From the very beginning and early days of teenage rebellion onwards, Bov Dylan has always avoided the paths others have walked before and sought the paths less traveled.
This was said by professor, translator and essayist Zoran Paunović at last night's presentation of his book "Bob Dylan: The Poetics of Outlawry" at the Grad Teatar festival in Budva.
The City of Theater announced that the festival's literary program continued last night, and Paunović was the guest at Poets' Square, who presented his book about the famous American singer, composer and poet Bob Dylan.
At the very beginning of the evening, Paunović thanked the audience for attending this literary evening in large numbers.
"I really appreciate that and I'm always happy to come to Trg pjesnika, and tonight I'm promoting my work for the first time, so I have more trepidation. I always have trepidation in front of this audience, which is well-versed and competent in literature," said Paunović.
Speaking about Dilan, Paunović emphasized that from his very beginnings it was possible to recognize that he is someone who is fundamentally different.
"It was clear that by synthesizing all his performing, creative and artistic powers, he had the potential to grow into something much bigger. That something much bigger needed to be given a name, and Robert Zimerman was not an appropriate name for someone who was about to conquer world so he decided to give himself the name Bob Dylan. He kept the shortened version of his personal name, and as for the surname, the most common story is that he read the poet Dylan Tomas. That story is not confirmed, but Dylan himself took to it And since it was difficult for him to explain the origins of his artistic name, he answered the journalist's questions that the reason was that he was in love with the poetry of Dilan Tomas see who is the man from whom he took his stage name," explained Paunović.
He added that he had two criteria when writing the book.
"I follow Dylan's life from the very beginning until today, but I am exclusively focused on the events that had a significant impact on his artistic formation, and then on his artistic path. I tried to illuminate those key points as well as those stories that try to show what kind of is actually the man behind that enigmatic, protean figure of Bob Dylan. To try to give readers answers to the riddle of his personality that he has never revealed to anyone for 80 years. Everything else is left out of this book, so this is a kind of art criticism biographies or creative biographies," said Paunović.
The moderator of the evening was Zoran Hamović, founder, director and editor-in-chief of CLIO Publishing Company and president of the Association of Professional Publishers of Serbia.
Hamović said that the word "outlawry" in the subtitle of the book is the key word for the synthesis in the book and that it is something that is a key characteristic of the main character.
Paunović explained that the subtitle is actually the real title of the book.
"Poetics because I wanted to focus on his artistic work, and outlawry defines his status in life, the role and position that he chose for himself in order to gain the freedom that he implied that an artist must have in order to fertilize and embody it in From the very beginning and the first days of teenage rebellion, Dilan always avoided the paths that others had taken before and sought the paths that were less frequented lead him to follow a different path than the one he felt was his artistic vocation," said Paunović.
He said that Dylan had the courage to switch from folk to rock music because he felt that it was the music of the new era and because he knew that he had to act in such a way in order to continue singing and for others to hear him.
"It caused an avalanche of negative reactions and he was dismissed as a traitor and it was only the first of many betrayals he dealt his audience, but he did it to stay true and consistent to himself. His conversion to Christianity during the seventies was a big surprise and disappointment for his audience, he argued with his audience and was ready to oppose them. He was an outlaw in relation to everyone, but he educated his audience with his outlawry," said Paunović.
Hamović pointed out that Grenič Village is a mythical place for Bob Dylan where he recharges his batteries and starts over, and Paunović explained that Grenič Village was literally a kind of artistic promised paradise for Dylan.
"A paradise in which some of his biggest role models performed and created their art, more than anything Woody Guthrie, who was his role model for the activism of his music. Guthrie's guitar had 'This machine kills fascists' written on it, while Dylan's probably said ' This machine kills stupidity, because his age-old war is exactly a war against stupidity on all possible levels, above all that stupidity that harms the human race," said Paunović and added that Dylan never stopped being a politically engaged artist.
"At one point he decided to stop being a poster artist and he felt that this protest song was becoming an end in itself. He felt that many people were trying to do what should not be asked of art, that many people got on that train because wanted to profit because the protest song was a very profitable musical commodity at the time. He moved away from it and began to write poetry that could be said to be surrealistic, which was more than ever before detached from real life and politics and then he sent messages of dissociation from lies, insanity, arms race, cold war phobia and everything else. Only these messages were now packaged differently and as such inaccessible to those who were trying to profit from them. He wanted his only his voice remains," said Paunović.
He also said that Dylan was often accused of being a vain artist, but that he was never a vain man.
"He did not want to suffer insults at the expense of his own art. He never took himself seriously, so he made some absurd statements about himself, some of which became legends, but he always took his art extremely seriously. While he accepted criticism with a smile at the expense of his own character, he was very often ready to fight with those who criticized his art. They wrote him off many times, but today nobody believes that creativity will last forever", emphasized Paunović and added that, in addition to Dylan, Leonard Cohen had to be in the innermost circle for the Nobel Prize.
Paunović also said that the Nobel committee chose Dylan because he is not only a poet.
"His work of art is a symbiosis of music and poetry. Let's not forget that the archetypal first poets sang their songs with music. Poetry was created by singing with music. So it is not an exaggeration to say that Dylan is the Homer of the modern age. The highlights of his work are top American poetry of the 20th century. When we add to that the symbiosis of music and other aspects of his artistic activity, it is clear to us that this is someone who, more than anyone else, marked the second half and the 20th century, but also the first quarter of the 21st. century. His voice is still heard," said Paunović.
During the evening, an insert from the film "Ex-friend Kid" directed by Sam Pekinpo was shown, in which Dylan played a small but important role, where his most famous song "Knockin' on heaven's door" is also heard, and the evening on Poets' Square was rounded off with numerous questions from the audience.
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