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,
    trolose 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 lovet. 
  Alt venskap er vammelt, al elskov er tovet,
    men her under lovet
    er ingen bedrovet.

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.