Norway’s slogan as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2019 is ‘The Dream We Carry’. The words derive from the poem ‘It Is That Dream’ by the much loved Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge (1908–94). In 2016, the poem was voted by readers and viewers of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) as the greatest Norwegian poem of all time. The life and work of the great poet is presented in the Olav H. Hauge Centre for Poetry in his homevillage by the Hardangerfjord.
Olav H. Hauge and the Dream
In 1982 a book by Olav H. Hauge was published with the sober title Dikt i umsetjing (Poetry in Translation), and it was here that it became clear that this Norwegian poet — who had himself published seven volumes of poetry between 1946 to 1980 — was one of the most active translators of poetry into Norwegian. A 1992 edition of the book contains the work of 27 poets, with Hauge translating from English, French and German. And it was not just anybody he had translated: it was romanticists and modernists writing in German such as Hölderlin, Heym, Trakl, Brecht and Celan; poets in English from Blake and Yeats to Lawrence and Bly; and French names such as Verlaine, Rimbaud, Michaux and Char. These were often demanding and enigmatic texts.
It might seem strange that Hauge, who was a trained gardener and lived as a fruit farmer, would bring this complicated poetry into a Norwegian linguistic form. One reason for this can be found in his Dagbok 1924–1994 ( Journals 1924–94 ), which were published after his death. These almost 4,000 pages tell a strong and fascinating life story, dealing with both the external and internal. The external drama concerns Hauge’s psychotic outburst in his early twenties, when he lived in a psychiatric hospital for several years. He came home to the farm, but was hospitalised many times throughout his life. The internal story tells of how he used literature to understand and interpret these experiences. He was passionate about the romantics — both in Norwegian and other European literature — and their dialogue with ‘the other side’. The writer Hölderlin was of great importance; for him the inner world was so strong that he lost his foothold in the safety of the everyday.
But Hauge established dialogue with modernist and surrealistic poetry too. In one well-known poem (‘Everyday’) he juxtaposes the good, calm day-to-day life, with being ‘in the storm, in the fire’, and feels drawn towards both. In the first part of his authorship, he experienced this gap between the dream and the earthly as painful and referred to himself as a dreaming gardener. But eventually, the dream became interwoven with literature. The dream and the poem became the place where everyday experiences — and the experience of being ‘detached’ and on the other side — could meet. The experiences of sorrow and of living in a cave, or being proud and building beyond the stars (‘And I Was Sorrow’), balanced against living in the near est tree. It is this background of sickness and vision that makes intimacy and everyday life so important to Hauge. When he found his way back to everyday life, there was perhaps a connection in that the dream and the poem were the places where these opposite poles could meet. "It Is That Dream" is one such meeting place:
Det er den draumen
Det er den draumen me ber på
at noko vedunderleg skal skje,
at det må skje —
at tidi skal opna seg,
at hjarta skal opna seg,
at dører skal opna seg,
at berget skal opna seg,
at kjeldor skal springa —
at draumen skal opna seg,
at me ei morgonstund skal glida inn
på ein våg me ikkje har visst um.
It Is That Dream
It is the dream we carry
that something wonderful will happen,
that it must happen –
that time will open,
that our hearts may open,
that doors shall open,
and the mountain shall open
that springs will gush forth –
that our dream will open,
and that one morning we’ll glide
into a cove we didn’t know.
Translation of ‘It Is That Dream’ (‘Det er den draumen’ from Dropar i austavind, Noregs boklag, 1966) by Olav Grinde. Text by Jan Inge Sørbø, author of Nynorsk Literary History (Samlaget, 2018). Translated by Matt Bagguley.