Triumph of the troubadour – The hindu editorial with vocab October 14, 2016
Over the last century, the Nobel Prize in
Literature has sprung its fair share of surprises. In
1950, for instance, the prize went to the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who
quickly followed this up with two books of awkward and astoundingly (very surprise and shocking) pedestrian short stories, written and published almost as if they
were intended to justify the award. The trend has since persisted, with the
Swedish Academy picking writers across genres and geographies. They include
Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer in 2011, the
oft-banned Chinese Mo Yan in 2012, Canadian short story writer Alice Munro in 2013,
French novelist Patrick Modiano in 2014 and Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, who has mined oral histories extensively for
her non-fiction work on life in the Soviet Union, last year. Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, a long shot in the Nobel sweepstakes
for years, is this year’s delightfully idiosyncratic
choice, for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American
song tradition”.
While the purists might be aghast भौचक्का, what
possibly clinched it for the 75-year-old is that he isn’t just another musician
with a five-decades-plus career. His lyrics — almost bordering on the philosophical
when he asks some weighty questions about peace and war in his 1962 hit,
‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ — chronicled Sixties America’s angst, marking him out as a counterculture icon although Dylan
himself would later deny having lent his voice to a generation. Like his
contemporary Leonard Cohen, Dylan also wrote in a manner that made listeners,
almost contradictorily विरोध रूप, both
engage and distance themselves from the music. In his hands the music and the
lyrics merged and separated, urging us to respond to his songwriting as melody
and rhythm, at one level, and as sheer poetry at another. His role as an
influential modern ‘English poet’ has been underrated, despite his profoundly
personal odes about war, peace, love and closure. So has been his contribution
to the evolution of modern music forms — few, for instance, would trace rap
music’s seeds in Dylan’s 51-year-old classic advisory for young adults,
‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. With every passing decade, he has reinvented
himself with a unique ability to stir hope in listeners even while plumbing the depths of darkness in his
themes. If Dylan’s body of work were to be compared to any one piece of art,
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica perhaps
comes closest. Like the beam of sunlight on a solitary flower in a slain
soldier’s hands in the depressing scene of the Spanish town destroyed by war,
Dylan still brings hope in a world going increasingly awry. And that’s worth a Nobel.
spring (APPEAR SUDDENLY) -
to appear or start to exist suddenly
pedestrian / / adjective - not interesting;
showing very little imagination
→ Synonym plodding
idiosyncrasy / / noun [ C usually plural]
a strange or unusual habit, way of behaving, or
feature that someone or something has:
Cambridge
Advanced Learner's Dictionary - 4th Edition
aghast / / adjective [ after verb]
suddenly filled with strong feelings of shock and
worry
angst / / noun - strong worry and unhappiness,
especially about personal problems
plumb the depths- idioms - to reach the lowest point
awry / / adjective [ after verb], adverb - not in the intended way
