An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway | Page 5

nyde Sit Udspring bar, men ei fra Eder
selv-- Hvad tænker I, som er den store Taae Her i Forsamlingen?
[10. _Coriolanus_--Malone's ed. London. 1790. Vol. 7, pp. 148 ff.]
Aside from the preponderance of feminine endings, which is inevitable
in Scandinavian blank verse, what strikes us most in this translation is
its laboriousness. The language is set on end. Inversion and
transposition are the devices by which the translator has managed to
give Shakespeare in metrically decent lines. The proof of this is so
patent that I need scarcely point out instances. But take the first seven
lines of the quotation. Neither in form nor content is this bad, yet no
one with a feeling for the Danish language can avoid an exclamation,
"forskruet Stil" and "poetiske Stylter." And lines 8-9 smack
unmistakably of Peder Paars. In the second place, the translator often
does not attempt to translate at all. He gives merely a paraphrase.
Compare lines 1-3 with the English original; the whole of the speech of
the first citizen, 17-24, 25-27, where the whole implied idea is fully
expressed; 28-30, etc., etc. We might offer almost every translation of
Shakespeare's figures as an example. One more instance. At times even
paraphrase breaks down. Compare
And through the cranks and offices of man The strongest and small
inferior veins, Receive from me that natural competency Whereby they
live.
with our translator's version (lines 50-51)
jeg den flyde lader Igjennem Menneskets meest fine Dele.
This is not even good paraphrase; it is simply bald and helpless
rendering.
On the other hand, it would be grossly unfair to dismiss it all with a
sneer. The translator has succeeded for the most part in giving the sense
of Shakespeare in smooth and sounding verse, in itself no small
achievement. Rhetoric replaces poetry, it is true, and paraphrase dries
up the freshness and the sparkle of the metaphor. But a Norwegian of

that day who got his first taste of Shakespeare from the translation
before us, would at least feel that here was the power of words, the
music and sonorousness of elevated dramatic poetry.
One more extract and I am done. It is Coriolanus' outburst of wrath
against the pretensions of the tribunes (III, 1). With all its imperfections,
the translation is almost adequate.
_Coriolanus_: Skal! Patrisier, I ædle, men ei vise! I høie Senatorer, som
mon mangle Al Overlæg, hvi lod I Hydra vælge En Tjener som med sit
bestemte Skal --Skjøndt blot Uhyrets Talerør og Lyd-- Ei mangler Mod,
at sige at han vil Forvandle Eders Havstrøm til en Sump, Og som vil
gjøre Jer Kanal til sin. Hvis han har Magten, lad Enfoldighed Da for
ham bukke; har han ingen Magt, Da vækker Eders Mildhed af sin
Dvale, Den farlig er; hvis I ei mangle Klogskab, Da handler ei som
Daaren; mangler den, Lad denne ved Jer Side faae en Pude. Plebeier
ere I, hvis Senatorer De ere, og de ere mindre ei Naar begge Eders
Stemmer sammenblandes Og naar de kildres meest ved Fornemhed. De
vælge deres egen Øvrighed, Og saadan Een, der sætte tør sit Skal, Ja sit
gemene Skal mod en Forsamling, Der mer agtværdig er end nogensinde
Man fandt i Grækenland. Ved Jupiter! Sligt Consulen fornedrer! Og det
smerter Min Sjæl at vide, hvor der findes tvende Autoriteter, ingen af
dem størst, Der kan Forvirring lettelig faae Indpas I Gabet, som er
mellem dem, og hæve Den ene ved den anden.
C
In 1865, Paul Botten Hansen, best known to the English-speaking
world for his relations with Bjørnson and Ibsen, reviewed[11] the
eleventh installment of Lembcke's translation of Shakespeare. The
article does not venture into criticism, but is almost entirely a resumé of
Shakespeare translation in Norway and Denmark. It is less well
informed than we should expect, and contains, among several other
slips, the following "...in 1855, Niels Hauge, deceased the following
year as teacher in Kragerø, translated Macbeth, the first faithful version
of this masterpiece which Dano-Norwegian literature could boast of."
Botten Hansen mentions only one previous Danish or Norwegian
version of Shakespeare--Foersom's adaptation of Schiller's stage

version (1816). He is quite obviously ignorant of Rosenfeldt's
translation of 1790; and the Rahbek-Sanders translation of 1801 seems
also to have escaped him, although Hauge expressly refers to this work
in his introduction. Both of these early attempts are in prose; Foersom's,
to be sure, is in blank verse, but Foersom's Macbeth is not
Shakespeare's. Accordingly, it is, in a sense, true that Hauge in 1855
did give the Dano-Norwegian public their first taste of an unspoiled
Macbeth in the vernacular.[12]
[11. _Illustreret Nyhedsblad_--1865, p. 96.]
[12. _Macbeth--Tragedie i fem Akter af William Shakespeare_.
Oversat og fortolket af N. Hauge. Christiania. 1855. Johan Dahl.]
Hauge tells us that he had interested himself in English literature at