Triumph of the troubadour
Over the last century, the Nobel Prize in
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(भद्दा ) and
astoundingly(चौकाने ) pedestrian(पैदल यात्री ) short
stories,
written and published almost as if they were intended to justify the
award. The trend has since persisted(कायम ),
with the Swedish
Academy picking writers across genres and geographies. They
include Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer in 2011, the oft-banned
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(विशेष स्वभाव का ) 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, 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(काम आंकना ),
despite his profoundly(गहरा )
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(अकेला ) 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.
1)Sprung meaning is jump, skip, bounce.
2)Awkward meaning is clumsy, inelegant, amateurish.
3)Astoundingly meaning is amazing, surprising, shocking.
4)Pedestrian meaning is everyday, banal, mundane, dull.
5)Persisted meaning is carry on, carry through, continue,prevail.
6)Idiosyncratic meaning is peculiar, distinctive.
7)Aghast meaning is horrified, very surprised.
8)Underrated meaning is underestimate, undervalue.
9)Profoundly meaning is intellectual, thoughtful, deep.
10)Solitary meaning is alone, single, unsociable.
6)Idiosyncratic meaning is peculiar, distinctive.
thanks alot sir
ReplyDelete