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 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.[I.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.[I.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 Støyt av ein hardsøkjen Lagnad
eld taka Vaapn imot eit Hav med Harmar,
staa mot og slaa dei veg?—Te døy, te sova,
alt fraa seg gjort,—og i ein Sømn te enda
dan Hjarteverk, dei tusend timleg' Støytar,
som Kjøt er Erving til, da var ein Ende
rett storleg ynskjande. Te døy, te sova,
ja sova, kanskje drøyma,—au, d'er Knuten.
Fyr' i dan Daudesømn, 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 Rettarløysa,
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
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 læt 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 strøyma ovugt
og tapa Namn av Tiltak.
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 fagrar' en ho sjølv" 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 noble form to Shakespeare's noble verse.