Bob Dylan admitted he was stunned and surprised when he was told he had won a Nobel prize because he had never stopped to consider whether his songs were literature.. Dylan, whose speech … We see only the surface of things. Songs aren’t like the books he’s been talking about. Life is breaking down all around you, and the shells are whistling. You need to enable JavaScript to use SoundCloud. Bob Dylan,2016 Nobel Prize winner for literature I was playing for small crowds, sometimes no more than four or five people in a room or on a street corner. Touching things he’s told not to. Myself and a lot of other songwriters have been influenced by these very same themes. It’s been a hard road to travel. It’s a pleasant memory. Écrivez un article et rejoignez une communauté de plus de 116 300 universitaires et chercheurs de 3 774 institutions. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back. When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" Is your network connection unstable or browser outdated? I’ll put it in front of you. Are they literary performances in themselves, in which the author takes pre-existing works and fashions, in a quasi-improvisatory way, something altogether new? But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. I don't know if these men and women ever thought of the Nobel honor for themselves, but I suppose that anyone writing a book, or a poem, or a play anywhere in the world might harbor that secret dream deep down inside. There’s endless assaults, poison gas, nerve gas, morphine, burning streams of gasoline, scavenging and scabbing for food, influenza, typhus, dysentery. The recorded version of the speech presents Dylan’s old-timer delivery against the sonic backdrop of a jazzy, cocktail-bar piano. Bob Dylan has finally delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech â just in time to claim the reward. All that culture from a thousand years ago, that philosophy, that wisdom – Plato, Aristotle, Socrates – what happened to it? So, I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least. More religious allegory. To cite this section Boats are lowered. One brand. He concluded by saying. Then you notice the cherry blossoms, and you see that nature is unaffected by all this. Dylan highlighted the novelâs multicultural nature and the way it layers disparate crumbs of knowledge from different fields: This World War I novel was published in 1929 and details the intimate experiences and daily lives of young soldiers, highlighting the trauma of war. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. He was carried off somewhere and left there. Making records and hearing your songs on the radio meant that you were reaching a big audience and that you might get to keep doing what you had set out to do. There’s two roads to take, and they’re both bad. Goddesses and gods protect him, but some others want to kill him. And, almost finally, he casually admits that “songs are unlike literature” after all. But soon they’ll be on somebody else’s feet. Nobel Media AB 2020. Are we listening to redundant re-tellings of three old books, or do Dylan’s accounts offer allegories of the main themes in his own work? When Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in late 2016, it ruffled a few feathers. And yesterday Dylan finally, and in the nick of time, undertook the one hurdle required to receive the $1 million associated with the prize: to give a speech within six months of the prize’s announcement. And I had had that for a while. You had to have a wide repertoire, and you had to know what to play and when. Boats are lowered again. But there’s one thing I must say. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you no good. I extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight. True, it might have the utilitarian purpose of making it harder for musicians to sample Dylan’s spoken-word performance (and there are some moments that could sound great in the right musical context). 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Nobel Banquet speech, 10 December 2016 Good evening, everyone. Of course, I might be taking this all too seriously, as the cheesy piano in the audio version reminds me. For more than a century, these academic institutions have worked independently to select Nobel Laureates in each prize category. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried. If you could, you’d put a bullet in his face. All rights to the Nobel Lecture by Bob Dylan are reserved and the Nobel Lecture may not be published or otherwise used by third parties with one exception: the audio file containing the Nobel Lecture, as published at Nobelprize.org, the official website of the Nobel Prize, may be embedded on other websites. They’re meant to be sung, not read. Specific books that have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school – I want to tell you about three of them: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey. The demented captain who actually lost his leg years ago trying to attack Moby with a knife. Takin’ the pistol out and puttin’ it back in your pocket. Sure, this was a controversial choice. Still, the style of the music seems deliberately eccentric. He was nobody. When Dylan says of the hero that “courage won’t save him, but his trickery will”, it’s not just a good (and accurate) description of Odysseus - it could also be a masterpiece of micro self-portraiture.