“游吟詩人”鮑勃?迪倫

A hard rain was falling on a summer’s day in 2009 when the call came into the police in the New Jersey shore community of Long Branch. A dishevelled old man had been spotted walking around in the storm and staring into the windows of a vacant house with a “for sale” on it.

2009年夏天的一天，當新澤西海岸區(qū)朗布蘭奇(Long Branch)的警局接到電話時，外面正下著暴雨。有人看到一個頭發(fā)凌亂的老人在暴風雨中游蕩，盯著一套貼著“在售”標志的空房的窗戶往里看。

A 24-year-old officer was sent to investigate and found a strangely saturated senior citizen at the scene. Dressed in a hooded raincoat and black sweat pants stuffed into his boots, he carried no identification and told a tale that seemed to be on the tall side.

一名24歲的女警官被派去查看，她在現(xiàn)場發(fā)現(xiàn)了一個渾身濕透的奇怪老人。他身著連帽雨衣和黑色運動褲，褲腿塞進靴子里，他未隨身攜帶任何身份證件，說的話也讓人難以相信。

“I asked him what his name was and he said, ‘Bob Dylan’,” said the officer, Kristie Buble. “Now, I’ve seen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn’t look like Bob Dylan to me at all . . . I wasn’t sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something.”

“我問他叫什么，他說，‘鮑勃•迪倫(Bob Dylan)’。”警官克里斯蒂•布勃萊(Kristie Buble)稱，“好吧，我很久以前見過鮑勃•迪倫的照片，在我看來那個人一點都不像鮑勃•迪倫……我當時不確定他是不是從哪家醫(yī)院或其他類似地方跑出來的。”

Indulging the soaked-through fellow, the officer put him in her car and took him to the place where he said his tour bus was parked. There, she found out that this Bob Dylan was the real McCoy — a discovery that made its way into the newspapers and provoked considerable amusement about the lack of historical consciousness among the US generations that followed the baby boomers.

這位女警官沒有為難那位渾身濕透的老人，她把他帶到車上，送他去他說他的旅游車停放的地方。在那里，她發(fā)現(xiàn)這位鮑勃•迪倫就是本尊——這個發(fā)現(xiàn)登上了報紙，引發(fā)了不少對美國嬰兒潮后的幾代人缺乏歷史意識的調(diào)侃。

This week, the hooded wanderer seen in Long Branch was back in the news because the Swedish Academy selected him as the 2016 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, raising again the question of what to make of him.

上周，這位曾出現(xiàn)在朗布蘭奇的穿著連帽雨衣的“流浪漢”再次出現(xiàn)在新聞報道中，因為瑞典文學院(Swedish Academy)將他選為2016年諾貝爾文學獎(Nobel Prize for Literature)得主。這再次引發(fā)了該如何看待他的問題。

The Swedish authorities knew Dylan well and honoured him “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”. Theirs was the Dylan who became the voice of his generation, expressing the young’s unease with the conformity of the postwar era and providing the poetry that animated the fights for civil rights and against the Vietnam war.

瑞典文學院很了解鮑勃•迪倫，嘉獎他“在美國歌曲的偉大傳統(tǒng)中開創(chuàng)了新的詩性表達”。他們眼中的鮑勃•迪倫是這樣一個人：為他那一代人發(fā)聲，表達年輕人對戰(zhàn)后時代的循規(guī)蹈矩的不安，創(chuàng)作的詩歌激勵了人們爭取公民權(quán)利的抗爭以及反對越戰(zhàn)運動。

But the furtive fellow picked up by the police in New Jersey deserves to be part of the story, too. For if there is one thing that has typified the former Robert Allen Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minnesota, in recent decades it has been his resistance to being too closely identified with the pop star version of Bob Dylan.

但當時被新澤西警察局帶走的那個鬼鬼祟祟的人也應該成為故事的一部分。因為，最近幾十年，來自明尼蘇達州希賓(Hibbing)、本名羅伯特•艾倫•齊默爾曼(Robert Allen Zimmerman)的他身上最典型的特征，就是他對與流行歌手鮑勃•迪倫這一身份過于緊密地聯(lián)系在一起的抵制。

Now 75, Dylan still seems to live by the credo he set forth in his magisterial 1964 song, It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding): “He not busy being born is busy dying.” His challenge has been that so many fans treat such words as if they were scriptural — as president-to-be Jimmy Carter seemed to do when he referenced the lyric at the 1976 Democratic convention in a bid to curry favour with younger voters. Following his period of pop stardom, Dylan quickly began turning away from the legions of people turning to him as their oracle.

如今已經(jīng)75歲的迪倫，似乎仍然在依照他在1964年的經(jīng)典歌曲《沒事兒，媽媽(我不過是在流血)》(It’s Alright, Ma(I’m Only Bleeding))中提出的信條生活——“沒在忙著出生的人就在忙著死去(He not busy being born is busy dying)”。他的難題一直是，太多的粉絲把這些歌詞當作圣經(jīng)來對待——就像之前尚未當選總統(tǒng)的吉米•卡特(Jimmy Carter)在1976年的民主黨全國代表大會上，為了迎合年輕選民而引用迪倫的歌詞時那樣。在流行歌星的人生階段過去之后，迪倫開始迅速遠離那些把他視為神明的人。

“Whatever the counterculture was, I had seen enough of it,” he wrote in his memoir — Chronicles: Volume One — of his state of mind by the late 1960s. “I was sick of the way my lyrics had been extrapolated, their meanings subverted into polemics and that I had been anointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbishop of Anarchy, the Big Cheese.”

“不管反主流文化是什么，我都看夠了，”在回憶錄《編年史》(Chronicles: Volume One，較早的一個中文版名為《像一塊滾石》)中，他這樣描述自己在1960年代末之前的思想狀態(tài)。“我厭倦了我的歌詞被揣測，歌詞的意義形成了論戰(zhàn)，我被神化成了‘反叛的大佬’(Big Bubba of Rebellion)、‘抗議的大祭司’(High Priest of Protest)、‘異見的沙皇’(Czar of Dissent)、‘不服從的公爵’(Duke of Disobedience)、‘寄生蟲的領袖’(Leader of the Freeloaders)、‘叛教之皇’(Kaiser of Apostasy)、‘無政府主義的大主教’(Archbishop of Anarchy)和‘大人物’(Big Cheese)。”

The solution in recent years has been what he calls the “Never-Ending Tour”, with Dylan hiding in plain sight as a wandering minstrel, maintaining the musical flame carried before him by such heroes as Woody Guthrie and Big Bill Broonzy (his journeys have included visits to the old homes of other songwriters — leading to speculation that his mission in Long Branch was to see a house there that had once been occupied by Bruce Springsteen).

近年來，他的解決辦法是他所說的“永無止境的旅行”(Never-Ending Tour)——迪倫像游吟詩人一樣隱藏在大庭廣眾之中，傳承伍迪•格思里(Woody Guthrie)和大比爾•布倫齊(Big Bill Broonzy)等前輩曾傳遞過的音樂火焰(他的旅程包括拜訪其他詞曲作家的故居，這讓人們猜測他去朗布蘭奇是想看一看布魯斯•斯普林斯廷(Bruce Springsteen)曾經(jīng)住過的房子)。

“These songs didn’t come out of thin air,” he said at a music industry gathering in Los Angeles last year. “I learnt lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs . . . sang nothing but these folk songs and they gave me the code for everything that’s fair game”.

“這些歌不是憑空誕生的，”去年他在洛杉磯的一場音樂行業(yè)盛會上表示，“我從聽民謠中學習了歌詞以及如何撰寫歌詞……只唱這些民謠，它們給了我一切可抒寫對象的密碼”。

The results are not meant to be easily understood. “These songs of mine, they’re like mystery stories, the kind that Shakespeare saw when he was growing up,” Mr Dylan said. “They were on the fringes then, and I think they’re on the fringes now. And they sound like they’ve been on the hard ground.”

以這種方式寫出的歌曲注定不能輕易被理解。“我的那些歌，就像莎士比亞成長時期所看過的那類神秘故事，”迪倫稱，“當時它們就屬于邊緣，我認為它們現(xiàn)在仍然屬于邊緣。它們聽起來像是一直在硬邦邦的地面上。”

Not everyone thinks that merits a Nobel. More conventional literary types wondered why the Swedish committee failed to recognise writers — such as New Jersey’s native son Philip Roth — known for publishing books rather than cutting records and doing shows. Some critics detected the hand of self-indulgent, self-involved baby boomers.

并非所有人都認為這配得上得諾貝爾獎。較傳統(tǒng)的文學人士想知道為何瑞典文學院未嘉獎一些因著書而聞名的作家——比如新澤西土生土長的菲利普•羅斯(Philip Roth)——而是選擇了以出唱片和演出為主的歌手。一些批評人士認為這是自我縱容、以自我為中心的嬰兒潮一代的手筆。

“I’m a Dylan fan,” tweeted Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, “but this is an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies.”

“我不是迪倫粉，”蘇格蘭小說家、《猜火車》(Trainspotting)的作者歐文•韋爾什(Irvine Welsh)在Twitter上寫道，“但這是從語無倫次的老嬉皮士發(fā)臭的前列腺扭下來的一個欠妥的懷舊獎項。”

In a way, the controversy showed that Dylan has not lost his touch. He has a talent for inspiring mixed feelings. “Anyone who likes him at all has a relationship with him . . . that’s just about as personal as any they have with the people they actually know,” Richard Hell, the punk rock pioneer, wrote in a recent collection of nonfiction. “He’s been that useful, meaningful and exasperating all your life long.”

在某種程度上，這種爭議表明了迪倫寶刀未老。他擁有激發(fā)起復雜感情的天賦。“每一個確實喜歡他的人都和他存在關(guān)系……這種關(guān)系就像他們與真正認識的人之間的關(guān)系那樣私人，”朋克搖滾先驅(qū)理查德•黑爾(Richard Hell)在最近的散文集中寫道，“在你有生之年中，他一直都是那么有用、有意義、又令人惱火。”

Still working things out intellectually with Dylan himself, Mr Hell, 67, said he was pleased to see him win the Nobel. “You have to smile,” he told the Financial Times. “He’s an incomparable genius.” Yet a part of the old New York punk wondered whether the new Nobel laureate might turn his back on the academy once again — and take a walk.

仍然和迪倫本人一起解決腦力問題的黑爾現(xiàn)年67歲，他稱，很高興看到迪倫贏得諾貝爾獎。“你必須微笑，”他向英國《金融時報》表示，“他是個無與倫比的天才。”不過這位紐約老朋克也有一點兒好奇，想知道這位新諾獎得主又會不會拒絕瑞典文學院，獨自走開。

“It would be funny,” Mr Hell said, “if he refused it.”

“這會很有趣，”赫爾稱，“如果他拒絕領獎。”