On 'Why Bob Dylan Matters'

Others’ Words: Allusion, Transfiguration, Plagiarism, and ‘Why Bob Dylan Matters’

Why Bob Dylan Matters. By Richard F. Thomas. Dey St., 2017; $24.99

One thing you might do, in 1968, if you were spending a great deal of time with Joni Mitchell and you were Leonard Cohen, and Mitchell asked you for a list of books to read, would be to give her a stack of authors you thought she ought to know. Cohen gave her his list, and so brought upon himself Mitchell’s claim — that he plagiarized other writers.

It happened like this: Mitchell read through Cohen’s selections — the list included Lorca, Camus, and Rilke — and she concluded that he was lifting lines from some of these sources and using them in his own lyrics. She’s persisted with this assessment over the years in interviews, retelling a particular detail of it, that Cohen’s lyric, “Walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme,” from “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” is plagiarized from a passage attributed to Camus: “Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Walk beside me; just be my friend”.

Even if we judge the similarity to be slight — and slight it is — Mitchell is mistaken when she attaches the Cohen lyrics to Camus’s writings. The writing is actually part of a Jewish song; online research tells us that it began to appear with the erroneous attribution in the early 1970s. Furthermore, given what comes next in the religious lyric, “And together we will walk in the ways of Hashem,” leaves us with the scenario that, unless Camus, an atheist, was trying his hand at songs for Havdallah  — walking with Hashem, Adonai, God — it is difficult to believe that these would be his words. Nevertheless, Mitchell’s story stuck around. Adding to it, in 2014 she included Bob Dylan in the tale: “So I thought that’s like Bob Dylan,” she told biographer Malka Marom, explaining that she believes both songwriters stole from others.

Assertions that Dylan plagiarizes emerged especially during the 2000s and 2010s, in particular they arose as albums such as “Love and Theft” were discovered to include lyrics similar to — and in some cases mirroring — lines from other writers’ novels and poems. In 2017, his Nobel lecture was scrutinized for allegedly including phrases from a study guide to Moby Dick. Considering these examples among others, the argument against them is as follows: it is true that Dylan’s writings include others’ words, and it is also true that he is not a plagiarist. If we are interested in how this can be the case, we can turn to Richard F. Thomas’ Why Bob Dylan Matters. The book is a welcome exploration of the allusions and echoes that Dylan’s lyrics have evidenced throughout his career, and it is one with which we can, thanks to the help of Thomas’ noticing eye, further apprehend and further appreciate the intertextual nature of Dylan’s lines.

It requires five pages, in Why Bob Dylan Matters, to list all the instances of other writers’ words in the lyrics of Dylan’s song “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” (Time Out of Mind, 1997). Among the examples are lyrics by Tom Rush, Woody Guthrie, lines from songs found in the Byron Arnold collection, and examples that echo spirituals and folk songs. In another instance, on the same album, Thomas focuses on the relationship between the lyrics of “Highlands” and lines of “My Heart’s in the Highlands”, a poem by Robert Burns. From Dylan’s lyric: “Well my heart’s in the Highlands gentle and fair / Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air / Bluebells blazing where the Aberdeen waters flow / Well my heart’s in the Highland / I’m gonna go there when I feel good enough to go”. From Burns’ poem: “My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here; / My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer; / A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe, / My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go.” Comparing each writing, deployed sequentially on the page as Thomas gives them, the suggestion that Dylan was in some way working with Burns’ words is persuasive.

It requires another four pages to list similar discoveries throughout Dylan’s album of 2001, “Love and Theft”. Lyrics that that bear comparison include lines from “Lonesome Day Blues,” which echoes — more than echoes — the English-language translation of Junichi Saga’s novel of 1989, Confessions of a Yakuza. From “Lonesome Day Blues: “Samantha Brown lived in my house for about four or five months / Don’t know how it looked to other people, / I never slept with her even once.” From Saga’s novel: “Just because she was in the same house didn’t mean we were living together as man and wife, so it wasn’t any business of mine what she did. I don’t know how it looked to other people, but I never slept with her—not once.”

In earlier lyrics, too, Thomas illuminates. He highlights structural similarities between a translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, “Poor People in Church,”  and Dylan’s lyric, “Chimes of Freedom”. As Norman Cameron translates Rimbaud: “ “The timid ones, the epileptic one, from whom / Yesterday at the cross-roads people turned aside, / The blind ones, nosing at old missals in the gloom, / Who creep into the court-yards with a dog for guide”. From Dylan’s lyric: “Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones / Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting / Tolling for the searching ones … Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed / For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse”. It is the “ones” that Thomas rightly notes.

Compelling when it bears fruit in these ways, not every instance fits Thomas’ thesis as neatly. Turning to the lyrics of “Duquesne Whistle,” for example, the suggestion is a connection to Virgil’s poetry, in this case David Ferry’s translation of the Eclogues. Dylan, co-writing with Robert Hunter: “The lights of my native land are glowin’ / I wonder if they’ll know me next time around / I wonder if that old oak tree’s still standing / That old oak tree, the one we used to climb”. From Ferry’s translation of Eclogue 1: “Oh, will it ever come to pass that I’ll / Come back, after many years, to look upon / The turf roof of what had been my cottage / And the little field of grain that once was mine, / My own little kingdom.” In both, there is indeed something of the emotion and feeling that come with absence, and with one’s return to places that have grown distant — but it is difficult to accept that Dylan’s “old oak tree” reaches into the lines of Ferry’s cottage and fields. Enthusiasm for explanations sometimes outpaces caution in other ways as well. In Chronicles, for example, Dylan titled one chapter “The Lost Land” and Thomas suggests that it could connect to Land of the Lost, a children’s television show in the 1970s. There are numerous examples to balance these instances, however. Thomas shows us that Dylan is likely alluding to Green’s The Poems of Exile in examples from “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” and “Ain’t Talkin’”, and he notes that even song titles can reach back to other writings: “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” echoes Green’s translation of Black Sea Letters, for example, in which, “beyond here lies nothing but chillness, hostility, frozen waves of an ice-hard sea”.

In this way, Why Bob Dylan Matters pursues and reveals correlations, and central to the book as well is Thomas’ expertise in showing us where ancient Greek and Roman poetry figures prominently in Dylan’s lines. His argument is that these are not examples of plagiarism, but something else, something that includes allusion, but that is also anchored to a word that Dylan himself has used to talk about writing, art in different forms, and about himself — sometimes in ways that suggest a spiritual or mystical imagination at work — that word being transfiguration.

The online Oxford Dictionary gives a definition of transfiguration: it is a process by which a thing transforms into something more beautiful or elevated. Thomas characterizes the preceding examples, and others, to be “a creative act involving the ‘transfiguring’ of song and of literature and of characters going back through Rome to Homer.” One way to explore what Thomas means is to look at the example of “Workingman’s Blues #2” (Modern Times, 2006). The lyrics echo lines from Ovid’s Tristia, as found in Peter Green’s 2005 translation, The Poems of Exile. Dylan: “No one can ever claim / That I took up arms against you”. Green: “My cause is better: no one can claim that I ever took up arms against you.” If we consider that line and then the rest of the lyric in the light of allusion, then Dylan’s echoing of Tristia allows us to further consider the landscape of both writings, and it allows us to notice some differences. This is where the concept of transfiguration enters Thomas’ examination. “Workingman’s Blues #2” can be considered in the company of Tristia but Dylan also makes the lines his own.

In Green’s translation, the speaker is an exiled poet pleading with Augustus for forgiveness and leniency. The circumstance is that while some have actually waged war against Caesar, the poet’s transgression is that he knows too much about Augustus. Worse, he’s probably put some of what he knows into poems, and so Caesar may be inclined to conduct a bit of spin control (as the communications professionals say, and in this case it will be ruthless). Continuing with Dylan’s lyric, however, the singer is not the pleader, rather he is the agent wielding power. “In you, my friend, I find no blame,” Dylan’s lyric continues. “Wanna look in my eyes, please do / No one can ever claim / That I took up arms against you / All across the peaceful sacred fields / They will lay you low / They’ll break your horns and slash you with steel / I say it must be so.” It could be a Caesar speaking to a subject, or it could be a poet predicting the fall of an emperor, but instead of begging for mercy, the singer is auguring and/or commanding that the individual in question will come to harm — he will be laid low, he will be broken and slashed. This is different from the story we find in Tristia.

Alert to what Dylan is doing in the lyric, he is calling upon what has been written by another, and then reshaping that instance in his own lines. In the context of Thomas’ argument, this brings to mind a passage from The Critic as Artist: “No doubt Homer had old ballads and stories to deal with, as Shakespeare had chronicles and plays and novels from which to work,” wrote Oscar Wilde. “He took them and shaped them into song. They become his, because he made them lovely.” While we needn’t evaluate whether the lyric is more beautiful or more elevated than Green’s translation — we would be wise not to do so — Dylan’s hand transforms it. Not plagiarism, but transfiguration.

Thomas supports his case for Dylan’s knowledge of the classics — high-school Latin Club; references to Ovid and Thucydides in Chronicles, Volume 1; mentions of Aeschylus and triads — but he does not argue that Dylan reads or writes in either the Latin or Greek. The case is that Dylan has turned to translators, and so, when Thomas asserts that Dylan alludes to the classics — that he transfigures the poems of Ovid or Virgil — he means that he is first turning to lines from translations to do this work. Not to be taken as a preamble, this is not an argument that allusions to the classics must depend only upon the Latin or the Greek — W.H. Auden steered us clear of those currents when he knew that poetry, and poets, could remain recognizable across translations so long as what “survives and excites” about the writing remains intact (i.e., the tonal qualities, the perspectives, the syntax that characterizes the constructions) — still, in this detail lies an additional consideration of the ways in which we consider Thomas’ argument.

Specific decisions by translators influence the allusions that call upon them. Reaching for Green’s Tristia is to reach for a specific tonality, perspective, and syntax. Reach for A.L. Wheeler’s translation and one finds different specifics. Here is the way Wheeler gives us the relevant line from Tristia: “My cause is a better one, for none assert that I have followed arms opposed to thee, or hostile power.” Alluding to these words, or within Thomas’ argument transfiguring them, one might write something in the vein of Dylan’s lyric, but one might write something else, and the lyric might have been something like this: “No one can ever claim  / That I followed those / The ones that took up arms against you”. Thomas’ underlying point can survive these distinctions, but if we are to take his assertion that Dylan occupies a place within a “classical stream,” we must also assert that the nature of his work is connected to the details of the translation to which he alludes. They are the closer tributaries, and they are the waters that allow Dylan to shape the things that he then makes his own. This is to say, he relies upon Green as he relies upon Ovid.

Does Bob Dylan matter because he calls upon other writers, alluding to and transfiguring their lines, making them his own? Thomas gives a substantial argument that he does, and he adds to that argument that Dylan matters because he writes about the times in which he lives, that Dylan connects his listeners with ways to think upon experiences of sorrow, joy, love, loss, desire, hatred, and jealousy. These writings will resonate, Thomas suggests, and they will be sought after in the future, attaining a status not unlike the poetry of Ovid, Virgil, and Homer.

What is additionally persuasive, however, and what is most welcome about Thomas’ book, is that it offers a sustained counterargument to assertions that Dylan plagiarizes. Dylan makes new works out of what he takes — whether they are transfigurations or allusions. He makes the lines on which he calls matter within his new creations, as they matter in the works he finds them, and then what he includes becomes his own. In that, there lies a part of his genius. Without Thomas’ attention, many of these instances might have remained unnoticed. 

 JAMES O’BRIEN

This article was first published by Oxford University Press in the April 2019 edition of Essays in Criticism.