Chapter 9

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.