Eventually, I would like to write something about this very short essay by Jorge Luis Borges. I had tried to work an excursus on it into a review essay I’m writing, but it just wasn’t working and read very forced. It’s now sitting in a file called “cut bits from review essay.docx.” (I will just note that with Borges being the writer he is, I did actually track down his reference to Ramos Mejía, and it exists as it is reflected in this essay.) So for now, I’m just sharing the text, because it’s one of those things I think everyone should read. This is allegedly an image of the original manuscript copy, currently for sale in a Buenos Aires bookshop (anyone have a spare $24k they don’t know what to do with?); I’m not enough of a Borgista to know if this is really his hand or not. In any case, it’s very clear. Read on.
The Nobel Prize in Literature went (as you surely know unless you have been living under a rock) to Bob Dylan this year. The news was followed by rather a lot of complaining about the choice, agonizing about the nature of the literary, and pearl-clutching over the decline of high culture in favor of pop. The one community in which none of this happened was amongst medievalists: Those of us who study the protest poetry and personal anthems of the Middle Ages, written in verse and often sung aloud, do not have the luxury of holding up the Provençal troubadour lyric (just to give one example) as the exemplification of the literary just because it is old while condemning Bob Dylan for being pop or soppy or definitely not poetry because he is a lot less old. The line is blurry and in the end they are the same thing: Bob Dylan is our troubadour.
For more on rock music and its relationship to the Provençal lyric, read chapter 3 of María Rosa Menocal’s Shards of Love, which focuses on a collaboration between the Persian poet Nizami and the rocker Eric Clapton that transcended language, death, and eight-hundred years. That chapter argues, in part, that in lyrics like Dylan’s or Clapton’s or the Provençal troubadours, the music is an inherent part of the poetics and the lyrics and the music can’t be separated out and read separately. It makes perfectly good sense: we don’t, for example, separate out the two languages in bilingual poetry or the sources or influences from poetry written at a cultural crossroads (or we shouldn’t, anyway). Some medieval Hebrew poetry has Arabic metrics; some medieval Arabic poetry ends with a Romance couplet; some Provençal poetry is influenced by Arabic forms and sung as song; and some twentieth-century American poetry has electric guitars.
Menocal brought rock to medieval studies in ways that were revolutionary and totally self-evident. (And in fact, having been her student, the coincidental timing of the fourth anniversary of her death and the awarding of a Nobel Prize that I’d like to think would have thrilled her gives this all a bit more weight for me.)
But despite my intellectual lineage, I don’t know all that much about Bob Dylan’s oevre. I find his voice hard to listen to, so I mostly don’t. At the end of the day, I’m a Clapton-Beatles kind of girl. The song of Dylan’s that I know the best, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” isn’t one that I know because of him, per se, or through a recording that he made. I don’t even really know it in English. In the early 1970s, the Israeli poet Jonathan Geffen translated several of Dylan’s songs into Hebrew, which were recorded in 1974 Danny Litani.
