pious prayers, sweet nothings and crude jokes, he panned poetry gold.”
On October 13, the Academy cited the 75-year-old singer-songwriter for creating “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
Engdahl summed up: “By means of his oeuvre, Bob Dylan has changed our idea of what poetry can be and how it can work.”
“He is a singer worthy of a place beside the Greeks’ vocalist, beside Ovid, beside the Romantic visionaries, beside the kings and queens of the Blues, beside the forgotten masters of brilliant standards,” he said.
“If people in the literary world groan, one must remind them that the gods don’t write, they dance and they sing,” Engdahl said.
Dylan last month said that due to previous commitments he would not attend the award ceremony in Stockholm’s Concert Hall.
After Engdahl’s speech, US singer Patti Smith – a friend of Dylan – performed Dylan’s song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” but stumbled over the lyrics and asked to start over, “I’m sorry, I’m so nervous,” she said.
She and Engdahl received warm applause.
It was not known when Dylan was to receive his award, worth 8 million kronor (930,000 dollars), which also comprises a gold medal and a diploma.
In recent years, several other literature laureates have been unable to attend the ceremony in person including Doris Lessing, the 2007 laureate, the 2004 Literature laureate Elfriede Jelinek of Austria, and Canada’s Alice Munro in 2013.
– dpa
