|
Bob Dylan’s Poetry
and Music Explored in a New
Book by an Italian
by LindAnn Lo Schiavo
“Poetry,”
noted Robert Frost, once
America
’s Poet Laureate, “is what gets lost in
translation.”
Protest
poetry was the language Bob Dylan was born to create, sing, inspire in
others, and then re-create for himself.
Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on
May 24, 1941
[
Duluth
,
Minnesota
], the legendary performer will soon turn 60.
When he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Bruce
Springsteen had this to say: “Bob
freed the mind the way Elvis freed the body.
He showed us that just because the music was innately physical
did not mean that it was anti-intellectual.
He had the vision and the talent to make a pop song that
contained the whole world. He
invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the
limitations of what a recording artist could achieve, and changed the
face of rock and roll forever.”
Assessing
Bob Dylan’s impact in The Guardian, British journalist Sean O'Hagen
admired the way that “Dylan had rewritten the rules of rock music like
no other artist before, or since, in a blaze of creativity that, as
critic Greil Marcus once wrote, ‘ranks with the most intense outbreaks
of 20th-century modernism’.
Dylan’s performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, fronting
an electric band, had single-handedly demolished the protest-folk era
that he, more than anyone else, had defined.
The release of dense, swirling songs such as Positively 4th
Street and Like A Rolling Stone, both recorded on
July 19, 1965
, had challenged all previous notions of what
constituted a pop song. And
then his abandonment of politics for a new kind of lyrical
sophistication that, in places, defied interpretation took a while
for his audience to get used to.”
English-speakers
know many of Dylan’s hits by heart, and his songs have attracted a
global following -- even if something got lost in translation.
An intriguing new book -- that also translates several Bob Dylan
songs into Italian -- is by Alessandro Carrera, the first to explore his
music in Italian: La voce di Bob Dylan: Una spiegazione dell'America
(
Milan
: Feltrinelli, 300 pages, publication date
May 14, 2001
).
Dylan-fan
Carlo Feltrinelli, a publisher who owns a prestigious European bookstore
chain, had read Carrera’s review of Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out
of Mind in the magazine Poesia, and suggested he write a book
explaining the award-winning musician to Italians, many of whom have
been Dylan devotees for four decades.
In 1962, when Dylan followed his wandering Italian-American
sweetheart Suze Rotolo to southern Italy, Giancarlo (“The Boss”)
Cesaroni invited him to play at his new Roman hotspot The Folk Studio, a
club famous for showcasing international folk talent since the sixties.
“Bob told his friends how much
Rome
wowed him,” Carrera emphasized.
“Nine years later, in 1971, he wrote a song about an expatriate
American artist who travels from
Rome
(where he has a date with ‘Botticelli’s niece’)
to
Brussels
; the title is ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’.
By the time Dylan returned to tour
Italy
in 1984, then again in 1987, and many other times,
he was a famous star with an enormous following.
Last year, when he performed in
Sardinia
, 10,000 people attended,” added Carrera.
Interestingly,
Tito Schipa Jr, the son and biographer of the famous tenor, has recorded
an entire CD of Dylan cover versions in Italian (1988).
The title is "Dylaniato"
(which means "torn apart").
Fame
aside, Dylan’s lyrics are difficult to understand, admitted Carrera, a
lifelong fan himself as well as a musician and a published poet.
According to this author, “the first translations appeared in
1972 and others have followed. Some
Italian songwriters have performed Italian versions of his songs (most
notably Fabrizio De Andrè and Francesco De Gregori).
Unfortunately, almost all the Italian translations are largely
unsatisfactory. Italian
translators of rock lyrics are often young and enthusiastic, but they do
not have a grasp of American slang and of American colloquialisms.
Since they tend towards literal translations, often they miss the
target altogether.”
Carrera
provided some examples of translations by Italian musicians:
"Romance in Durango" (from "Desire", 1975) becomes
"Avventura a Durango" (De Andrè); "Desolation Row"
(from "Blonde on Blonde", 1966) becomes "Via della povertà"
in De Andrè; "If You See Her, Say Hello" (from "Blood on
the Tracks", 1975) becomes "Dille che non è cosi'"
("Tell Her It Isn't So" in Francesco De Gregori).
“If
I have done something better,” said Carrera, “it is only because I
have been living in
North America
for fourteen years now.”
His background was tailor-made for this book.
Alessandro Carrera’s dissertation explored the relationship
between poetry and music. To
support his college years in
Italy
, he performed for 6 years as a folksinger.
He even cut his own LP [1981] and has written songs for others.
He’s also a music critic who comments on operas playing at the
Met for Italian public radio.
Destiny perhaps had Carrera in mind all along.
When Dylan moved to
Manhattan
, he lived at
161 West 4th Street
-- and that is only one block away from where Prof.
Carrera has been living while teaching at NYU and writing this book.
(This fall, he begins teaching at the
University
of
Houston
.) In
Manhattan
in mid-May, Town Hall celebrated the work of Bob
Dylan to a sold-out audience.
In
Milan on May 24th, Carrera read from his new work and sang his
translations of Dylan’s songs at the Libreria Einaudi, then headed to
Alba (Piedmont region),
where his book was discussed by panelists
at the three-day-long Bob Dylan Festival.
Other readings are planned for this year, too.
La
voce di Bob Dylan: Una spiegazione dell'America
(Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001, pp. 300) is available online:
www.internetbookshop.it --
expect to pay between 25.000 and 30.000 lire ($12.95 -- $14.95).
IDEA
SETTEMBRE 2001
|
