An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway | Page 8

crafts and folk-lore, the
dialects of Norway, like the dialects of any other country, have a
vocabulary amazingly rich and complete.[17] But not all ideas belong
in the realm of the every-day, and the great difficulty of the Landsmaal
movement is precisely this--that it must develop a "culture language."
To a large degree it has already done so. The rest is largely a matter of
time. And surely Ivar Aasen's translation of the famous soliloquy
proved that the task of giving, even to thought as sophisticated as this,
adequate and final expression is not impossible. The whole is worth
giving:
Te vera elder ei,--d'er da her spyrst um; um d'er meir heirlegt i sitt
Brjost aa tola kvar Styng og Støyt av ein hardsøkjen Lagnad eld taka
Vaapn imot eit Hav med Harmar, staa mot og slaa dei veg?--Te døy, te
sova, alt fraa seg gjort,--og i ein Sømn te enda dan Hjarteverk, dei
tusend timleg' Støytar, som Kjøt er Erving til, da var ein Ende rett
storleg ynskjande. Te døy, te sova, ja sova, kanskje drøyma,--au, d'er
Knuten. Fyr' i dan Daudesømn, kva Draum kann koma, naar mid ha
kastat av dei daudleg Bandi, da kann vel giv' oss Tankar; da er Sakji,
som gjerer Useldom so lang i Livet: kven vilde tolt slikt Hogg og Haad
i Tidi, slik sterk Manns Urett, stolt Manns Skamlaus Medferd, slik
vanvyrd Elskhugs Harm, slik Rettarløysa, slikt Embæt's Ovmod, slik
Tilbakaspenning, som tolug, verdug Mann fær av uverdug; kven vilde
da, naar sjølv han kunde løysa seg med ein nakjen Odd? Kven bar dan
Byrda so sveitt og stynjand i so leid ein Livnad, naar inkj'an ottast
eitkvart etter Dauden, da uforfarne Land, som ingjen Ferdmann er

komen atter fraa, da viller Viljen, da læt oss helder ha dan Naud, mid
hava, en fly til onnor Naud, som er oss ukjend. So gjer Samviskan
Slavar av oss alle, so bi dan fyrste, djerve, bjarte Viljen skjemd ut med
blakke Strik av Ettertankjen og store Tiltak, som var Merg og Magt i,
maa soleid snu seg um og strøyma ovugt og tapa Namn av Tiltak.
[16. Skrifter i Samling, I, 168. Kristiania. 1911.]
[17. Cf. Alf Torp. Samtiden, XIX (1908), p. 483.]
This is a distinctly successful attempt--exact, fluent, poetic. Compare it
with the Danish of Foersom and Lembcke, with the Swedish of
Hagberg, or the new Norwegian "Riksmaal" translation, and Ivar
Aasen's early Landsmaal version holds its own. It keeps the right tone.
The dignity of the original is scarcely marred by a note of the
colloquial. Scarcely marred! For just as many Norwegians are offended
by such a phrase as "Hennar Taus er fagrar' en ho sjølv" in the balcony
scene, so many more will object to the colloquial "Au, d'er Knuten." Au
has no place in dignified verse, and surely it is a most unhappy
equivalent for "Ay, there's the rub." Aasen would have replied that
Hamlet's words are themselves colloquial; but the English conveys no
such connotation of easy speech as does the Landsmaal to a great part
of the Norwegian people. But this is a trifle. The fact remains that
Aasen gave a noble form to Shakespeare's noble verse.
E
For many years the work of Hauge and Aasen stood alone in
Norwegian literature. The reading public was content to go to Denmark,
and the growing Landsmaal literature was concerned with other
matters--first of all, with the task of establishing itself and the even
more complicated problem of finding a form--orthography, syntax, and
inflexions which should command general acceptance. For the
Landsmaal of Ivar Aasen was frankly based on "the best dialects," and
by this he meant, of course, the dialects that best preserved the forms of
the Old Norse. These were the dialects of the west coast and the
mountains. To Aasen the speech of the towns, of the south-east coast
and of the great eastern valleys and uplands was corrupt and vitiated. It

seemed foreign, saturated and spoiled by Danish. There were those,
however, who saw farther. If Landsmaal was to strike root, it must take
into account not merely "the purest dialects" but the speech of the
whole country. It could not, for example, retain forms like "dat," "dan,"
etc., which were peculiar to Søndmør, because they happened to be
lineal descendants of Old Norse, nor should it insist on preterites in ade
and participles in ad merely because these forms were found in the
sagas. We cannot enter upon this subject; we can but point out that this
movement was born almost with Landsmaal itself, and that, after
Aasen's fragments, the first Norwegian translation of any part of
Shakespeare is a rendering of Sonnet CXXX in popularized Eastern, as
distinguished from Aasen's literary, aristocratic Western Landsmaal. It
is the first translation of a Shakespearean sonnet on