A language unheard

1Two questions: first, Bob Dylan’s body of work suggests that he has indeed found a language, but what language, and what does he say with it? Second, how does his language transplant into French, in a French version of “Blind Willie McTell” by Francis Cabrel?

2To begin with the notion that appears in the title: the unheard, the unheard-of, more broadly the ear and listening. In the Martin Scorsese film No Direction Home (2005), Dylan discusses his beginnings as a folksinger in New York. When he comes to comment on “Blowing in the Wind” he says: “It was written in a language I hadn’t heard before”. Therefore it was, to him, unique, singular – invented, come upon, found, and inventive. But along with its singularity, Dylan’s language was able to throw down a bridge between itself and the people who heard it. Poetic language in this case is both endowed with absolute singularity, and communicative. The song seems then to have taken its own author by surprise; it’s intrinsic to Dylan’s aesthetic that he talks about his work or himself modestly. On the whole Dylan manages to be objective when he talks about himself and to evaluate his songs honestly. Dylan’s ability to hear the language of his own song so that it strikes his ear in the way it does is also inherent in his very use of language: that is, letting language speak to him in a new way that neither he nor his listeners have heard before. This is a quality of mind and an aesthetic quality that has nothing to do with primitivism. To speak and recognize a language when it’s new, you have to know the old one (s).

3Dylan’s verbal art raises the question not only of its own invention but also, like any verbal art, of its interpretation. In the case of a performer or singer the question is dual: the interpretation by the listener or reader, but also the interpretation on stage by the artist of his own work. Onstage, the persona, voice and music of Dylan, however legendary they may have become, aren’t quite enough: the words themselves are crucial to appreciating the event.

4In this respect alone Dylan is a poet to the extent that he knows his lyrics – his lyric poems – by heart: “I know my song well before I start singing”.1 In Derrida’s text entitled What is poetry? one of the philosopher’s definitions is that poetry is an affair of the heart, poetically contained in the idiomatic expression to learn by heart.2 Dylan is a living example of the poetry of the heart, of poetry by heart.

5Dylan’s language shifts registers according to the song. “Every Grain of Sand” (1981) is written in poetic diction while other song lyrics are American demotic and often non-grammatical or a-grammatical. Many of his songs are apostrophes, sometimes dialogues or at least dialogical. His approach to language is social in the way that according to Bakhtine all language has a social dimension.3 His lyrics are unstable: as he himself says, his lyrics aren’t written in stone. The recorded lyrics sometimes differ from the printed ones, sometimes the live lyrics differ from both. The variants are multiple. Some of his performances seem to have a semi-improvisatory feel, or suggest that he’s almost making the words up as he goes along. In one concert performance of “Like a Rolling Stone”, the lines at the beginning of the fourth stanza on the original recorded version read:

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They’re drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you’d better lift your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe

6At the 1965 Newport Festival, the lines become:

Ah you’ve gone to the steeple and all the pretty people
Drinking thinking that they got it made
You better take your diamond ring and things, babe
You better take it down and you’re gonna pawn it babe

7The phrase “Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts” is omitted”.4 Dylan both strips the lady of her royal identity and addresses her directly, while losing part of the “p” alliteration so that the “steeple/people” internal rhyme strikes the ear all the harder. What is “steeple” doing here (in either version)? Nothing of any meaningful importance. The lines are just sheer rhyming exuberance. No wonder Dylan called the song “a rhythm thing on paper”.5 Dylan thus makes pure rhythm out of words.

Jokers and clowns

8Dylan’s language is questioning, is itself a powerful question. The whole rhetorical structure of “Blowing in the Wind” (1962) is based on a series of nine questions, three per stanza, questions perhaps asked by the friend who appears in the chorus and whom the speaker perhaps addresses in order to tell him poetically and ambiguously that, either there is no answer, or that he’ll have to look for and find the answer himself. “How many times must a man look up/before he can see the sky?”6 These lines are a metaphor for denial, for refusing to see what’s in front of one’s eyes, and for the inability to appreciate beauty that stands before us. These lines put words to an idea which may seem familiar, but if the words are new perhaps the idea is, too. “Seeing the sky” may be a metaphor for freedom, the idea may be realizing one is free, or it may be a longing to be free. It could be a metaphor for the freedom one hasn’t got, as when Verlaine writes: “Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit, si bleu, si calme!”.7 Dylan’s prison language, like Verlaine’s, is powerful in such songs as “I Shall Be Released” and “Hurricane”. We don’t know whether Verlaine could see, or only imagine, the sky when he wrote about it since he was in his prison cell in Brussels after firing his revolver at Rimbaud in a fit of drunken rage: “Situations have ended sad, relationships have all been bad, Kind of been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud”.8 Few English-language poets would think of rhyming “go” with “Rimbaud”.9

9Dylan, in fact, rarely looks at himself reflexively in his songs or questions his own artistic identity. However, he does do so very occasionally. The most obvious example is perhaps “Jokerman” (1983). The song both critiques the jokerman of the title and takes him completely seriously. The speaker addresses the jokerman as “you”, a “you” who could well be himself. The jokerman is one of Dylan’s many masks. How does he characterize himself in the text? “You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing” is a syncretic blend of Biblical or pseudo-Biblical and mythical symbolism along with autobiography or even confession, suggesting that the speaker has been grappling with evil and violence since the beginning.10 At the same time the line evokes the ferocious attitude that characterizes the speaker in a large number of Dylan’s lyrics ( “Like a Rolling Stone” [1965], for instance). The image of the snake returns in the following stanza: “Shedding off one more layer of skin”, bearing witness to Dylan’s constant self-renewal and renewal of his art, something Dylan does naturally. The chorus – “Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune, /Bird fly high by the light of the moon, /Oh, oh, oh jokerman.” – confirms the fact that despite Dylan’s hard-edged and aggressive performance of the words, the song is at once a lament and an outpouring of anger denouncing both a certain pretentiousness in the jokerman and hypocrisy in society.

10The lyrics of “Jokerman” could be linked to “Mr Tambourine Man”, and these song-titles are almost symmetrical. In both songs the singer addresses the eponymous title character who could be the singer himself, or a version of or mask for himself. The figure of the clown in “Mr Tambourine Man” seems to have a possible reflexive dimension, like the jokerman:

And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn’t pay it any mind
It’s just a shadow you’re seein’ that he’s chasing

11Dylan’s language here, as elsewhere, is – though he would probably hate the term as pretentious – metatextual: it refers to his own art, and describes it. “My mind weaves a symphony/And tapestry of rhyme”, Dylan sings in “If Dogs Run Free” (1970). Of his approach to the composition of his lyrics Dylan said, “You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see if you can make it make sense in another kind of way”.11 In terms of this configuration, two rhyme words seem to come to Dylan, and then he tries to write the two lines which end in those words. There is someone setting dancing rhymes to the music of the tambourine player, who may hear the rhymer – a poet, therefore – skipping along behind him. The rhymer seems to be a figure of fun and an alternative mask to that of the tambourine man. The jokerman then is an avatar of this clown figure. Dylan takes on the mask of poor, almost contemptible figures, showing to what extent he’s able to find a reflexive language with which to send himself up – more wittily and poetically than any critic has ever been able to do. The figure of the clown or joker provides an antithesis and an antidote to the “spokesman for a generation” tag which Dylan has always abhorred. The artist hates all these roles thrust upon him, including that of being Bob Dylan: “Why are you doing this press conference?” “For the money.” “Do you enjoy being Bob Dylan?” “I hate it. All I want to do is get out of here so I can stop being Bob Dylan and just be myself” (1986 press conference in Australia).12 Looking back in prose on his situation and persona in the 80s, his assessment is deadly in its lucidity: “Wherever I am, I’m a ‘60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows. I’m in the bottomless pit of cultural oblivion”.13 Each phrase here is sheer poetry in its perfect word-choice and rhythm. “You name it. I can’t shake it […] I felt like a goon and didn’t want to stick around”.14 A goon – a mixture between a clown and a fool. “My performances were an act”.15 Dylan was able to move on thanks to his awareness of possible inauthenticity in his stage persona and live work.

Like/Unlike

12The first stanza of “What good am I?” (1989) goes:

What good am I if I’m like all the rest?
If I just turn away when I see how you’re dressed
If I shut myself off so I can’t hear you cry
What good am I?16

13Here, Dylan affirms his originality, his own particular selfhood. But Dylan’s originality, his unheard-of-ness, arises not only from his particular use of the rhetoric of questioning but also precisely from his being the poet of “like”. He likes “like”: the last stanza of “Ballad of a Thin Man” (1965) begins, “Well you walk into the room/Like a camel and then you frown”.17 A camel’s walk looks peculiarly relaxed and indolent, and despite the thin man’s not seeming particularly relaxed in the rest of the song – or for this very reason - the image remains all the more memorable. The simile is somewhat looked down upon as a figure of speech, as though it were the metaphor’s poor relation. But Dylan’s comparisons are worthy of any metaphor. He is really par excellence the poet of the simile. “My love she speaks like silence”.18 Although perhaps Leonard Cohen’s familiar “Bird on the Wire” (1969) may come to mind: “Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir…”, it is beautiful, smooth, in short, poetic, almost too much so.19 The comparison is therefore defective. Although “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965) and a year later “Just Like a Woman” may readily spring to mind, Dylan has compelling similes in other songs: “Yonder stands your orphan with his gun, /Crying like a fire in the sun”.20 Although a fire doesn’t shed tears, the image seems to have some kind of logic: the orphan feels perhaps small and insignificant as a fire on earth cannot match the power of the sun which is made of fire. In “Simple Twist of Fate”: “He felt the heat of night/Hit him like a freight train/Moving with a simple twist of fate”.21 This is the only simile in the song and all the more effective for being so. The image owes its evocativeness to the fact that the first line of what is a rhyming couplet does not end in the rhyme word ‘freight’ but in the word ‘train’ which follows it: the addition of a word makes for a disruptive, clashing effect which chimes perfectly with the impact of the sultry night upon the speaker.

14The poetic imagination Dylan brings to “like” can only remind us once again of the artist’s unlikeness – how unlike he is to everyone else, his life in what Robert Lowell called the “land of unlikeness”.22

Plantation/Transplantation

15Francis Cabrel has spoken of his discovery of Dylan in these terms: “Dylan put words in a certain order and made them sing (les faisait chanter). He produced sounds I’d never heard before. It made me want to do the same thing in French, to do so humbly, I might say to work the language (travailler cette langue)”.23 Both Dylan and Cabrel insist on the unheard (-of) nature of Dylan’s language. Dylan speaks of language, Cabrel of Dylan’s way of making words sing, which is a poetic and linguistic quality and has nothing to do with the fact of singing those words. So Cabrel discovered his vocation in French through hearing what Dylan did with English. He has always been known in France as the “French Dylan” (though not that alone). Cabrel’s early material sounds more like pop music than rock (or indeed folk, or folk-rock), with cloying strings on some songs and equally sugary harmonies. However, in time, he developed a more rock approach both to the melody and arrangements of his songs, and his performing style on record, perhaps like some of his lyrics themselves, has become harsher. He has also developed a Dylanesque tendency to draw out certain words as he sings them. His versions of Dylan’s songs on the album Vise le ciel (2012) sound the way Dylan would sound if he were French, or sang his songs in French. In this respect his versions of Dylan’s material are rawer and closer to the spirit of Dylan than, for example, the versions of Hughes Aufray who was among the first to bring Dylan to the notice of the French public by singing Dylan in French, along with Graeme Allwright. On Vise le ciel, Cabrel and his musicians reproduce Dylan’s melodies and instrumentation faithfully and respectfully, without trying to bring anything new to the songs in this respect. The stanzaic structures of his adaptations of the lyrics also follow the originals. For instance, each stanza of the original of “Dignity” has three rhyming lines followed by a shorter final line ending with the word “dignity”. Cabrel retains the stanza structure, as he does for all the songs. This means that his adaptations cannot be literal translations but are often close and offer a kind of impressionistic version of Dylan’s lyrics. In the case of “Dignity”, where Dylan has sixteen stanzas, Cabrel has twelve. He takes some lines out of the context of their original stanzas and puts them elsewhere, making his version part translation, part adaptation, part rewriting. Cabrel’s version begins: “L’homme fort, tatoué sur les bras”.24 (Strong man with tattoos on his arms) where Dylan has “Fat man lookin’ in a blade of steel”.25 Later in the song, Dylan has a line in a stanza Cabrel does not translate at all: “Steps goin’ down into tattoo land”. So it seems likely that Cabrel dragged the word “tattoo” from that stanza into the first line of his adaptation. Several of his stanzas have no literal equivalent at all in the original:

Ces enfants qu’on pousse vers les flammes
Toutes ces marques aux visages des femmes
La moitié du monde réclame
Plus de dignité

(Those children being pushed to the flames/All those marks on women’s faces/Half the world is calling out/For more dignity).

16Neither the children nor the women mentioned here by Cabrel appear in Dylan’s lyrics. Another of Cabrel’s stanzas goes:

Il vendait de l’or à des condamnés
Des châteaux forts à des gens paumés
Surtout, il avait vendu en premier
Sa dignité

(He sold gold to condemned prisoners/Fortresses to poor bums/Above all, the first thing he sold/Was his dignity)

17None of the ideas here appear directly in Dylan’s original. There’s nothing in it about selling dignity. But these stanzas – and the ideas they contain – could certainly have been in Dylan’s version.

18Each stanza of “Blind Willie McTell” ends with the words “nobody can sing the blues/Like Blind Willie McTell”. Hence Cabrel’s choice to entitle the French version “Comme Blind Willie McTell” makes sense, since it is the whole line (and not just the blues singer’s name, as in Dylan’s title). “Blind Willie McTell” is made up of five stanzas in turn made up of two quatrains each with alternate rhymes. Each second quatrain ends with the two-line chorus praising the eponymous blues singer (1898-1959), in the present tense, incidentally. In fact, the lyric is mainly in the present tense, and is set at the time of the slave trade, including some historical details. In the rest of the five stanzas – the first six lines of each of them – the persona is by no means central. Although the persona laments the slave trade and cruelty loss of life attached to it, he feels that he must let Blind Willie McTell take precedence over him. What language has Dylan found in which to tell his slave-trade history? In fact he tells it in flashes floating free of any specific chronology. He uses the technique of the first-person witness. History is told through a series of more or less connected images linked to the idea of the eye witness or ear witness:

I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear that undertaker’s bell
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell26

19The eye, ear and at one point sense of smell prevail in the song. The last stanza takes a broader overview of the subject, suggesting that slavery and the decadence and fakery described in the song are to be linked to man’s fallen state, in an allusion to 1 Peter 1: 23 ( “power and greed and corruptible seed/ Seem to be all that there is”). Apart from the quadruple-syllabled “corruptible” in the last stanza, the language is at once rich and plain, stripped down, with few adjectives or adverbs. While the subject of the song is weighty, its syntax is light. The words themselves are simple, some lines entirely monosyllabic:

There’s a chain gang on the highway
I can hear them rebels yell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

20The sound of the English words in the song, as in English in general especially when compared to French, is hard and consonantal: hoot, strut, whips, ghosts, boot, gang, greed.

21As for Francis Cabrel’s adaptation of the song – and a very successful one, at that, it does not try to reproduce the harsh consonants of the English original. Rather, one notes the omnipresence of the soft / ʃ / sound: fleche, chante, chouette, charbon, champ, chaînes, chevilles. Dylan’s linguistic register is on the whole less formal than Cabrel’s: “Seen the arrow… Well, I heard…” or the use of “them” for “those” ( “Them charcoal gypsy maidens…”). The only equivalents Cabrel proposes are “Y’a” (for “Il y a”, there is) and “gars du coin”: for “He’s dressed up like a squire” Cabrel has “Un gars du coin aux bonnes manières”, a well-mannered local boy. As regards toponymy, Cabrel removes New Orleans and Texas from Dylan’s text, making the American site more diffuse. The rhyme scheme adopted by Cabrel is slightly tighter and more traditional than Dylan’s. For the first quatrain of each stanza, Cabrel has an a/b/a/b rhyme scheme where Dylan has (more or less) a/b/c/b. These tighter rhymes don’t betray the spirit of Dylan’s text. In the second quatrain, Cabrel’s rhyme scheme, c/d/e/d, exactly corresponds to Dylan’s.

22Cabrel keeps strictly to the tune as well as, to a large extent, the instrumentation, of the original, so that he had to make his verbal adaptation stick to what the melody line made possible (or impossible). In order to do this he had to introduce certain differences between his lyric and Dylan’s. His version begins:

J’ai vu la flèche contre la porte
J’ai lu l’ancien poème
Cette terre est déclarée morte
D’ici jusqu’à Jérusalem

23Cabrel’s “poem” is not in the original at all, nor is the fact that it is old:

Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, “This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem”

24Cabrel seems to have been looking for a rhyme for “Jerusalem”: his version is felicitous, especially since the arrow and doorpost in Dylan’s lyric suggest a written notice stuck to the door, even if that notice is (only) metaphorical. In the second stanza, the owl, which merely sings in the original, has fallen, and there is no suggestion that the owl ever sang:

De l’arbre nu, la chouette est tombée
Pendant qu’ils démontaient les camps
Quelques tissus, une étoile froissée
C’est tout ce qu’ils ont laissé en partant

25(Literal translation: From the bare tree, the owl fell/As they were dismantling the camps;/A few pieces of material, a crumpled star/Were all they left when they left). In Dylan’s text, the owl could be an image of McTell, less likely in Cabrel’s, since his owl does not sing. The owl’s fall corresponds to the spirit of the original, all the more so as Dylan evokes the fall of the martyrs in his first stanza ( “I traveled through East Texas/Where many martyrs fell”), an image that Cabrel does not translate ( “je vois marcher les martyres/La face tournée vers le ciel”) (I can see the martyrs walking/Face upward to the sky). One of Cabrel’s finest phrasings here is his “étoile froissée”, rumpled or crumpled star – a single star, tormented and sad, where Dylan has “The stars”. Cabrel’s line “Comme dans un missel” owes its existence to the adaptor’s need to find a rhyme for “McTell”; the connotation of the word “missal” is obscure in English at this point in the lyric, but it adds a touch of spirituality that is consonant with the tone of the whole song. Cabrel’s third stanza omits Dylan’s Gothic ghost-ships, as well as the undertakers and the slaves’ moans, though Cabrel’s equivalent for the latter, the clanking of their chains, is quite acceptable. Cabrel’s “grands magnolias en flammes” is perfect here, and perhaps more evocative than Dylan’s “sweet magnolia blooming”. The first two lines of Dylan’s last stanza are: “Well, God is in His heaven/And we all want what’s His”. The second line suggests that man does reach out for divine redemption. Cabrel effaces this idea in his own second line: “Nous, nous faisons de notre mieux” (we do the best we can). Cabrel’s “Cupides, avides, envieux” does not translate literally Dylan’s “power and greed and corruptible seed” but it keeps the triple characteristics of man as defined here and reproduces Dylan’s splendid internal rhyme. Cabrel offers a faithful translation of the name of the hotel in the last stanza, the St James Hotel: “le Saint-Jacques hôtel”, though it is true that putting the name of the hotel before the word “hotel” in French, despite occasional occurrence in France, shows the influence of English. A hotel by such a name (St James) does exist in New Orleans. Dylan, though, may be hinting at the title of the old blues song “St James Infirmary” on the tune of which that of “Blind Willie McTell” is based. Blind Willie McTell recorded the song and claimed to have written it (though its history stretches back to the Elizabethan period). For this reason, Cabrel might have kept the hotel’s original name. Discussing his versions of Dylan on the Vise le ciel album, Cabrel said of Dylan’s language:

Dylan overloads his songs with images. He compresses as much as possible. In the same sentence there may be five or six powerful images, but French does not allow the same kind of compression as English. The lesson Dylan gives in his writing is fluency, and an intelligent way of rhyming that constantly brings new impetus (la rime intelligente perpétuellement rebondissante). I gave such fluency priority over translating extremely precisely.27

26Nevertheless, Cabrel has found a colourful and formally precise language in which to transplant the archetypically American story of “Blind Willie McTell” into French.