NEW YORK — Bob Dylan has completed his Nobel course requirements.
The Swedish Academy said Monday that it has received the mandatory lecture from the 2016 literature winner, enabling Dylan to collect $922,000 in prize money.
Spokeswoman Sara Danius described Dylan’s talk as “extraordinary” and “eloquent.” Nobel officials said the talk was recorded Sunday in Los Angeles and an audio clip is posted on the academy’s website, www.nobelprize.org.
Dylan received the Nobel Literature diploma and medal in April but was still required to give a speech to receive the money. He did not attend December’s Nobel ceremony in Stockholm and his acceptance remarks were read by the U.S. ambassador to Sweden, Azita Raji.
Dylan’s songs have drawn on literary influences from Beat poetry to Anton Chekhov and his recording was a celebration of books and music and of the common language among art forms.
Dylan said folk songs were his earliest musical vocabulary, but that books such as “Ivanhoe” and “Don Quixote” helped shape his view of the world and inspire him to write songs “unlike anything anybody had ever heard.”
He discussed three works at length: “Moby Dick,” (a reminder we “see only the surface of things”), “All Quiet On the Western Front” (in which “death is everywhere, nothing else is possible”) and “The Odyssey,” a “strange, adventurous tale” he likened to modern pop songs such as Simon & Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound.” He noted that Shakespeare’s words were meant to be spoken, “Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page.”
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