Hvad melder De mig om Dem selv, Laertes?

and two lines below: 

  Hvad kan du be mig om?

It might be a mere slip that the translator in one line uses the formal De and in another the familiar du, but the same inconsistency occurs again and again throughout the volume.  In itself a trifle, it indicates clearly enough the careless, slipshod manner of work—­and an utter lack of a sense of humor, for no one with a spark of humor would use the modern, essentially German De in a Norwegian translation of Shakespeare.  If a formal form must be used it should, as a matter of course, be I.

Nor is the translation itself so accurate as it should be.  For example, what does it mean when Marcellus tells Bernardo that he had implored Horatio “at vogte paa minutterne inat” (to watch over the minutes this night)?  Again, in the King’s speech to Hamlet (Act I, Sc. 2) the phrase “bend you to remain” is rendered by the categorical “se til at bli herhjemme,” which is at least misleading.  Little inaccuracies of this sort are not infrequent.

But, after all, a translator with a new variorum and a wealth of critical material at hand cannot go far wrong in point of mere translation.  The chief indictment to be made against Blom’s translation is its prosiness, its prosy, involved sentences, its banality.  What in Shakespeare is easy and mellifluous often becomes in Blom so vague that its meaning has to be discovered by a reference to the original.

We gave, some pages back, Ivar Aasen’s translation of Hamlet’s soliloquy.  The interesting thing about that translation is not only that it is the first one in Norwegian but that it was made into a new dialect by the creator of that dialect himself.  When we look back and consider what Aasen had to do—­first, make a literary medium, and then pour into the still rigid and inelastic forms of that language the subtlest thinking of a great world literature—­we gain a new respect for his genius.  Fifty years later Blom tried his hand at the same soliloquy.  He was working in an old and tried literary medium—­Dano-Norwegian.  But he was unequal to the task: 

At vaere eller ikke vaere, det problemet er:  Om det er storre av en sjael at taale skjaebnens pil og slynge end ta til vaaben mot et hav av plager og ende dem i kamp?  At do,—­at sove, ei mer; og tro, at ved en sovn vi ender vor hjerteve og livets tusen stot, som kjod er arving til—­det maal for livet maa onskes inderlig.  At do,—­at sove—­ at sove!—­Kanske dromme!  Der er knuten; for hvad i dodsens sovn vi monne dromme, naar livets laenke vi har viklet av, det holder os igjen; det er det hensyn, som gir vor jammer her saa langt et liv’ etc.

K