Mark Polizzotti

How Does it Feeeel?
Review of the Bloomsbury 33 & 1/3 paperback edition (September 1, 2006)

How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To be without a home?
Like a complete unknown?
Like a rolling stone?

Have you ever been inspired to read a book simply based on a GR friend’s status update? After seeing Sarah’s update for her reading of the The Mojo Collection: The Greatest Albums of All Time and the Bob Dylan album Highway 61 Revisited, I just had to get out my old LP and then look for what books there were about the album as well. Fortunately there was a rather thorough analysis available from the excellent 33 and 1/3 series.

See cover at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/95/Bob_Dylan_-_Highway_61_Revisited....
Cover of the Highway 61 Revisited album. Photograph by Daniel Kramer. Image sourced from Wikipedia.

Polizzotti's book is not for the casual fan. It goes into enormous detail about which songs were recorded at which session. It describes how the various session musicians were chosen and who played on which days. It speculates about the lyrics and often about whom might have been the real-people being written about. In the end it is the music that matters though and for me this is one of the greatest albums of all time. It was one of the first vinyl LPs that I ever purchased back in the 1960s and I still own that original.

Soundtrack
Obviously this includes the entire Highway 61 Revisited album which you can listen to on YouTube here.

For further songs recorded during the Highway 61 Revisited sessions but not included on the final album you can listen to Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence, Positively 4th Street and Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?.

For bonus alternate tracks and false starts released as The Cutting Edge 1965-1966 collection (note that this includes tracks from the Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde on Blonde sessions) you can listen to the highlights via a playlist on YouTube which starts here.

Trivia and Links
The GR Listopia for the 33 and 1/3 series is incomplete with only 38 books listed as of November 2023. For an up-to-date list see Bloomsbury Publishing with 188 books as of November 2023.

The Wikipedia article for Highway 61 Revisited covers a lot of the trivia background to the album as well.… (more)

While I find the 33 1/3 books of varying quality, obviously dependant on the author, this one was interesting. I find you'll get one of three things out of this series of books.

1 - An in-depth look at the musicality and musicianship of the album, with talks of major and minor chords and tones and semi-tones. These are the ones I just stop reading.

2 - A deep dive strictly into the album, typically song-by-song and the merits (or lack thereof) of each one. These are usually interesting.

3 - A deep dive into the album, but also a broader look at the artist's life and times during the writing and recording, giving much more context into the making of the album. These are the ones I value and enjoy the most.

This book falls firmly into that third category. I'm not the biggest Dylan fan. I enjoy most of his better-known work, but I was simply born a few years too late to soak up the tumultousness of the times he wrote about, and buy the time I was digging into his music, I'd heard much of it before, so I couldn't discover it like all those that were blown away by the first plays of the album, or hearing it on the radio for the first time.

That being said, the author does a great job of taking us through each song, as well as the differences between the versions on record versus the outtakes, and gives a solid insight into where Dylan's head was at at the time.

Good stuff.… (more)

The old Italian pun “traduttore, tradittore” has long governed the discussion on translation. It casts the translator as traitor, someone who walks a fine line between fidelity to the source text and compliance with the norms of the language into which the text is being translated. Polizzotti, a primarily French-to-English translator, delves into this discussion and shows how translation matters, why it matters, and what the purpose is. Translation is not inferior to the source text: it is its own artistic creation.

As a former translator myself, I naturally enjoyed this book. I especially liked his focus on more practical aspects of translation; translation theory always seems to be a bit full of itself, from my viewpoint. Polizzotti shows examples of variant translations and discusses the different approaches to translation in general, particularly in more “untranslatable” genres such as poetry. I’d recommend this if you like to read books in translation or even if you don’t—it might convince you to give one a go.… (more)