Norway | Norwegian | Prose Poem
March, 2020The work of Sigbjørn Obstfelder is challenging to translate today because of the interlingual nature of late-19th century Norwegian. As Norway was still a young nation, Norwegian at the time was heavily Danish but emerging as modern Bokmål. Beyond that, stylistically, Obstfelder has a jerky hyphenated style that says much with few words. The former quality reveals his nervous nature and the latter puts him firmly in the Norwegian tradition.
"Høst" (Autumn) was originally published in Samtiden 7 in 1896 by John Griegs Forlag in Bergen. Samtiden is a Norwegian literary journal that's been in print since 1890. Obstfelder had two contributions to this edition, the other being his essay officially defending Edvard Munch.
"Høst" is a peek into the type of conversations that would have been going on in the 1890’s Norwegian bohème scene of Kristiania. The young artists of the time were seized with a desire to express life in its truest form, with suffering and death so close at hand. Hans Jaeger and Edvard Munch were among the strongest voices in the scene.
- Jordan Barger
Norway | Norwegian | Poetry (excerpts)
December, 2017Anne is a long poem, or a "bullet-pointed novel," as Paal-Helge Haugen calls it. He writes in his “Note to Self” (in the final pages of Anne) that the book should be constructed collaboratively by its author and its readers. He goes on to explain that he has termed Anne a bullet-pointed novel because it is made up of poetic sections and sections of found text; Anne is not meant to be either cohesive or complete. (These sections of found text range from Bible citations, hymns, medical text and documents, excerpts from children's textbooks, and public records.)
The book follows Anne as she goes from being a girl to a young woman,while also showing her declining health due to tuberculosis. It is set in Norway around the beginning of the twentieth century.
This is perhaps Haugen's most well-known book of poetry in Norway, and it was very well received upon publication in 1968. It was one of the first books where Haugen explored his interest in using religious texts in his creative work. It's an important book because of its experimental and collaborative nature. U.S. readers of Roland Barthes will recognize some of his philosophy in Haugen's approach and thoughts about the relationship between reader and author. What U.S. readers will not be familiar with is the landscape and culture on the west coast of Norway, which Haugen describes beautifully. Norwegian and Scandinavian literature has been gaining popularity in the English-speaking world, through authors such as Karl Ove Knausgård, Tomas Espedal, and Kjell Askildsen, and I believe the time is right to introduce this iconic Norwegian poet.
Haugen is similar to famous Swedish poet and Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer in his evocative but unadorned language, as well as the investigation of and engagement with the unknowable and transcendental, visible in Anne when Haugen explores her feverish dreams, inner longings, and experience of disease, in part II of the book.
The number that follows each excerpt is the number of the page on which it appears in the book.
- Julia Johanne Tolo
Norway | Norwegian | Poetry (excerpts)
December, 2017The translation of these poems was sometimes challenging, as the book was published in 1904, prior to Norway’s secession from Sweden in 1905 and the subsequent process of Norwegianization of the written language that followed. Formerly, written Norwegian was basically Danish in orthography due to Norway’s having been part of Denmark for more than 400 years. Though the text is for the most part readable in Norwegian, there are often words spelled using an older form of Danish than is used today. Hamsun would go on to heavily revise The Wild Chorus in his collected works to reflect these national changes. Written Norwegian is today called Norwegian Bokmål (“book tongue”).
- Peter Dahlstrand
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