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鲍勃·迪伦，一个真诚的美国之声 （中英文双语）试读：
能和迪伦生活在同一个时代太幸运了
鲍勃·迪伦凭借“在伟大的美国传统歌曲中注入诗意的表达”获得2016年诺贝尔文学奖。 多年来《纽约时报》一直密切关注着这位伟大的摇滚明星与文坛巨人，从他的最新动态到与他相关的各种书籍出版，用“这个声音只需一两句歌词便能将记忆化为预言，将玩笑变成威胁，把浪漫变为屠杀”这样至高的赞美来描述他的新专辑；走访“宁愿活在鲍勃·迪伦的生活里，也不愿去过自己的人生”的疯狂迪伦学家；独家预览神秘的，“只有少数几个人见过”的“迪伦档案”。时报中文网精选其中内容译为中文，带给读者。
Bob Dylan the Writer: An Authentic American Voice
Critic's Notebook/By DWIGHT GARNER/October 14, 2016Bob Dylan performed and recorded legendary songs over the decades.
“I'm the first person who'll put it to you,” Bob Dylan said in a 1978 interview, “and the last person who'll explain it to you.”
The Swedish Academy, which awarded Mr. Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, has put it to us, and it has no explaining to do to most readers and listeners, however much they might have been pulling for Philip Roth or Don DeLillo or Margaret Atwood.
This Nobel acknowledges what we've long sensed to be true: that Mr. Dylan is among the most authentic voices America has produced, a maker of images as audacious and resonant as anything in Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson.
It has never hurt that Mr. Dylan's words were delivered, as the English poet Philip Larkin once put it, in a “cawing, derisive voice” that seemed to carry the weight of myth and prophecy. Mr. Larkin was not Mr. Dylan's greatest fan. He found the lyrics to “Desolation Row” to be “possibly half-baked.”
It took a different Englishman, the venerated critic and scholar Christopher Ricks, to make the case most fully for Mr. Dylan as a complicated and complicating poet. In Mr. Ricks's sly 2004 book “Dylan's Visions of Sin,” he persuasively compared Mr. Dylan at various points with personages as distinct as Yeats, Hardy, Keats, Marvell, Tennyson and Marlon Brando.
“Dylan's in an art in which sins are laid bare (and resisted), virtues are valued (and manifested), and the graces brought home,” Mr. Ricks wrote. He added, “Human dealings of every kind are his for the artistic seizing.”
Mr. Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Duluth, Minn., in 1941, was inspired when young by potent American vernacular music, songs by performers like Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams and Robert Johnson. When his voice became fully his own, in his work of the mid-to-late 1960s that led up to what is probably his greatest song, “Like a Rolling Stone,” no one had ever heard pop songs with so many oracular, tumbling words in them.
When Bruce Springsteen inducted Mr. Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, he described the opening seconds of that song this way: “That snare shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind.” The words that followed pulled that door from its hinge. In the chorus, they posed a question that has not stopped ringing over American life: “How does it feel/To be on your own/with no direction home.”
At the time, Dylan wrote in his masterful memoir “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), “I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick.” That memoir demonstrated that Mr. Dylan could write prose as fluently as lyrics. This needed proving only because Mr. Dylan's sole novel, “Tarantula” (1966), written when he was 25, is a largely unreadable wordstew, written so as to defeat the hardiest of his idolators.
As Elvis Costello said in his own recent memoir, “If you want a long career, you have to drive people away now and again, so they realize they miss you.”
Everyone has his or her own private anthology of favorite Dylan lyrics. Mine come from songs including “Idiot Wind” (“blowing every time you move your teeth”), “Brownsville Girl” (“Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than people who are most content”), “Hurricane” (“How can the life of such a man/be in the palm of some fool's hand?”), “Sweetheart Like You” (“It's done with a flick of the wrist”) and “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread,” written with the Band (“Pack up the meat, sweet, we're headin' out”).
Then there's this, from “Blind Willie McTell”:
Well, God is in His heaven, And we all want what's his. But power and greed and corruptible seed, Seem to be all that there is.
Before this Nobel Prize, Mr. Dylan has been recognized by the world of literature and poetry. In 2008, the Pulitzer Prize jury awarded him a special citation “for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”
His songs have always packed social and political power to match the imagery. In his book “The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood,” Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke of what Mr. Dylan's songs meant to his father as well as to a generation:
“Dylan's voice was awful, an aged quaver that sounded nothing like the deep-throated or silky R&B that Dad took as gospel. But the lyrics wore him down, until he played Dylan in that addicted manner of college kids who cordon off portions to decipher the prophecies of their favorite band. Dad heard poetry, but more than that an angle that confirmed what a latent part of him had already suspected.” What was confirmed was this: The Vietnam War was a moral disgrace.
Songs are not poems, exactly. Songs prick our senses in different manner. Many of Mr. Dylan's lyrics can no doubt, as Mr. Larkin put, look half-baked when set starkly alone on a white page.
But Mr. Dylan's work — “with its iambics, its clackety-clack rhymes, and its scattergun images,” as the critic Robert Christgau wrote — has its own kind of emblematic verbal genius. His diction, focus and tone are those of a caustically gifted word man; his metrical dexterity is everywhere apparent. He is capable of rhetorical organization; more often he scatters his rhetoric like seed, or like curses.
This award is also a sign —after last year's laureate, Svetlana Alexievich, whose work is made up of interviews — that the Swedish Academy is increasingly open to nontraditional forms of writing.
In what feels like a blow for common sense and scalding wordplay, the academy has attended to Mr. Dylan's lyrics in “Lay Lady Lay,” to wit: “Why wait any longer for the one you love/When he's standing in front of you?”
In a 2004 interview in The New York Times, Mr. Ricks summed up my sense of the best of Mr. Dylan's oeuvre: “I just think we're terrifically lucky to be alive at a time when he is.”
This award is also a sign —after last year's laureate, Svetlana Alexievich, whose work is made up of interviews — that the Swedish Academy is increasingly open to nontraditional forms of writing.
In what feels like a blow for common sense and scalding wordplay, the academy has attended to Mr. Dylan's lyrics in “Lay Lady Lay,” to wit: “Why wait any longer for the one you love/When he's standing in front of you?”
In a 2004 interview in The New York Times, Mr. Ricks summed up my sense of the best of Mr. Dylan's oeuvre: “I just think we're terrifically lucky to be alive at a time when he is.”
作者鲍勃‧迪伦：一个真诚的美国之声
文化/DWIGHT GARNER/2016年10月14日鲍勃·迪伦在表演，摄于1978年。“我是第一个把它放在你面前的人，”鲍勃·迪伦（Bob Dylan）在1978年的一次采访中说道，“也是最不愿意向你解释它的人。”
星期四，瑞典文学院（Swedish Academy）把诺贝尔文学奖颁给了迪伦，他们把这个结果放在了我们面前，但是却没有为大多数读者与听众提供解释，不管这些读者们是多么看好菲利普·罗斯（Philip Roth）、唐·德里罗（Don DeLillo）或玛格丽特·阿特伍德（Margaret Atwood）。
这次把奖颁给他，等于是确认了我们一直以来的一个感觉是真的：迪伦已经跻身美国最为真诚的声音之列，他所创造的意向如同沃尔特·惠特曼（Walt Whitman）或艾米莉·迪金森（Emily Dickinson）的一样大胆、令人产生共鸣。
正如英国诗人菲利普·拉金（Philip Larkin）指出的，迪伦的歌词是用一种“鸦叫般的嘲弄之声”唱出，这嗓音从来无伤大雅，似乎承载了神话与预言的重量。不过拉金并不是迪伦最大的歌迷。他觉得《荒凉小径》（Desolation Row）的歌词“可能是半成品”。
彻底把迪伦作为一个复杂难解，且还在不断变得更加扑朔迷离的诗人来研究的，是另一位英国人——备受崇敬的评论家与学者克里斯托弗·瑞克斯（Christopher Ricks）。瑞克斯在2004年那本俏皮之作《迪伦的原罪想象》（Dylan's Visions of Sin）一书中，从各个方面把迪伦同范围广泛的各路名人进行了令人信服的对比，包括叶芝（Yeats）、哈代（Hardy）、济慈（Keats）、麦尔维尔（Marvell）、丁尼生（Tennyson）与马龙·白兰度（Marlon Brando）。“迪伦的作品是一种赤裸呈现原罪（并对之进行抵抗）的艺术，美德受到重视（并得以公开），恩宠清晰可见，”里克斯写道。他又说，“人类的每一种行为都可供他以艺术的方式去捕捉。”
迪伦原名罗伯特·艾伦·齐默曼（Robert Allen Zimmerman），于1941年出生在明尼苏达州的德卢斯，年轻时，他深受强大的美国民间音乐的影响，包括伍迪·格瑟里（Woody Guthrie）、汉克·威廉姆斯（Hank Williams）与罗伯特·约翰逊（Robert Johnson）等人的歌曲。他渐渐形成了完全属于自己的声音，在其20世纪60年代中后期的作品《像一块滚石》（Like a Rolling Stone）中，众多如同神谕般云里雾里的字眼前所未有地出现在流行歌曲之中，而这首歌或许也是他最伟大的一首歌。
1988年，布鲁斯·斯普林斯汀（Bruce Springsteen）引荐迪伦进入摇滚名人堂（Rock and Roll Hall of Fame）时这样描述这首歌的开头几秒钟：“军鼓的声音就像有人一脚踢开通向你头脑的大门。”其后的歌词更是把这扇门整个拆了下来。副歌中提出的问题多年来一直回响在美国人的生活之中：“孤身一人的感觉怎么样/没有回家的方向。”
迪伦在他精彩的回忆录《编年史：第一卷》（Chronicles: Volume One，2004）中写道，那个时候，“我觉得主流文化蹩脚极了，就是一个大笑话。”这本回忆录表明，迪伦可以像写歌词一样流畅地书写散文。这一点之所以还需要证明，只是因为迪伦的唯一一本小说，他在25岁那年创作的《狼蛛》（Tarantula, 1966）是几乎难以读懂的文字大杂烩，只是用来打击他最铁杆的崇拜者。
正如埃尔维斯·科斯特洛（Elvis Costello）在前不久出版的回忆录中写到的，“如果你希望拥有长久的事业生涯，就得时不时地赶走人群，好让他们意识到他们对你的想念。”
所有人都有自己最心爱的“迪伦歌词选”。我喜欢的歌词来自《白痴风》（Idiot Wind，“每当启齿就呼啸而来”）；《布朗斯维尔女孩》（Brownsville Girl，“一起受苦的人比心满意足的人更加紧密团结，这件事可真是奇怪”）；《飓风》（Hurricane，“这样一个男人的生活，何以落入愚人之手？”）；《甜心如你》（Sweetheart Like You，“就在手腕轻颤之间”），还有《耶，沉沉的一大瓶子面包》（Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread），是他与“乐队”（the Band）合写的（“带上点肉，宝贝，我们要出发了”）。
然后还有《盲眼威利·麦克代尔》（Blind Willie McTell）里的歌词：
上帝在他的天堂/我们都想要他的国/然而权力、贪婪与腐坏的种子/似乎依然遍布大地
在获得诺贝尔奖之前，迪伦已经获得文学界与诗歌界的认可。2008年，普利策奖评委会因为“他的歌词中带有非凡的诗意力量，对流行音乐与美国文化产生了深刻影响”，把一个特别奖颁发给他。
他的歌中总是包含与这个描述相衬的社会与政治力量。塔-奈西希·科特斯（Ta-Nehisi Coates）在《美丽的斗争：一位父亲，两个儿子与难以置信的成人之路》（The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood）一书中说起迪伦的歌曲对自己的父亲，乃至整整一代人的意义：“迪伦的声音非常可怕，带着年迈的颤音，父亲视为福音的都是那些嗓音深沉或是如丝般润滑的节奏布鲁斯歌手，和迪伦可谓相去甚远。但是他们的歌词让他厌烦，直到他上瘾般地放着迪伦的歌，就像那些把心爱乐队的歌曲分成一段段来听，企图破解歌中预言的大学生一般。”爸爸从中听到了诗歌，但更多还是一个角度，确证了已经潜藏在他心中的怀疑。他确认的是：越南战争是一种道德上的耻辱。
准确地说，歌曲并不是诗歌。歌曲是以另一种方式来刺激我们的感官。正如拉金指出的，如果只是白纸黑字地印出来，那么迪伦的很多歌词确实是半成品。
但是，正如评论家罗伯特·克里斯戈（Robert Christgau）所写到的，迪伦的作品“带着抑扬格，带着咔哒作响的清脆节奏，带着机关枪般的意象”，呈现出独特的标志性语言天分。他的措辞、焦点和语调都属于一个具有尖刻才华的文字创作者；歌词中对韵律的敏锐随处可见。他擅长组织修辞，经常把自己的雄辩像种子抑或诅咒一般播散在歌曲之中。
这个奖项也是一个标志——继去年把桂冠颁给了主要作品为访谈的斯韦特兰娜·阿列克谢耶维奇（Svetlana Alexievich）之后，瑞典文学院对非传统形式的写作有了更加开放的态度。
说句似乎有点打击常识，而且非常尖刻的俏皮话吧，瑞典文学院肯定是看了迪伦《躺下吧，女士》（Lay Lady Lay）的歌词，就是那句“当真爱就站在你的面前/为什么还要再去等待”。
在2004年接受《纽约时报》采访时，瑞克斯的一句话极好地概括了我对迪伦作品的感受：“我觉得我们能和他生活在同一个时代，简直是太幸运了。”
翻译：董楠Bob Dylan's Secret Archive
By BEN SISARIO/March 13, 2016Modernism pushes tumbleweed aside in Tucson, where finding individualistic architecture only requires wheels and a map.
For years, Bob Dylan scholars have whispered about a tiny notebook, seen by only a few, in which the master labored over the lyrics to his classic 1975 album “Blood on the Tracks.” Rolling Stone once called it “the Maltese Falcon of Dylanology” for its promise as an interpretive key.
But that notebook, it turns out, is part of a trinity. Sitting in climate-controlled storage in a museum here are two more “Blood on the Tracks” notebooks — unknown to anyone outside of Mr. Dylan's closest circle — whose pages of microscopic script reveal even more about how Mr. Dylan wrote some of his most famous songs.
There have long been rumors that Mr. Dylan had stashed away an extensive archive. It is now revealed that he did keep a private trove of his work, dating back to his earliest days as an artist, including lyrics, correspondence, recordings, films and photographs. That archive of 6,000 pieces has recently been acquired by a group of institutions in Oklahoma for an estimated $15 million to $20 million, and is set to become a resource for academic study.Bob Dylan working in a room above the Cafe Espresso in Woodstock, N.Y., in 1964, left. On the right are items from his archive.
In a preview of the Bob Dylan Archive by The New York Times, it is clear that the archives are deeper and more vast than even most Dylan experts could imagine, promising untold insight into the songwriter's work.
“It's going to start anew the way people study Dylan,” said Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian and author of “Bob Dylan in America,” when told about the existence of the archive.
Bought by the George Kaiser Family Foundation — whose namesake is an oil and banking billionaire — and the University of Tulsa, Mr. Dylan's archives are now being transferred to Oklahoma, the home state of Woody Guthrie, Mr. Dylan's early idol. After two years of cataloging and digitization, the material will take its place in Tulsa alongside a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence, a cache of Native American art and the papers of Guthrie.
Mr. Dylan said in a statement that he was glad his archives had found a home “and are to be included with the works of Woody Guthrie and especially alongside all the valuable artifacts from the Native American nations.” He added, with typical understatement, “To me it makes a lot of sense, and it's a great honor.”
With voluminous drafts from every phase of Mr. Dylan's career, the collection offers a comprehensive look at the working process of a legendarily secretive artist. Dozens of rewrites track the evolution of even minor songs like “Dignity,” which went through more than 40 pages of changes but was still cut from the 1989 album “Oh Mercy.”
Classics from the 1960s appear in coffee-stained fragments, their author still working out lines that generations of fans would come to know by heart. (“You know something's happening here but you,” reads a scribbled early copy of “Ballad of a Thin Man,” omitting “don't know what it is” and the song's famous punch line: “Do you, Mister Jones?”) The range of hotel stationery suggests an obsessive self-editor in constant motion.via the Bob Dylan ArchiveHandwritten lyrics to “Chimes of Freedom,” from 1964.
And while the archive is a further step in the canonization of Mr. Dylan, now 74, as not just a musical icon but also an American literary giant, the documents are tantalizing in what they do not reveal. A card from Barbra Streisand postmarked November 1978, for example, thanks Mr. Dylan for sending flowers and playfully suggests that they make a record together; there is no evidence of a response.
For longtime students, seeing the archive may conjure a familiar feeling of astonishment at just how deep the well of Dylanology goes. There is always far more beneath the surface than anyone could guess. One example of this phenomenon — and of how radically the material could change existing Dylan scholarship — is the “Blood on the Tracks” material.Shane Brown for The New York TimesNotebooks containing lyrics from Mr. Dylan's 1975 album “Blood on the Tracks.”
The “little red notebook,” which by most accounts was stolen from Mr. Dylan at some point, circulated among collectors and is now held at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, with access severely restricted. But the existence of two more books shows how much raw material has been unavailable and unknown for study. The song “Tangled Up in Blue,” with its refracted scenes of a wanderer haunted by a broken relationship, gets a slightly more picaresque telling here, with a refrain absent from the finished recording: “Wish I could lose, these dusty sweatbox blues.” Even in songs that have been pored over for decades, new layers of meaning await discovery.
The archive also shows the careful work behind even the most disjointed parts of the Dylan oeuvre. “Tarantula,” his book of Beat-like prose poetry, has multiple typescripts, neatly annotated by hand, while the convoluted film “Eat the Document” is represented with a thick sheath of prosaic editing notes (“me fixing my hair — might be interesting”). There are hundreds of original tape reels, unseen concert films and business contracts going back to the very beginning of Mr. Dylan's career.via the Bob Dylan ArchiveNotes on the back of a 4-track tape box from a recording session in 1966.
Humanizing touches appear, but in small and scattered pieces. There is a wallet from the mid-1960s containing Johnny Cash's phone number and Otis Redding's business card. We can see the 1969 telegram from “Peter and Dennis” (Fonda and Hopper, that is) about the use of “It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)” in the film “Easy Rider,” but the response is by a lawyer. Amid these mountains of paper, Mr. Dylan, the man, remains an enigma.
“This is an artist whose working process has been as private as his personal life,” Professor Wilentz noted.Via the Bob Dylan ArchiveA telegram to Mr. Dylan from Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper concerning the use of the song “It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)” in the 1969 movie “Easy Rider.”
George B. Kaiser, the driving force behind the acquisition, is far from the cult of rabid Dylandom. In an interview in his spacious office at the Kaiser-Francis Oil Company here, Mr. Kaiser, 73, made clear that he is less of an aficionado of Dylan than an appreciator of his place in American history. “I was taken by Joan Baez in college,” he said, “when she was singing down the block.” (He went to Harvard.)
With a fortune estimated at more than $7 billion, Mr. Kaiser is the richest man in Oklahoma, although in his plain blue shirt and Casio watch he hardly looks the part. The son of refugees from Nazi Germany, he is a major Democratic fund-raiser in one of the reddest of states, and his family foundation — which Mr. Kaiser has endowed with about $3.4 billion — supports early childhood education and works with women in prison. Five years ago, the foundation acquired Woody Guthrie's archives, and Mr. Kaiser said that the Guthrie and Dylan deals fit into the organization's broader mission of revitalizing Tulsa.Shane Brown for The New York TimesThe Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa.
“Portland wasn't always cool; Seattle wasn't always cool,” Mr. Kaiser said. “One of the ways you can try to make your city cool is by attracting talented young people and hoping that a number of them stick.”
The foundation built a slick mini-museum for the Guthrie material in downtown Tulsa, with interactive displays for the public and a professional staff for the papers. Then, in September 2014, Glenn Horowitz, a rare-book dealer in New York who had brokered the Guthrie transaction, emailed Ken Levit, the executive director of the Kaiser foundation, teasing an opportunity of “global significance.” The hyperbole, Mr. Levit said, made him think it had to be either Mr. Dylan or the Beatles.
Mr. Dylan's archives had been amassed over the years as he and his office simply placed reams of material in storage. But as curious collectors and institutions made inquiries, and as evidence mounted of the astronomical sums paid at auction for some of his early manuscripts — a handwritten copy of “Like a Rolling Stone” sold for more than $2 millionat Sotheby's in 2014 — Mr. Dylan's camp eventually hired an in-house archivist and retained Mr. Horowitz.Shane Brown for The New York TimesDrafts of lyrics for the song “Dignity,” from 1989.
Mr. Horowitz, whose deals for the papers of figures like Norman Mailer, John Updike and Kurt Vonnegut have made him the go-to broker of major literary archives, said that the Dylan collection could have gone to virtually any university. But he did not want it to be treated as just another store of papers inside a giant library. At a place like Harvard, Mr. Horowitz said, “it would almost be as if it was just, after Emerson and after Updike, here comes Bob.”
So he pitched the collection to the Kaiser foundation and the University of Tulsa as a magnet for both scholarly study and international tourism. Most of the material will be housed at the Helmerich Center for American Research, a facility at the Gilcrease Museum, which is affiliated with the university. The Gilcrease has a vast collection of western art and early colonial archives, a fittingly historical setting for a songwriter whose words are regularly cited by Supreme Court justices. Although plans are still being made, the Kaiser foundation is also considering a spot next to the Guthrie museum for a new Dylan gallery that will be open to the public.
Access to the bulk of the archive will be restricted, but Steadman Upham, the president of the University of Tulsa — and an avowed Dylan fan — acknowledged that when it comes to experts in this material, the standard academic credentials need not apply. “We will be set up for serious scholars and for people who have a record of being Dylanologists,” he said.
So far, Mr. Dylan has not visited the foundation, the Gilcrease or the university. He had been scheduled to make a stop while passing through Tulsa on tour last year, but a tornado whipping through the region gave him only enough time to play the show and make it to the next town.
When asked about the size of the transaction, Mr. Kaiser and others involved in the deal declined to comment. The full archive was appraised at more than $60 million, with the bulk of it given as a donation; the difference between the appraised value and the purchase price may allow Mr. Dylan to claim a large charitable donation for tax purposes.
For Mr. Dylan, another motivation for the deal might be the prestige of an afterlife beside Guthrie, or a center devoted to serious study of his work. Over the last decade or so, he has also tended to his legacy, with the publishing of the first volume of his memoirs, “Chronicles,” in 2004; the release of Martin Scorsese's documentary “No Direction Home,” in 2005; and even his career-spanning speech at a Grammy event last year.
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