Poetry
Digte
Not translated into English
Sigbjørn Obstfelder · 1893
Opening lines
Bare en liden vise om du og jeg,
eller om dagene, som gik dengang,
nætterne, —
værelset med det kjælne tusmørke,
Just a little song about you and me,
or about the days that went by then,
the nights,
the room with its tender twilight,
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from bokselskap.no
Synopsis
The collection gives up final rhyme and fixed metre for free verse, rhythmed like music. According to Hilde Bøe's critical edition, it contains seventeen separate poems, then two sections, “Melodier” and “Skovviser”. We encounter the loneliness of a Christmas evening, the surge of a hurricane, love, and above all estrangement from the world: in “Jeg ser”, a man looks at the sky, the tall houses, the well-dressed gentlemen and the smiling ladies, and ends up believing he has arrived on a planet that is not his own.
Context
The book was published by John Grieg, in Bergen, in early December 1893. According to Hilde Bøe, eight of the poems had already appeared, four of them in Samtiden in 1892, and Edvard Munch was to draw vignettes that never saw the light of day. Norwegian and Danish critics were favourable, with one exception: Aftenposten spoke of “gibberish”. Britannica reads in it a break with naturalist poetry, and Janss and Refsum make it the first Nordic collection dominated by free verse. The Norgeshistorie website, of the University of Oslo, compares it to Munch's paintings.
Who it is for
About thirty short poems, available in French in the collected volumes translated by Régis Boyer and then by Romain Mathieux.
Prizes and reception
Hailed by Dagbladet as the literary event of the year, the collection is now regarded as the birth certificate of Norwegian modernism.
Sources for this page 5
The pages consulted to check this page.