I swear I didn’t know.
And because I didn’t know, when I heard about Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize in literature I was as puzzled as the next, thinking what the heck?, what were those guys at the Swedish Academy thinking about?, is it a canard? But no; it was true, and they had come up with that implausible explanation — rather a justification: “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition“. Oh, please!
For a few minutes I wondered, like everybody around me, if there were really no better and worthier candidates out there who wrote real literature or poetry and beat Dylan by a landslide. But… ‘new poetic expressions’ or ‘Great American song tradition’? Give me a break! Why should the literature jury at the Academy particularly care about the USAmerican song tradition? Whatever.
In any case, I got the hasty conclusion that the Swedish must have just been bootlicking the USA — like mostly everyone does.
Yet, this conclusion didn’t quite convince me; something didn’t tie in; since, if they were simply flattering ‘the great American nation’, there were other USAmerican authors, real writers, cultivated and praiseworthy artists who beat Dylan by a landslide, and whom to award the Nobel in literature, rather than to a — sure, remarkable, but just another singer songwriter among the crowd. Continue reading
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