Bob Dylan has finally acknowledged his recent Nobel Prize for Literature win in a new interview with the Telegraph. “Amazing, incredible. Whoever dreams about something like that?” he told the publication. Dylan says that he “absolutely” plans on attending the gala held on December 10 in Stockholm “if it’s at all possible.” The Nobel Foundation also announced that they were able to get in touch with Dylan who told them, “The news about the Nobel Prize left me speechless. I appreciate the honor so much.” Previously, Nobel secretary Sara Danius compared Dylan’s body of work to that of Homer and Sappho. In response, Dylan stated, “I suppose so, in some way. Some [of my own] songs – ‘Blind Willie,’ ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown,’ ‘Joey,’ ‘A Hard Rain,’ ‘Hurricane’ and some others – definitely are Homeric in value.” And what does Dylan have to say about the mass uproar created by his silence?
For his part, Dylan sounds genuinely bemused by the whole ruckus. It is as if he can’t quite fathom where all the headlines have come from, that others have somehow been over-reacting. Couldn’t he just have taken the calls from the Nobel Committee? ‘Well, I’m right here,’ he says playfully, as if it was simply a matter of them dialling his number, but he offers no further explanation.