鮑勃迪倫 我們這個時代的奇人
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.
我是第一個把它放在你面前的人，鮑勃•迪倫(Bob Dylan)在1978年的一次採訪中說道，也是最不願意向你解釋它的人。
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.
星期四，瑞典文學院(Swedish Academy)把諾貝爾文學獎頒給了迪倫，他們把這個結果放在了我們面前，但是卻沒有爲大多數讀者與聽衆提供解釋，不管這些讀者們是多麼看好菲利普•羅斯(Philip Roth)、唐•德里羅(Don DeLillo)或瑪格麗特•阿特伍德(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.
這次把獎頒給他，等於是確認了我們一直以來的一個感覺是真的：迪倫已經躋身美國最爲真誠的聲音之列，他所創造的意向如同沃爾特•惠特曼(Walt Whitman)或艾米莉•迪金森(Emily Dickinson)的一樣大膽、令人產生共鳴。
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.
正如英國詩人菲利普•拉金(Philip Larkin)指出的，迪倫的歌詞是用一種鴉叫般的嘲弄之聲唱出，這嗓音從來無傷大雅，似乎承載了神話與預言的重量。
Mr Larkin was not Mr Dylan’s greatest fan.
不過拉金並不是迪倫最大的歌迷。
He found the lyrics to Desolation Row to be possibly half-baked.
他覺得《荒涼小徑》(Desolation Row)的歌詞可能是半成品。
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.
徹底把迪倫作爲一個複雜難解，且還在不斷變得更加撲朔迷離的詩人來研究的，是另一位英國人——備受崇敬的評論家與學者克里斯托弗•瑞克斯(Christopher Ricks)。
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.
瑞克斯在2004年那本俏皮之作《迪倫的原罪想象》(Dylan’s Visions of Sin)一書中，從各個方面把迪倫同範圍廣泛的各路名人進行了令人信服的對比，包括葉芝(Yeats)、哈代(Hardy)、濟慈(Keats)、麥爾維爾(Marvell)、丁尼生(Tennyson)與馬龍•白蘭度(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.
迪倫的作品是一種赤裸呈現原罪（並對之進行抵抗）的藝術，美德受到重視（並得以公開），恩寵清晰可見，裏克斯寫道。
He added, Human dealings of every kind are his for the artistic seizing.
他又說，人類的每一種行爲都可供他以藝術的方式去捕捉。
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.
迪倫原名羅伯特•艾倫•齊默曼(Robert Allen Zimmerman)，於1941年出生在明尼蘇達州的德盧斯，年輕時，他深受強大的美國民間音樂的影響，包括伍迪•格瑟裏(Woody Guthrie)、漢克•威廉姆斯(Hank Williams)與羅伯特•約翰遜(Robert Johnson)等人的歌曲。
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.
他漸漸形成了完全屬於自己的聲音，在其20世紀60年代中後期的作品《像一塊滾石》(Like a Rolling Stone)中，衆多如同神諭般雲裏霧裏的字眼前所未有地出現在流行歌曲之中，而這首歌或許也是他最偉大的一首歌。
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.
1988年，布魯斯•斯普林斯汀(Bruce Springsteen)引薦迪倫進入搖滾名人堂(Rock and Roll Hall of Fame)時這樣描述這首歌的開頭幾秒鐘：軍鼓的聲音就像有人一腳踢開通向你頭腦的大門。
The words that followed pulled that door from its hinge.
其後的歌詞更是把這扇門整個拆了下來。
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.
副歌中提出的問題多年來一直迴響在美國人的生活之中：孤身一人的感覺怎麼樣/沒有回家的方向。
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.
迪倫在他精彩的回憶錄《編年史：第一卷》(Chronicles: Volume One，2004）中寫道，那個時候，我覺得主流文化蹩腳極了，就是一個大笑話。
That memoir demonstrated that Mr Dylan could write prose as fluently as lyrics.
這本回憶錄表明，迪倫可以像寫歌詞一樣流暢地書寫散文。
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.
這一點之所以還需要證明，只是因爲迪倫的唯一一本小說，他在25歲那年創作的《狼蛛》(Tarantula, 1966)是幾乎難以讀懂的文字大雜燴，只是用來打擊他最鐵桿的崇拜者。
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.
正如埃爾維斯•科斯特洛(Elvis Costello)在前不久出版的回憶錄中寫到的，如果你希望擁有長久的事業生涯，就得時不時地趕走人羣，好讓他們意識到他們對你的想念。
Everyone has his or her own private anthology of favorite Dylan lyrics.
所有人都有自己最心愛的迪倫歌詞選。
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).
我喜歡的歌詞來自《白癡風》（Idiot Wind，每當啓齒就呼嘯而來）；《布朗斯維爾女孩》（Brownsville Girl，一起受苦的人比心滿意足的人更加緊密團結，這件事可真是奇怪）；《颶風》（Hurricane，這樣一個男人的生活，何以落入愚人之手？）；《甜心如你》（Sweetheart Like You，就在手腕輕顫之間），還有《耶，沉沉的一大瓶子麪包》(Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread)，是他與樂隊(the Band)合寫的（帶上點肉，寶貝，我們要出發了）。
Then there’s this, from Blind Willie McTell:
然後還有《盲眼威利•麥克代爾》(Blind Willie McTell)裏的歌詞：
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.
上帝在他的天堂/我們都想要他的國/然而權力、貪婪與腐壞的種子/似乎依然遍佈大地在獲得諾貝爾獎之前，迪倫已經獲得文學界與詩歌界的認可。
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.
2008年，普利策獎評委會因爲他的歌詞中帶有非凡的詩意力量，對流行音樂與美國文化產生了深刻影響，把一個特別獎頒發給他。
His songs have always packed social and political power to match the imagery.
他的歌中總是包含與這個描述相襯的社會與政治力量。
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:
塔-奈西希•科特斯(Ta-Nehisi Coates)在《美麗的鬥爭：一位父親，兩個兒子與難以置信的成人之路》(The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood)一書中說起迪倫的歌曲對自己的父親，乃至整整一代人的意義：
Dylan’s voice was awful, an aged quaver that sounded nothing like the deep-throated or silky R&B that Dad took as gospel.
迪倫的聲音非常可怕，帶着年邁的顫音，父親視爲福音的都是那些嗓音深沉或是如絲般潤滑的節奏布魯斯歌手，和迪倫可謂相去甚遠。
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.
但是他們的歌詞讓他厭煩，直到他上癮般地放着迪倫的歌，就像那些把心愛樂隊的歌曲分成一段段來聽，企圖破解歌中預言的大學生一般。
Dad heard poetry, but more than that an angle that confirmed what a latent part of him had already suspected.
爸爸從中聽到了詩歌，但更多還是一個角度，確證了已經潛藏在他心中的懷疑。
What was confirmed was this: The Vietnam War was a moral disgrace.
他確認的是：越南戰爭是一種道德上的恥辱。
Songs are not poems, exactly.
準確地說，歌曲並不是詩歌。
Songs prick our senses in different manner.
歌曲是以另一種方式來刺激我們的感官。
Many of Mr Dylan’s lyrics can no doubt, as Mr Larkin put, look half-baked when set starkly alone on a white page.
正如拉金指出的，如果只是白紙黑字地印出來，那麼迪倫的很多歌詞確實是半成品。
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.
但是，正如評論家羅伯特•克里斯戈(Robert Christgau)所寫到的，迪倫的作品帶着抑揚格，帶着咔噠作響的清脆節奏，帶着機關槍般的意象，呈現出獨特的標誌性語言天分。
His diction, focus and tone are those of a caustically gifted word man; his metrical dexterity is everywhere apparent.
他的措辭、焦點和語調都屬於一個具有尖刻才華的文字創作者；歌詞中對韻律的敏銳隨處可見。
He is capable of rhetorical organization; more often he scatters his rhetoric like seed, or like curses.
他擅長組織修辭，經常把自己的雄辯像種子抑或詛咒一般播散在歌曲之中。
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.
這個獎項也是一個標誌——繼去年把桂冠頒給了主要作品爲訪談的斯韋特蘭娜•阿列克謝耶維奇(Svetlana Alexievich)之後，瑞典文學院對非傳統形式的寫作有了更加開放的態度。
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?
說句似乎有點打擊常識，而且非常尖刻的俏皮話吧，瑞典文學院肯定是看了迪倫《躺下吧，女士》(Lay Lady Lay)的歌詞，就是那句當真愛就站在你的面前/爲什麼還要再去等待。
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.
在2004年接受《紐約時報》採訪時，瑞克斯的一句話極好地概括了我對迪倫作品的感受：我覺得我們能和他生活在同一個時代，簡直是太幸運了。
