An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway Part 3

Two of the fairest stars in all the Heaven, etc.

And equally good are the closing lines beginning:

Aa tala meir, Ljos-Engel med du lyser, etc.

Foersom is deservedly praised for his translation of the same lines, but a comparison of the two is not altogether disastrous to Aasen, though, to be sure, his lines lack some of Foersom's insinuating softness:

Tal atter, Lysets Engel! thi du straaler i Natten saa hiherlig over mig som en af Nattens vingede Cheruber for ddeliges himmelvendte ine, etc.

But lines like these have an admirable and perfect loveliness:

naar han skrid um dan seinleg-sigand' Skyi og sigler yver hge Himmels Barmen.

Aasen busied himself for some years with this effort to naturalize his Landsmaal in all the forms of literature. Apparently this was always uppermost in his thoughts. We find him trying himself in this sort of work in the years before and after the publication of _Prver af Landsmaalet_. In _Skrifter i Samling_ is printed another little fragment of _Romeo and Juliet_, which the editor, without giving his reasons, a.s.signs to a date earlier than that of the balcony scene. It is Mercutio's description of Queen Mab (Act I, Sc. 4). This is decidedly more successful than the other. The vocabulary of the Norwegian dialects is rich in words of fairy-lore, and one who knew this word treasure as Aasen did could render the fancies of Mercutio with something very near the exuberance of Shakespeare himself:

No ser eg vel, at ho hev' vore hjaa deg ho gamle Mabba, Naerkona aat Vettom.

So lita som ein Adelstein i Ringen paa fremste Fingren paa ein verdug Raadsmann, ho kjyrer kring med smaa Soldumbe-Flokar paa Nasanna aat Folk, dan Tid dei sv.

Hjulspikann' henna er av Konglefter, Vognfelden er av Engjesprette-Vengjer, og Taumann' av den minste Kongleveven.

Av Maanestraalanne paa Vatn er Selen, og av Sirissebein er Svipeskafted og Svipesnerten er av Agner smaa.

Skjotskaren er eit nett graakjola My so stort som Holva av ein liten Ml, som minste Vaekja krasa kann med Fingren.

Til Vogn ho fekk ei holut Haslenot av Snikkar Ikorn elder Natemakk, som altid var Vognmakarann' aat Vettom.[15]

[15. Ivar Aasen: _Skrifter i Samling_. Christiania. 1911, Vol. I, p. 166.]

The translation ends with Mercutio's words:

And being thus frightened, swears a prayer or two, And sleeps again.

In my opinion this is consummately well done--at once accurate and redolent of poesy; and certainly Aasen would have been justified in feeling that Landsmaal is equal to Shakespeare's most airy pa.s.sages. The slight inaccuracy of one of the lines:

Av Maanestraalanne paa Vatn er Selen,

for Shakespeare's:

The colors of the moonshine's watery beams,

is of no consequence. The discrepancy was doubtless as obvious to the translator as it is to us.

From about the same time we have another Shakespeare fragment from Aasen's hand. Like the Queen Mab pa.s.sage, it was not published till 1911.[16] It is scarcely surprising that it is a rendering of Hamlet's soliloquy: "To be or not to be." This is, of course, a more difficult undertaking. For the interests that make up the life of the people--their family and community affairs, their arts and 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 Styt av ein hardskjen Lagnad eld taka Vaapn imot eit Hav med Harmar, staa mot og slaa dei veg?--Te dy, te sova, alt fraa seg gjort,--og i ein Smn te enda dan Hjarteverk, dei tusend timleg' Stytar, som Kjt er Erving til, da var ein Ende rett storleg ynskjande. Te dy, te sova, ja sova, kanskje dryma,--au, d'er Knuten.

Fyr' i dan Daudesmn, 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 Rettarlysa, slikt Embaet's Ovmod, slik Tilbakaspenning, som tolug, verdug Mann faer av uverdug; kven vilde da, naar sjlv han kunde lysa 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 laet 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 stryma 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 f.a.grar' en ho sjlv" 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 n.o.ble form to Shakespeare's n.o.ble 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 Sndmr, 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 Cx.x.x in popularized Eastern, as distinguished from Aasen's literary, aristocratic Western Landsmaal. It is the first translation of a Shakespearean sonnet on Norwegian soil. The new language was hewing out new paths.

Som Soli Augunn' inkje skjin, og som Koraller inkje Lipunn' glansar, og snjokvit hev ho inkje Halsen sin, og Gullhaar inkje Hove hennar kransar,

Eg baae kvit' og raue Roser ser--, paa Kinni hennar deira Lit'kje blandast; og meire fin vel Blomsterangen er, en den som ut fraa Lipunn' hennar andast.

Eg hyrt hev hennar Ryst og veit endaa, at inkje som ein Song dei laeter Ori; og aldrig hev eg set ein Engel gaa-- og gjenta mi ser sttt eg gaa paa Jori.

Men ho er strre Lov og aere vaer enn pyntedokkane me laana Glansen.

Den reine Hugen seg i alting ter, og ljost ho smilar under Brurekransen.[18]

[18. "Ein Sonett etter William Shakespeare." _Fram_--1872.]

Obviously this is not a sonnet at all. Not only does the translator ignore Shakespeare's rime scheme, but he sets aside the elementary definition of a sonnet--a poem of fourteen lines. We have here sixteen lines and the last two add nothing to the original. The poet, through lack of skill, has simply run on. He could have ended with line 14 and then, whatever other criticism might have been pa.s.sed upon his work, we should have had at least the sonnet form. The additional lines are in themselves fairly good poetry but they have no place in what purports to be translation. The translator signs himself simply "r." Whoever he was, he had poetic feeling and power of expression. No mere poetaster could have given lines so exquisite in their imagery, so full of music, and so happy in their phrasing. This fact in itself makes it a poor translation, for it is rather a paraphrase with a quality and excellence all its own. Not a line exactly renders the English. The paraphrase is never so good as the original but, considered by itself, it is good poetry. The disillusionment comes only with comparison. On the whole, this second attempt to put Shakespeare into Landsmaal was distinctly less successful than the first. As poetry it does not measure up to Aasen; as translation it is periphrastic, arbitrary, not at all faithful.

F

The translations which we have thus far considered were mere fragments--brief soliloquies or a single sonnet, and they were done into a dialect which was not then and is not now the prevailing literary language of the country. They were earnest and, in the case of Aasen, successful attempts to show that Landsmaal was adequate to the most varied and remote of styles. But many years were to elapse before anyone attempted the far more difficult task of turning any considerable part of Shakespeare into "Modern Norwegian."

Norway still relied, with no apparent sense of humiliation, on the translations of Shakespeare as they came up from Copenhagen. In 1881, however, Hartvig La.s.sen (1824-1897) translated _The Merchant of Venice_.[19] La.s.sen matriculated as a student in 1842, and from 1850 supported himself as a literateur, writing reviews of books and plays for _Krydseren_ and _Aftenposten_. In 1872 he was appointed Artistic Censor at the theater, and in that office translated a mult.i.tude of plays from almost every language of Western Europe. His published translations of Shakespeare are, however, quite unrelated to his theatrical work. They were done for school use and published by _Selskabet for Folkeoplysningens Fremme_ (Society for the Promotion of Popular Education).

[19. _Kjbmanden i Venedig_--Et Skuespil af William Shakespeare. Oversat af Hartvig La.s.sen. Udgivet af Selskabet for Folkeoplysningens Fremme som andet Tillaegshefte til _Folkevennen_ for 1881. Kristiania, 1881.]

To _Kjbmanden i Venedig_ there is no introduction and no notes--merely a postscript in which the translator declares that he has endeavored everywhere faithfully to reproduce the peculiar tone of the play and to preserve the concentration of style which is everywhere characteristic of Shakespeare. He acknowledges his indebtedness to the Swedish translation by Hagberg and the German by Schlegel. Inasmuch as this work was published for wide, general distribution and for reading in the schools, La.s.sen cut out the pa.s.sages which he deemed unsuitable for the untutored mind. "But," he adds, "with the exception of the last scene of Act III, which, in its expurgated form, would be too fragmentary (and which, indeed, does not bear any immediate relation to the action), only a few isolated pa.s.sages have been cut. Shakespeare has lost next to nothing, and a great deal has been gained if I have hereby removed one ground for the hesitation which most teachers would feel in using the book in the public schools." In Act III, Scene 5 is omitted entirely, and obvious pa.s.sages in other parts of the play.

It has frequently been said that La.s.sen did little more than "norvagicize" Lembcke's Danish renderings. And certainly even the most cursory reading will show that he had Lembcke at hand. But comparison will also show that variations from Lembcke are numerous and considerable. La.s.sen was a man of letters, a critic, and a good student of foreign languages, but he was no poet, and his _Merchant of Venice_ is, generally speaking, much inferior to Lembcke's. Compare, for example, the exquisite opening of the fifth act:

La.s.sEN

_Lor_: Klart skinner Maanen, i en Nat som denne, da Vinden gled med Lys igjennem Lvet, og alt var tyst: i slig en Nat forvist Trojas Murtinder Troilus besteg, til Graekerlejren, til sin Cressida udsukkende sin Sjael.

LEMBCKE

Klart skinner Maanen, i en Nat som denne, mens Luftningen saa sagte kyssed Traeet at knapt det sused, i en saadan Nat steg Troilus vist up paa Trojas Mur og sukked ud sin Sjael mod Graekerlejren der gjemte Cressida.

_Jes_: I slig en Nat sig Thisbe listed aengstelig, over Duggen saa Lvens Skygge fr hun saa den selv, og lb forskraekket bort.

En saadan Nat gik Thisbe bange trippende paa Duggen og jned Lvens Skygge fr den selv og lb forfaerdet bort.

_Lor_: I slig en Nat stod Dido med en Vidjevaand i Haanden paa vilden strand, og vinked til Kartago sin elsker hjem igjen.

En saadan Nat stod Dido med en Vidjekvist i Haanden paa vilden Strand og vinkede sin Elsker tilbage til Carthagos Kyst.