Bob Dylan finally delivers his Nobel lecture

Bob Dylan finally delivers the lecture required to keep the $1.2m prize money, eight months after he won the Nobel prize for literature | LISTEN

Bob Dylan has delivered a lecture to qualify for the cash reward that comes with the Nobel prize for literature, months after the singer-songwriter was named the winner at a ceremony he declined to attend.

“When I received the Nobel prize for literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature,” Dylan, 76, said in a recorded 26-minute address.

“I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was. I’m gonna try and articulate it to you — and most likely it will go in a roundabout way.”

He does not disappoint, offering freewheeling summaries of three books that he said were special influences — Moby-Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.

Of Moby-Dick, he wrote: “We see only the surface of things. We can interpret what lies below any way we see fit. Crewmen walk around on deck listening for mermaids, and sharks and vultures follow the ship. Reading skulls and faces like you read a book. Here’s a face. I’ll put it in front of you. Read it if you can.”

He also highlighted the influence of Buddy Holly and Huddie William Ledbetter, the American folk and blues musician known as Lead Belly.

In a warm, raspy delivery, with lounge-style piano in the background, he called Buddy Holly his first musical hero, praised his “imaginative verses” and remembered seeing him in concert not long before Holly died in a 1959 plane crash.

“Something about him seemed permanent and he filled me with conviction,” Dylan said of seeing Holly on stage. “Then out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened, he looked at me right straight there in the eye and he transmitted something, something I didn’t know what. It gave me the chills.”

Dylan’s relationship with the Swedish Academy, which awards Nobel prizes, has been testy. He irked some academy members by failing to comment for weeks after he was named the winner. He declined to attend the ceremony in December, opting instead to collect the award privately later. To qualify for the £715,000 ($1.2m) cash prize he had to deliver a lecture by June 10.

He ended his lecture with what seems like a teasing jab at the academy. “Songs are unlike literature,” he said. “They’re meant to be sung, not read ... I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says: ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’ ”

The Times