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"Sólo Soy Un Guitarrista":Bob Dylan in the Spanish-Speaking World—Influences, Parallels, Reception, and Translation Christopher Rollason, Independent Scholar (bio) "Sólo soy un guitarrista" - Bob Dylan, Tarantula (1966) "La guitarra. . . como la tarántula, teje una gran estrella" - Federico García Lorca, "Las seis cuerdas," (1931) Spanish Manners: An Introduction This paper aims to examine the relationship between Bob Dylan's work and the cultures, literatures, and musics of the Spanish-speaking world. The relationship is bidirectional, taking in Spanish and Latin American influences and themes in Dylan's production, as well as the influence and reception of that work in the Hispanophone universe. I further consider not only direct influences but also literary and musical parallels, and also briefly examine the translation of Dylan into Spanish. What I am offering is a case-study in intercultural relations, not an excursion into theory, and I shall not be explicitly entering into issues of ethnoliterature, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, or translation studies. I do, however, stress by way of introduction that I believe Dylan's work is a particularly interesting case of a hybrid cultural object, the result of a fusion, not so much between a bipolarised "high" and "low" culture as between three different cultures—intellectual culture, mass culture, and folk or traditional culture. Much in Spanish and Latin American cultures, both literary and musical, is similarly—and fecundly—hybrid in its make-up, building bridges between the official culture and more popular elements. Meanwhile, today Spanish is one of the few languages that can seriously compete with English: as the transculturation scholar Dora Sales Salvador wrote in 2005, "both English and Spanish have taken on the role of global lingua franca as well as literary [End Page 112] language."1 Given all this, to study the links and connections between the Hispanophone cultural area and Bob Dylan's work should prove a fruitful and illuminative exercise.2 The Spanish Moon: Spain and Latin America in Dylan's Texts The Songs In his 1975 song "Abandoned Love" Dylan sang: "The Spanish moon is rising on the hill,"3 and over his career references to things Spanish and Latin American have been scattered through his work. In his prose text of 1963 "My Life in a Stolen Moment," recalling his University of Minnesota days, Dylan actually claims some knowledge of Spanish: "I did OK in Spanish though but I knew it beforehand."4 Be that as it may, the 1974 song "Something There Is About You," which speaks of youthful times in Duluth, the town of Robert Allen Zimmerman's birth, mentions a character called Danny Lopez:5 Dylan thus relates a Hispanic name to the idea of beginnings. Other Dylan characters find themselves south of the border. In "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," Big Jim thinks he has seen the Jack of Hearts "down in Mexico"; the Brownsville Girl too disappears, in the song that bears her name, "way down in Mexico." "Goin' to Acapulco," "Romance in Durango" and "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" (located in [End Page 113] Ciudad Juárez) are all explicitly set in or near Mexican cities. "Durango,"6 in particular, addressed in the first person to a woman called Magdalena by an unnamed gunman, refers to Mexican culture ("past the Aztec ruins and the ghosts of our people") and history ("We'll drink tequila where our grandfathers stayed / When they rode with Villa into Torreón"). "Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)," though it does not name Mexico, is surely set there, and has often been read as a critique of US intervention in Latin America.7 That subject is visibly taken up in its economic aspect in "North Country Blues" ("it's much cheaper down / In the South American towns / Where the miners work almost for nothing"), and "Union Sundown" ("the car I drive is a Chevrolet / It was put together in Argentina / By a guy makin' thirty cents a day"). Argentinian cultural or political motifs feature in "Farewell Angelina" ("little elves . . . dance / Valentino-type tangos"), that song's double "Angelina" ("Tell me, tall men, where would you like to be overthrown, / In Jerusalem or Argentina?"), and "The Groom...
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