An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway, Martin Brown Ruud [books suggested by bill gates txt] 📗
- Author: Martin Brown Ruud
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hvem vi er, og hvor vi os befinder.
Ja, livet her er ei ly for verdens ondskap,
er stolt og frit og fuldt av rike glæder:
hver graasten synes god og kirkeklok,
hvert redetræ er jo en sangers slot,
og alt er skjønt, og alt er saare godt.
_Amiens_:
Du er en godt benaadet oversætter,
naar du kan tolke skjæbnens harske talesæt
i slike sterke, stemningsfulde ord...
(En hofmand, derefter Jacques og tjenere kommer.)
_Hertugen_:
Godmorgen, venner--vel, saa skal vi jage
paa vildtet her, de vakre, dumme borgere
av denne øde og forlate stad...
_Jacques_:
Det er synd at søndre deres vakre lemmer
med pile-odd.
_Amiens_:
Det samme sier du altid,
du er for melankolsk og bitter, Jacques.
A careful comparison of the translation with the original will reveal
certain verbal resemblances, notably in the duke's speech:
Din spøk er vel en saadan sanger værd, etc.
But, even allowing for that, it is a rephrasing rather than a
translation. The stage action, too, is changed. Notice that Jacques
appears in the scene, and that in the episode immediately following, the
second part of the first lord's speech is put into Jacques' mouth. In
other words, he is made to caricature himself!
This is Wildenvey's attitude throughout. To take still another example.
Act IV, 2 begins in the English with a brief dialogue in prose between
Jacques and the two lords. In Wildenvey this is changed to a rhymed
dialogue in iambic tetrameters between Jacques and Amiens. In like
manner, the blank verse dialogue between Silvius and Phebe (Silvius and
Pippa) is in Norwegian rendered, or rather paraphrased, in iambic verse
rhyming regularly abab.
Occasionally meanings are read into the play which not only do not
belong in Shakespeare but which are ridiculously out of place. As an
illustration, note the dialogue between Orlando and Rosalind in II, 2
(Original, III, 2). Orlando remarks: "Your accent is something finer
than could be purchased in so remote a dwelling." Wildenvey renders
this: "Eders sprog er mer elevert end man skulde vente i disse vilde
trakter. De taler ikke Landsmaal." Probably no one would be deceived by
this gratuitous satire on the Landsmaal, but, obviously, it has no place
in what pretends to be a translation. The one justification for it is
that Shakespeare himself could not have resisted so neat a word-play.
Wildenvey's version, therefore, can only be characterized as needlessly
free. For the text as such he has absolutely no regard. But for the fact
that he has kept the fable and, for the most part, the characters,
intact, we should characterize it as a belated specimen of Sille Beyer's
notorious Shakespeare "bearbeidelser" in Denmark. But Wildenvey does not
take Sille Beyer's liberties with the dramatis personae and he has,
moreover, what she utterly lacked--poetic genius.
For that is the redeeming feature of _Livet i Skogen_--it does not
translate Shakespeare but it makes him live. The delighted audience
which sat night after night in Christiania and Copenhagen and drank in
the loveliness of Wildenvey's verse and Halvorsen's music cared little
whether the lines that came over the footlights were philologically an
accurate translation or not. They were enchanted by Norwegian verse and
moved to unfeigned delight by the cleverness of the prose. If Wildenvey
did not succeed in translating _As You Like It_--one cannot believe that
he ever intended to,--he did succeed in reproducing something of "its
imperishable woodland spirit, its fresh breath of out-of-doors."
We have already quoted the opening of Act II. It is not Shakespeare but
it is good poetry in itself. And the immortal scene between Touchstone
and Corin in III, 2 (Shak. III, 2), in which Touchstone clearly proves
that the shepherd is damned, is a capital piece of work. The following
fragment must serve as an example:
_Touchstone_:
Har du været ved hoffet, hyrde?
_Korin_:
Visselig ikke.
_Touch_:
Da er du evig fordømt.
_Korin_:
Det haaber jeg da ikke.
_Touch_:
Visselig, da er du fordømt som en sviske.
_Korin_:
Fordi jeg ikke har været ved hoffet? Hvad mener I?
_Touch_:
Hvis du ikke har været ved hoffet, saa har du aldrig set gode seder,
og hvis du ikke har set gode seder, saa maa dine seder være slette,
og slette seder er synd, og syndens sold er død og fordømmelse. Du
er i en betænkelig tilstand, hyrde!
And the mocking verses all rhyming in _in-ind_ in III, 3 (Shak. III, 2):
"From the East to western Ind," etc., are given with marvelous
cleverness:
Fra øst til vest er ei at finde
en ædelsten som Rosalinde.
Al verden om paa alle vinde
skal rygtet gaa om Rosalinde.
Hvor har en maler nogensinde
et kunstverk skapt som Rosalinde?
Al anden deilighet maa svinde
av tanken bort--for Rosalinde.
Or Touchstone's parody:
Hjorten skriker efter hinde,
skrik da efter Rosalinde,
kat vil katte gjerne finde,
hvem vil finde Rosalinde.
Vinterklær er tit for tynde,
det er ogsaa Rosalinde.
Nøtten søt har surhamshinde,
slik en nøtt er Rosalinde.
Den som ros' med torn vil finde,
finder den--og Rosalinde.
With even greater felicity Wildenvey has rendered the songs of the play.
His verses are not, in any strict sense, translations, but they have a
life and movement which, perhaps, interpret the original more fully than
any translation could interpret it. What freshness and sparkle in "Under
the Greenwood Tree!" I give only the first stanza:
Under de grønne trær
hvem vil mig møte der?
Hvem vil en tone slaa
frit mot det blide blaa?
Kom hit og herhen, hit og herhen,
kom, kjære ven,
her skal du se,
trær skal du se,
sommer og herlig veir skal du se.
Or what could be better than the exhilirating text of "Blow, blow, thou
winter wind," as Wildenvey has given it? Again only the first stanza:
Blaas, blaas du barske vind,
troløse venners sind
synes os mere raa.
Bar du dig end saa sint,
bet du dog ei saa blindt,
pustet du ogsaa paa.
Heiho! Syng heiho! i vor skog under løvet.
Alt venskap er vammelt, al elskov er tøvet,
men her under løvet
er ingen bedrøvet.
_Livet i Skogen_, then, must not be read as a translation of _As You
Like It_, but is immensely worth reading for its own sake. Schiller
recast and rewrote _Macbeth_ in somewhat the same way, but Schiller's
_Macbeth_, condemned by its absurd porter-scene, is today nothing
more than a literary curiosity. I firmly believe that Wildenvey's
"bearbeidelse" deserves a better fate. It gave new life to the
Shakespeare tradition on the Norwegian stage, and is in itself,
a genuine contribution to the literature of Norway.
SUMMARY
If we look over the field of Norwegian translation of Shakespeare,
the impression we get is not one to inspire awe. The translations are
neither numerous nor important. There is nothing to be compared with the
German of Tieck and Schlegel the Danish of Foersom, or the Swedish of
Hagberg.
But the reason is obvious. Down to 1814 Norway was politically and
culturally a dependency of Denmark. Copenhagen was the seat of
government, of literature, and of polite life. To Copenhagen cultivated
Norwegians looked for their models and their ideals. When Shakespeare
made his first appearance in the Danish literary world--Denmark and
Norway--it was, of course, in pure Danish garb. Boye, Rosenfeldt,
and Foersom gave to their contemporaries more or less satisfactory
translations of Shakespeare, and Norwegians were content to accept the
Danish versions. In one or two instances they made experiments of their
own. An unknown man of letters translated a scene from _Julius Caesar_
in 1782, and in 1818 appeared a translation of _Coriolanus_. But there
is little that is typically Norwegian about either of these--a word or a
phrase here and there. For the rest, they are written in pure Danish,
and but for the title-page, no one could tell whether they were
published in Copenhagen or Christiania and Trondhjem.
In the meantime Foersom had begun his admirable Danish translations,
and the work stopped in Norway. The building of a nation and literary
interests of another character absorbed the attention of the cultivated
world. Hauge's translation of _Macbeth_ is not significant, nor are
those of Lassen thirty years later. A scholar could, of course, easily
show that they are Norwegian, but that is all. They never succeeded in
displacing Foersom-Lembcke.
More important are the Landsmaal translations beginning with Ivar
Aasen's in 1853. They are interesting because they mark one of the most
important events in modern Norwegian culture--the language struggle.
Ivar Aasen set out to demonstrate that "maalet" could be used in
literature of every sort, and the same purpose, though in greatly
tempered form, is to be detected in every Landsmaal translation since.
Certainly in their outward aim they have succeeded. And, despite the
handicap of working in a language new, rough, and untried, they have
given to their countrymen translations of parts of Shakespeare which
are, at least, as good as those in "Riksmaal."
Herman Wildenvey stands alone. His work is neither a translation nor
a mere paraphrase; it is a reformulating of Shakespeare into a new work
of art. He has accomplished a feat worth performing, but it cannot be
called translating Shakespeare. It must be judged as an independent
work.
Whether Norway is always to go to Denmark for her standard Shakespeare,
or whether she is to have one of her own is, as yet, a question
impossible to answer. A pure Landsmaal translation cannot satisfy, and
many Norwegians refuse to recognize the Riksmaal as Norwegian at all. In
the far, impenetrable future the language question may settle itself,
and when that happy day comes, but not before, we may look with some
confidence for a "standard" Shakespeare in a literary garb which all
Norwegians will recognize as their own.
CHAPTER II (S)hakespeare Criticism In Norway
The history of Shakespearean translation in Norway cannot, by any
stretch of the imagination, be called distinguished. It is not, however,
wholly lacking in interesting details. In like manner the history of
Shakespearean criticism, though it contains no great names and no
fascinating chapters, is not wholly without appeal and significance. We
shall, then, in the following, consider this division of our subject.
Our first bit of Shakespearean criticism is the little introductory note
which the anonymous translator of the scenes from _Julius Caesar_ put at
the head of his translation in _Trondhjems Allehaande_ for October 23,
And even this is a mere statement that the passage in the original"may be regarded as a masterpiece," and that the writer purposes to
render not merely Antony's eloquent appeal but also the interspersed
ejaculations of the crowd, "since these, too, are evidence of
Shakespeare's understanding of the human soul and of his realization
of the manner in which the oration gradually brought about the result
toward which Antony aimed."
This is not profound criticism, to be sure, but it shows clearly that
this litterateur in far-away Trondhjem had a definite, if not a very new
and original, estimate of Shakespeare. It is significant that there is
no hint of apology, of that tone which is so common in Shakespearean
criticism of the day--Shakespeare was a great poet, but his genius was
wild and untamed. This unknown Norwegian, apparently, had been struck
only by the verity of the scene, and in that simplicity showed himself a
better critic of Shakespeare than many more famous men. Whoever he was,
his name is lost to us now. He deserves better than to be forgotten,
but it seems that he was forgotten very early. Foersom refers to him
casually, as we have seen, but Rahbek does not mention him.[1] Many
years later Paul Botten Hansen, one of the best equipped bookmen that
Norway has produced, wrote a brief review of Lembcke's translation. In
the course of this he enumerates the Dano-Norwegian translations known
to him. There is not a word about his countryman in Trondhjem.[2]
[1. "Shakespeareana i Danmark"--_Dansk Minerva_, 1816 (III)
151 ff.]
[2. _Illustreret Nyhedsblad_, 1865, pp. 96 ff.]
After this solitary landmark, a long time passed before we again find
evidence of Shakespearean studies in Norway. The isolated translation
of _Coriolanus_ from 1818
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