Hauge was a careful and conscientious scholar. He knew his field and worked with the painstaking fidelity of the man who realizes the difficulty of his task. The translation he gave is of a piece with the man-faithful, laborious, uninspired. But it is, at least, superior to Rosenfeldt and Sander, and Hauge justified his work by giving to his countrymen the best version of Macbeth up to that time. Monrad himself reviewed Hauge's Macbeth in a careful and well-informed article, in Nordisk Tidsskrift for Videnskab og Literatur, which I shall review later. D One of the most significant elements in the intellectual life of modern Norway is the so-called Landsmaal movement. It is probably unnecessary to say that this movement is an effort on the part of many Norwegians to substitute for the dominant DanoNorwegian a new literary language based on the "best" dialects. This language, commonly called the Landsmaal, is, at all events in its origin, the creation of one man, Ivar Aasen. Aasen published the first edition of his grammar in 1848, and the first edition of his dictionary in 1850. But obviously it was not enough to provide a grammar and a word-book. The literary powers of the new language must be developed and disciplined and, accordingly, Aasen published in 1853 Prøver af Landsmaalet i Norge. The little volume contains, besides other material, seven translations from foreign classics; among these is Romeo's soliloquy in the balcony scene. 14 (Act II, Sc. 1) This modest essay of Aasen's, then, antedates Hauge's rendering of Macbeth and constitutes the first bit of Shakespeare translation in Norway since the Coriolanus of 1818. Aasen knew that Landsmaal was adequate to the expression of the homely and familiar. But would it do for belles lettres? Han lær aat Saar, som aldri kende Saar. Men hyst!-Kvat Ljos er dat dar upp i glaset? Dat er i Aust, og Julia er Soli. Sprett, fagre Sol, og tyn dan Maane-Skjegla, som alt er sjuk og bleik av berre Ovund, at hennar Taus er fagrar' en ho sjølv. Ver inkje hennar Taus; dan Ovundsykja, 14 Ivar Aasen-Skrifter i Samling-Christiania. 1911, Vol. 11, p. 165. Reprinted from Prøver af Landsmaalet i Norge, Første Udgave. Kristiania. 1853, p. 114. so sjukleg grøn er hennar Jomfru-Klædnad; It was no peasant jargon that Aasen had invented; it was a literary language of great power and beauty with the dignity and fulness of any other literary medium. But it was new and untried. It had no literature. Aasen, accordingly, set about creating one. Indeed, much of what he wrote had no other purpose. What, then, shall we say of the first appearance of Shakespeare in "Ny Norsk"? First, that it was remarkably felicitous. Kinn-Ljosken hadde skemt dei Sternor som Dagsljos skemmer Lampen, hennar Augo, etc. That is no inadequate rendering of: 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 som en af Nattens vingede Cheruber for dødeliges himmelvendte Øine, etc. But lines like these have an admirable and perfect loveliness: naar han skrid um dan seinleg-sigand' Skyi og sigler yver høge 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 Prøver af Landsmaalet. In Skrifter i Samling is printed another little fragment of Romeo and Juliet, which the editor, without giving his reasons, assigns 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, Nærkona aat Vettom. So lita som ein Adelstein i Ringen paa fremste Fingren paa ein verdug Raadsmann, som minste Vækja krasa kann med Fingren. Til Vogn ho fekk ei holut Haslenot av Snikkar Ikorn elder Natemakk, som altid var Vognmakarann' aat Vettom." The translation ends with Mercutio's words: And being thus frightened, swears a prayer or two, 15 Ivar Aasen: Skrifter i Samling. Christiania. 1911, Vol. I, p. 166 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 passages. 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 passage, 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 sophiscated as this, adequate and final expression is not impossible. The whole is worth giving: Te vera elder ei,-d'er da her spyrst um; 16 Skrifter i Samling, I, 168. Kristiania. 1911. 17 Cf. Alf Torp. Samtiden, XIX (1908), p. 483. 16 naar mid ha kastat av dei daudleg Bandi, som gjerer Useldom so lang i Livet: kven vilde tolt slikt Hogg og Haad i Tidi, slik sterk Manns Urett, stolt Manns Skamlaus Medferd. 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 It. 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. 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 noplace 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 |