If you want to know why I like so much Bob Dylan.


The purpose of this website is to publish Bob Dylan's lyrics as translated into French.
The website is on Francois Guillez's account, who also did translations wherever they are unsigned.
Web design and HTML coding were made by Laurent Carluccio.


In translating Dylan's lyrics, I have attempted to remain as faithful as possible to the original, while at the same time creating a French text that can stand on its own, without reference to the English version.

There is no such thing as the perfect translation, especially when it comes to Dylan's lyrics, which are full of puns, slang and poetic images, which resist translation into another language.
Readers may disagree with some of my translations.
This is inevitable, and I welcome your comments, but please try to remain positive and include your own suggestions, so that I can give them serious consideration, and perhaps improve what I have published.

Please send your comments, positive or negative, to moonpeeler[at]yahoo[dot]com.





We (Laurent and myself, Francois) would like to thank all the people who helped us along, especially (in no particular order):
Alain B. whose idea originated this site, Anna Devivo, Shep, Michel Pomarede, David Pomarede, Valerie Charlez, Agnes Chaput, Christophe Veyrat, Gerard Poillet, Marie M., JFC, Pierre Mercy, Christian Barbier, Derek Barker, Keith Wootton, Francois Payen, Denis Stephan, Arthur Louie, Cyrille Blanc, Ole Sivert, Thelma Blitz...



Why I like so much Bob Dylan


I am not going to make my speech about Bob Dylan’s life, you can read that in Wikipedia or elsewhere. Instead, I am going to talk about one question: why is it that I like Bob Dylan so much?

I have been asked many times that question and found it difficult to answer, the easy answer would be: "I don’t know." Still I’m going to try and answer.

At the beginning, it was his voice and the way he sang that drew me to his music. You could sense he had something to say and would not say it the easy way. You may or may not like Bob Dylan’s voice, but you have to recognize it is not ordinary. Moreover, he took it on purpose, it was his own choice. Before he came to New York and recorded officially, if you listen to his first recordings for friends, he sang with a soft voice, in a gentle way. He chose to sing with a rough voice because it was the way most of the bluesmen he liked sang. He also was inspired by the first music he liked, that is rock’n’roll, and he sang the way Elvis Presley or Little Richard or other early rock’n’roll singers did.

Apart from the voice, I was drawn by the lyrics, of course. But at the very beginning I did not understand them, and there was not any book for me to read them. Besides my English was very poor, so even when I got to read them, I understood a very small part of them. It took me decades to study Bob Dylan’s lyrics, and even now I don’t think I fully understood them. Some of his songs have been the subject of many interpretations, and there’s been thousands of lines written trying to explain them, some by people much more educated and intelligent than me. His lyrics contain references to many people and many things. If you want to fully comprehend them, you have to know the Bible and other religions and philosophies, the blues and country music and other American musical genres, the American way of life, American and English poets and writers and musicians, a few French also, like Arthur Rimbaud and François Villon, and so on. He is a great reader and a walking encyclopedia, in popular music and many other things. As you know, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In my opinion, he already had many honors and prizes in his lifetime, so it was not necessary, but he deserved it as much as other Nobel recipients. In his acceptance speech, he stated that his art was writing songs, and that it was not really the same as literature.

I like his lyrics but it would not be enough to maintain my interest in Dylan for so many years. So, what was the main reason why I have been liking him for so long?

Bob Dylan does not do the same thing twice the same way. Each and every album he released is different from the previous one. I am not going to describe them all but I’ll do a quick survey. He began by playing the acoustic guitar and singing solo, folk music as it was called, although he denied it. The first known song he wrote was Blowin’ In The Wind, that had a big success as a protest song, even though its verses were no much protest. His third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, earned him the crown of ""King of Folk" and of "Protest". In the following album, he was still playing acoustic guitar, but he sang much more personal songs. In the three next albums, he returned to the music he liked as a teenager, Rock’n’roll, but the lyrics were much more elaborate than those from the early Rock’n’roll songs. He became very famous and did not like it, because he hated being put in a category, be it musical or political, and that people used his name for their own purpose. So he decided to retire in the country, near Woodstock, and wrote songs inspired by old American music and country music, and played them with friends. He was the first well-known singer to record country music, and that opened the way for other musicians to mix country music with rock music. It was the birth of a new musical genre, Americana. At the end of the 70s, although he’s been raised in the Jewish religion, he discovered Christian religion and wrote songs about his new faith and God. During two years, he was singing only Christian songs in his shows. But it did not last, because once again people categorized him and tried to use him as a torchbearer.

The 1980s were not the best period but Dylan continued to release albums and each of them was different from the previous one. In 1989 he recorded an album with the producer and musician Daniel Lanois, and it was his best for a decade, maybe more. At the same time, he began touring at least six months in every year, in the US, Europe, Australia, Japan, South America, and even China and Eastern Asia. In those shows, he played different versions of his own songs, and covered many songs, from all kinds of musicians. The setlists were different each time, you could hear 40 different songs in 3 following shows. At the end of the 1990s and during the years 2000, he released albums that were all acclaimed by the critics and had commercial success. In 2020, during the Covid lockdown, he released his 39th album, in a completely new style, with a song that lasted 17 minutes, "Murder Most Foul", about the murder of President John F. Kennedy. It was his first original album in 8 years, and a critical and public success. He made a film from a concert in a private venue, and broadcast it on the internet. In this show he played his old songs, but no well-known songs, and all the songs had new arrangements and some new lyrics. It was a forecast of the shows that he would play the next year.

At the end of the lockdown, he started touring again. To this day, he still plays at least 85 shows a year. In a typical show, he plays 9 songs out of 10 from his latest album, and 7 or 8 songs from his previous albums, but not a single hit. He changes words and musical arrangements in his songs, even the new ones, and plays a cover each time, from different songs, American music mostly.

While all the musicians that started in the 1960s or 1970s play mostly their old songs, the ones their audience wants to hear, Bob Dylan plays what he likes and acts as if his career had just begun a few years ago. Like he said in Martin Scorsese’s film "No Direction Home":

"An artist has to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s at somewhere… You always have to realize that you are constantly in a state of becoming, and as long as you can stay in that realm, you’ll be alright."

His music changes all the time and you are never sure what will come next, he’s been called the Picasso of Rock’n’roll. That’s why I still like Bob Dylan, and I hope this little speech aroused your interest in him.