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
Norway/United States | Norwegian | Poetry (excerpts)
July, 2015My older sister took out Niels Fredrik Dahl’s Antecedentia from the library when it came out in 1995. I was fourteen at the time, and as far as I can remember, these are the first poems that truly fascinated me. Antecedentia is Dahl’s third collection of poetry. The book has big themes: love, history and the passing of time, suffering, ill fortune, and humanity’s darkest sides. But it’s also filled with the local and specific: references to places, news events, pop culture, and real people, done in an elegant and sometimes humorous way. Dahl creates vivid stories with few words and keeps his readers on their toes. Antecedentia has always given me a feeling that the world is large and rich with hurtful detail that one can access through poetry.
When I had to pick a translation project for a graduate workshop, Antecedentia was a natural choice. I was a complete novice, but I’d been working in the territory between English and Norwegian ever since I'd started writing as a young teenager. Like everyone else in Norway, I grew up with TV and pop music in English, and started honing my knowledge of American idioms and slang early on. I spoke English with parts of my family, and it felt more intimate than Norwegian did. Writing felt natural in this English, which was full of satisfying, cool phrases. I felt free to pour out things that were too painful or embarrassing to express in Norwegian. I think I share this sensation with many Norwegians—almost all Norwegian pop stars, for example, write their lyrics in English. Later, I would translate my writing into Norwegian. When exposed to the bright light of my native tongue, these pieces curled into themselves and tightened up, until only the strongest and smallest possible structure of terse Norwegian remained. This became my modus operandi for years. I was primarily a poet until I switched to fiction and left Norway to pursue my MFA in the United States. Attempting to bring the no-nonsense clarity of the Norwegian language into English via Dahl’s poems has been a very interesting experience.
Translating poetry can be frustrating, so I consider a bonus anything I can manage that carries over a little bit more of the original’s unnamable qualities. Dahl uses punctuation sparingly, and changes verb tenses and tone midway through a poem. Translating his tightly packed sentences without losing even their most basic meaning is sometimes challenging. I hope I’ve been able to do the poems justice.
- Karen Havelin
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).