"Da warst du chic angezogen ..."; Addendum on 12/4/16

So begins Helmut Winkelmann's reading of a German translation of "Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan. The Germans are taking Dylan as a poet seriously, which indeed he is. Mark Polizzotti, a colleague of mine and Editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also wrote a piece ("Dylan's Appropriations") in Parnassus about the literary allusions in Dylan's lyrics.

Seemingly a Goethe-unrelated post, but one of our very own Goethe scholars, Heinrich Detering, wrote a book on Bob Dylan a few years ago, and he was interviewed on "3sat" (identified onscreen as president of the Akademie der Sprache und Dichtung!) regarding the Nobel announcement. Here is a link to the video interview. I liked the part where he referred to Brecht in connection with "It Ain't Me, Babe." We have some very interesting people among Goethe scholars.

I wrote an article that appeared in the Goethe Yearbook years ago (indeed, it was my first publication there) on Goethe's play Die Laune des Verliebten. At the time, Tom Saine, the editor of the Yearbook criticized me for the lack of current scholarship on the play. As I mentioned to Tom, practically the only recent scholarship on the play at that time was an article by Heinrich Detering entitled “Die Heilung des Verliebten: Pathologie and  Poetologie in Goethes Schäferspiel,” which appeared in 1991 in the Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts. It is good to be in such company.

ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention Professor Detering's later book on Dylan: Die Stimmen aus der Unterwelt: Dylans Mysterienspiele