雅思阅读丨鲍勃·迪伦终究没有出现在领奖台（下）

昨天，长沙新航道小编分享的文章《鲍勃·迪伦终究没有出现在领奖台（上）》中，和大家分享了鲍勃·迪伦的领奖致辞，致辞的结尾，他巧妙地把别人对自己的质疑转移给了诺贝尔官方，本期的雅思阅读我们就看看诺贝尔官方是如何回应“鲍勃·迪伦的作品算是文学吗？”这一质疑。

在颁奖词中，诺贝尔皇家学院的Horace Engdahl教授用一篇充满力量、极尽赞誉的演讲回击了那些批评质疑的声音。

不愧是诺贝尔文学奖的颁奖词！这篇演讲稿文采斐然，如诗一般的语言，读来极有韵味，值得细品。

What brings about the great shifts in the world of literature? Often it is when someone seizes upon a simple, overlooked form, discounted as art in the higher sense, and makes it mutate.

Thus, at one point, emerged the modern novel from anecdote and letter, thus arose drama in a new age from high jinx on planks placed on barrels in a marketplace, thus songs in the vernacular dethroned learned Latin poetry, thus too did La Fontaine take animal fables and Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales from the nursery to Parnassian heights. Each time this occurs, our idea of literature changes.

In itself, it ought not to be a sensation that a singer/songwriter now stands recipient of the literary Nobel Prize. In a distant past, all poetry was sung or tunefully recited, poets were rhapsodes, bards, troubadours; 'lyrics' comes from 'lyre'.

But what Bob Dylan did was not to return to the Greeks or the Provençals. Instead, he 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. He listened day and night, testing the stuff on his instruments, trying to learn. But when he started to write similar songs, they came out differently.

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, whether on purpose or by accident is irrelevant; all creativity begins in imitation.

Even after fifty years of uninterrupted exposure, we are yet to absorb music's equivalent of the fable's Flying Dutchman. He makes good rhymes, said a critic, explaining greatness. And it is true. His rhyming is an alchemical substance that dissolves contexts to create new ones, scarcely containable by the human brain.

It was a shock. With the public expecting poppy folk songs, there stood a young man with a guitar, fusing the languages of the street and the bible into a compound that would have made the end of the world seem a superfluous replay.

At the same time, he sang of love with a power of conviction everyone wants to own. All of a sudden, much of the bookish poetry in our world felt anaemic, and the routine song lyrics his colleagues continued to write were like old-fashioned gunpowder following the invention of dynamite. Soon, people stopped comparing him to Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams and turned instead to Blake, Rimbaud, Whitman, Shakespeare.

In the most unlikely setting of all - the commercial gramophone record - he gave back to the language of poetry its elevated style, lost since the Romantics. Not to sing of eternities, but to speak of what was happening around us. As if the oracle of Delphi were reading the evening news.

Recognising that revolution by awarding Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize was a decision that seemed daring only beforehand and already seems obvious. But does he get the prize for upsetting the system of literature? Not really. There is a simpler explanation, one that we share with all those who stand with beating hearts in front of the stage at one of the venues on his never-ending tour, waiting for that magical voice.

Chamfort made the observation that when a master such as La Fontaine appears, the hierarchy of genres - the estimation of what is great and small, high and low in literature - is nullified. “What matter the rank of a work when its beauty is of the highest rank?" he wrote. That is the straight answer to the question of how Bob Dylan belongs in literature: as the beauty of his songs is of the highest rank.

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' ἀοιδόι, beside Ovid, beside the Romantic visionaries, beside the kings and queens of the Blues, beside the forgotten masters of brilliant standards. If people in the literary world groan, one must remind them that the gods don't write, they dance and they sing. The good wishes of the Swedish Academy follow Mr. Dylan on his way to coming bandstands.

什么会带来文学世界的巨变？通常，是一种简单、被人忽视，从更高意义来说被贬低为技艺的一种形式被某个人所掌握，并令其蜕变的时候。

于是，当代小说从奇闻轶事与日常通信脱颖而出，戏剧从站在市集木桶板上表演的杂耍发轫，拉丁诗文渐被方言歌谣取代，同样地，拉·方丹将动物寓言、安徒生把童话，从育婴室升华到高蹈派诗歌的高度。每一次变化的出现，我们对于文学的看法就随之发生改变。

本来，一位歌手或作曲家成为诺贝尔文学奖得主并不应该成为一个耸人听闻的事件。在久远的过去，所有的诗都是唱出来或是带着音调起伏诵读出来的。史诗吟诵者、游吟诗人、行吟诗人，他们就是诗人；而“歌词”一词就来源于“里尔琴”。

但鲍勃·迪伦所做的并非要回到古希腊或中古的普罗旺斯。相反，他全身心地投入于20世纪的美国流行音乐中，这些都是为普通人创作的音乐，不分人种，它们在广播电台和留声机唱片中播放：抗议歌曲、乡村音乐、蓝调、早期摇滚乐、福音音乐和主流音乐……他日夜聆听，用乐器弹奏，试着学习创作。当他开始写出类似的歌曲时，它们呈现出来的却是另一片天地。

在他的手中，这些素材发生了变化。从别人的传家宝与废弃之物中、从陈腐的韵律与机灵妙语中、从邪恶的诅咒和虔诚的祷告中、从甜言蜜语和粗鄙玩笑中，他淘出了诗歌的黄金。是有心还是无意，都无关紧要。所有的创作都始于模仿。

即使在50年的不断聆听之后，我们还未能完全领悟迪伦那些在音乐领域能与《漂泊的荷兰人》相媲美的歌曲。“他的旋律朗朗上口，”一位评论家如是解释他的伟大。没错。他的韵律就像是一剂炼金秘方，溶解现有的语境创造出人类大脑所难以容纳的新内容。

多么震撼。当大众在期待着流行民谣的时候，一个年轻人手持吉他站在那儿，把街头俗语与圣经语言熔在一起，让世界末日看起来都像是多余的再现。

与此同时，他以一种人人想拥有的、令人信服的力量来歌颂爱。突然间，世间那些书面的诗词变得如此苍白无力，而他的同行们那些按部就班创作的词曲也仿佛成了随着炸药诞生而过时了的火器。很快，人们不再把他与伍迪·格思里和汉克·威廉姆斯这些音乐人相比，而是将他与威廉·布莱克（英国浪漫主义诗人）、阿蒂尔·兰波（法国象征主义诗人）、沃尔特·惠特曼（美国世人）和莎士比亚相提并论。

在商业化的黑胶唱片这一最不可能的条件中，他重新赋予诗歌语言以高昂的姿态，这是自浪漫主义时代之后便已失掉的风格。不为歌颂永恒，只在叙述我们的日常，好似德尔斐的神谕正向我们播报着晚间新闻。

通过授予鲍勃·迪伦诺奖来认可这一革命，初时似乎会觉得过于大胆，但现在已然觉得理所应当。但他获得文学奖是因为颠覆了文学系统吗？并不是。还有个更简单的解释，这个解释所有看过迪伦演出的观众都懂，他们都怀着一颗跳动的心站在迪伦那永不停歇的巡演舞台前，等待着那魔力般的声音响起。

法国剧作家尚福尔评论说，当诸如拉·方丹这类文学巨擘诞生时，文学类型的等级——对文学高低贵贱的价值估量——便再无约束力。他曾写到：“当一部作品自身的美达到了时，等级还有什么意义呢？”这也是对鲍勃·迪伦如何属于文学范畴这一问题最直白的解答：他的音乐之美已达到最崇高的地位。

迪伦的毕生作品已经改变了我们对诗的认知——诗是什么，该如何创作。鲍勃·迪伦作为一名歌手，值得与希腊声乐家、古罗马的奥维德、浪漫主义空想家、蓝调歌王歌后、和以及诸多以高标准来衡量而被遗忘的大师共享盛名。如果文学界的人对此不满，那他应该记得：神并不写作，他们只歌唱舞蹈。瑞典学院的美好祝愿将一路跟随迪伦先生的音乐之路前行。

discounted：已打折的

mutate：变化，改变，突变

anecdote：奇闻轶事

plank：木板，支架

vernacular：本地话，方言，用本地语言写成的

fable：寓言

bards：吟游诗人

troubadours：行吟诗人

rhapsodes：游唱诗人，吟诵史诗的人

lyre：里尔琴；抒情诗

gramophone：留声机

heirloom：传家宝

scrap：碎片；残余物

banal：陈腐的；平庸的；老一套的

pan：淘金

alchemical：炼金术的

rhyming：押韵

compound：化合物；混合物；复合词

superfluous：多余的；不必要的；的

conviction：确信，深信

bookish：书本上的，书呆子气的

anaemic：无活力的，贫血的

oracle：神谕

oeuvre：毕生之作

颁奖礼上的另一个插曲，是“朋克教母”帕蒂·史密斯（Patti Smith）代替鲍勃·迪伦出席了诺贝尔颁奖典礼，并献唱了他的经典作品《暴雨将至》（“A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”）

对于Patti而言，Bob Dylan是她的精神指引，也是她的挚友。现年70岁的Patti因1975年专辑《Horses》名声大噪。

她既是诗人，又是歌手。她身上兼具了诗人的温情，和朋克歌手的洒脱，是敏感抒情和桀骜不驯的结合体。

但是，经历过各种大舞台大场面的Patti在诺贝尔文学奖领奖台上的表演却紧张到忘词，连连向观众致歉：

“I'm sorry. Could we start that section again? I apologize, I'm sorry. I'm so nervous.”

Forgetting the lyric “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin”, she apologised quietly but profusely to the jewel-bedecked audience and asked if she could start that section of the song again. “I am so nervous,” she explained.Smith was encouraged by applause from the gathered dignatories and members of the Swedish royal family.

唱到“I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin”一句时，她一时忘词，向台下盛装出席的听众轻声道歉，询问乐队是不是可以从这部分重新唱。她解释道：“我太紧张了。”Patti Smith受到了台下重要嘉宾和瑞典皇室成员的掌声鼓励。

纵使她紧张忘词，但她娓娓道来、饱含深情的歌声还是打动了大家，让不少人湿了眼眶。

实至名归也好，充满争议也罢，鲍勃·迪伦注定成为许多人的记忆中和文学历史上浓墨重彩的一笔。

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