ABSTRACT
The paper raises the question of possible misreadings of Bob Dylan’s songs, which possibility seems to be an inherent feature of their reception not only by those for whom English is not the first language. Without engaging too much of theoretical apparatus and without attempting to draft an adequate map of such misreadings, the paper, fairly commonsensically, argues and provides examples showing that misreadings, including mistranslations, constitute a significant aspect of interpreting the performative image of Bob Dylan. This image, as it seems, is quite fastidiously foreignised so as to stand for the foreignness of the sound (evoked in “It's alright, Ma”) which, perhaps like any other kind of foreignness, needn’t be feared.
