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 Søndmør, 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 CXXX 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 høyrt hev hennar Røyst og veit endaa,
at inkje som ein Song dei læter Ori;
og aldrig hev eg set ein Engel gaa—
og gjenta mi ser støtt eg gaa paa Jori.
Men ho er større Lov og Ære vær
enn pyntedokkane me laana Glansen.
Den reine Hugen seg i alting ter,
og ljost ho smilar under Brurekransen.[I.18]
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 passed 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 Lassen (1824-1897) translated The Merchant of Venice.[I.19] Lassen 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 multitude 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).
To Kjøbmanden 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, Lassen cut out the passages 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 passages 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 passages in other parts of the play.