Jon Fosse - "Morgon og kveld"

Norwegian playwright and novelist Jon Fosse will be 50 this year. He is one of the more visible writers in Norway, and acclaimed internationally as a playwright.

His short poetic novel from 2000 is called Morgon og kveld (Morn and Eve) and is gently experimental. It tells, in two parts, of the birth and the dying days of the protagonist, a fisherman. The first part, told by a third-person narrator, forms one seventh of the 116-page novel, and describes how the father, Olai, is waiting around rather helplessly as the old midwife Anna helps his wife Marta to give birth to his son Johannes. This son's mid-life is passed over, and when we meet Johannes again, he himself is the narrator, so the novel ends in mid-sentence.

In her review, critic Anne Lise Jomisko notes various things about this novel. Firstly that there are no full-stops in the whole book. Secondly that many descriptions are of daily routines. And that there are repetitions, as the reader can see from the excerpt below. This is a way of writing a novel that brings to the fore the words, the writing, as much as the plot or storyline.

The excerpt from the start of the novel shows the main two styles of the novel: short and pithy dialogue, and long stream of consciousness passages. The whole of the last paragraph here, for instance, continues and takes up pages 9-17 of the novel. This is still a draft; some of the shifting of tenses in the long passages are a challenge to the translator.

Morgon og kveld (Morn and Eve)

by Jon Fosse

More hot water, says the old midwife Anna

No, don’t stand there hanging around in the kitchen doorway, man, she says

No, no, says Olai

and he feels heat and cold spreading across his skin among the goose pimples and a joy goes right through him and emerges as tears in his eyes as he rushes off to the stove and starts to ladle steaming water into a long wooden bowl so that there will be enough, yes, thinks Olai and he ladles even more water into the bowl and he can hear the midwife Anna saying that there must be enough now, that’ll be enough now, she says and Olai looks up and there the old midwife Anna is, standing behind him and she picks up the bowl

I can carry it myself, says midwife Anna

and a muffled shriek can be heard form the room and Olai looks old midwife Anna in the eye and nods and even gives a big grin as he stands there

Be patient, will you, says the old midwife Anna

If it’s a boy, he’ll be called Johannes says Olai

We’ll have to see, says midwife Anna

Johannes, yes, says Olai

After my father, he says

No, there’s nothing wrong with that name, says the old midwife Anna
and another shriek, louder, freer now

Be patient, will you, Olai, says the old midwife Anna

Be patient, she says

Do you hear what I say? she says

Be patient, she says

You’re a fisherman, you know that there must be any women on board, don’t you? she says

Yes, yes, says Olai

And maybe it’s the same with men, you know what I’m getting at? says the old midwife Anna

Yes, a mishap, says Olai

Yes exactly, a mishap, says the old midwife Anna

and Olai sees the old midwife Anna go straight towards the door to the room holding the bowl of hot water in front of her, arms straight, and the old midwife Anna stops in the doorway and turns round towards Olai

Don’t just stand there, says the old midwife Anna

and Olai gives a start, is he standing there and unintentionally spreading mishap? no he didn’t mean to do so and if things go wrong with both loving and honouring Marta, his darling, his wife, then they will, no I can’t happen like that

You, Olai, leave the kitchen door alone and go and sit down on your chair, says the old midwife Anna

and Olai sits down at the end of the kitchen table and places his elbows on the table and rests his head in his hands and it was a good thing he’d taken Magda to his brother’s that day, thinks Olai, and when he was on his way to fetch the old midwife Anna, he first rowed over to his brother’s with Magda and didn’t know if he’d done the right thing, because Magda will soon be a grown up woman, Magda as well, the years pass quickly, but Marta asked him to do so, when she was about to give birth and he was to row out to fetch the old midwife Anna and must take Magda with him, so she could be at his brother’s while the birth took place, she was too young to know exactly what was awaiting her as adult woman, is what Marta had said to him and he had obviously to do what she said, even though he would so gladly have had Magda at his side right now, she’d been a clever and sensible girl as long as he could remember and good at everything she does, I’ve certainly got a good daughter, thinks Olai, but it didn’t look as if the Lord God would bless you with more children and the years passed by and after you had resigned yourself to the fact that there were not going to be more children, that’s how it was, that was their fate they said and they should thank the Lord their God as he had given them Magda, for if they hadn’t have had her, then it would have been sad for them here on Holmen where they had settled and where he himself had built the house and his brothers and neighbours had helped but he’d done most of the work himself and when he was courting Marta he had bought Holmen, which was going for a song and he’d thought it all out, where his home would be built, in a calm spot in the lee for wind and weather, and where it would stand, and he’d also thought about where the boathouse and the jetty would be, but it didn’t end up there, and the first he built was the jetty and built it in a quiet bay turned in towards the land, well in the lee for wind and weather there on the west side of Holmen, yes, and then the house itself got built, not so big and beautiful perhaps, and now Marta was lying there in the little room and would at last give birth to a son, now little Johannes was going to be born, he was sure of that, thought Olai as he sat there at the kitchen table, on his chair, and rested his head in his hands, as long as things didn’t go wrong, as long as Marta gave birth to the child, as long as little Johannes was alright in her belly and as long as both Marta and little Johannes can stand the pain, as long as it didn’t go with Marta like on that terrible day with his mother, no, he couldn’t bear the thought, thinks Olai, because they’ve had a good time together, Olai and Marta, love at first sight, thinks Olai, but now? will Marta be taken away from him? is God so angry with him? alright if He wants to, but it’s just as likely to be Satan who rules this world as it is the good Lord, Olai had never had any doubts about that

*

Translated from Norwegian (nynorsk) by Eric Dickens

Det Norske Samlaget

Language and identity are intertwined. National awareness sometimes goes hand in hand with violence, as in Northern Ireland, Euskadi and Palestine, even this century. But at other times, as when the Baltic States broke with the Soviet Union in 1991, secession was achieved almost without incident. Even today, a peaceful move to secession, based partly on language, is brewing in Catalonia.

Norwegian national aspirations had been around since pre-1814, when after a brief war with Sweden, Norway became part of a dual monarchy. And in 1830, Norwegian language reform took place. In the 1840s and 1850s, Ivar Aasen began to create a new written language, nynorsk, based on dialects. Norway broke with Sweden in 1905. It is intriguing that in Norway, like in Finland, two significant literary languages are used (Sámi is more international). But unlike in Finland, the two languages of Norway are closely linked.

Scroll forward to 1978. In that year, a publishing house was created that publishes books only in this minority version of written Norwegian: Det Norske Samlaget. Nowadays it publishes around 200 titles per year on a variety of subjects, including fiction and poetry. Novels are also translated into nynorsk, such as one by French author Anna Gavalda among those published in spring 2009. See the following webpage for the details of other authors, mostly writing originally in nynorsk at:

http://www.samlaget.no/artikkel.cfm?id=1518

And their main sjønnlitteratur page:

http://www.samlaget.no/section.cfm?path=18,21

One of the authors celebrated on their website is Jon Fosse, major Norwegian playwright and novelist, who is 50 this year. But there are many other authors there, such as short-story author Frode Grytten, and writers producing their first books, such as Hilde K. Kvalvaag, Gaute M. Sortland, and Rune F. Hjemås. The famous novelist Kjartan Fløgstad is also well represented here by various books.

The bokmål majority (around 88% of Norwegians) have not always been happy with the fact that nynorsk continues to be taught and promoted in schools. In 2005, some young conservatives symbolically burnt a copy of a nynorsk dictionary. And the percentage of children being taught nynorsk in primary schools is a mere 14%. But for the time being, the publishing house Det Norske Samlaget continues to thrive.

Hammershaimb, Aasen, Aavik

Linguistics, the nation and literature.

I regard myself as a literary translator, rather than a linguist as such, but certain linguistic phenomena interest me, such as the creation and restitution of languages. This is where linguistics meets social, and especially literary, needs.

The three men listed in the title are by no means the only linguists who have actually built and formed parts of their respective languages, but they are representative of people who felt it their duty to do something for the written language of their respective countries, so that it would become a usable national language - not least that a national literature could be written in them.

Ivar Aasen (1813-1896) started of what was to become nynorsk. Venceslaus Hammershaimb (1819-1909) created a new spelling for Faroese so that it could become a viable written language. Johannes Aavik (1880-1973) even created neologisms and used Finnish calques to expand the Estonian language, also to make it more suited to writing literature.

Their efforts are not to be divorced from a national (language) consciousness, first perhaps hinted at by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), who had moved from East Prussia to Riga and was maybe the first leading poet and intellectual to make people, in this case in the Baltic countries, aware of the fact that what many regarded as mere peasant dialects and idioms could be turned into literary languages, by drawing on oral folk tales and poems, committing them to paper, and using words to be found there when writing new poetry. His efforts in turn sparked off the work of, for instance, Johann Snellman (1806-1881) and Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884) in Finland, and Friedrich Kreutzwald (1803-1882) in Estonia.

For more details on all these linguists and men of letters, you can turn to Google. The phenomenon of raising the dignity of a national language is not restricted to northern countries alone. The same was done with, for example, what was to become modern Hebrew, and Afrikaans, which was in effect a breakaway dialect of Dutch.

But my point is that when all these linguistic efforts were made to consolidate national languages, literature, at first poetry, later novels, were an essential and symbiotic part of the efforts. I wonder how linguists, anno 2009, would go about the same tasks. Would literature, as such, still play an equally major part?

Dag og Tid

Just a quick introduction to a newspaper that has been added to the links to the right of your screen. Dag og Tid calls itself "...den einaste riksavisa på nynorsk". It is by no means entirely devoted to literature, but is a mouthpiece for those people who want write and read in nynorsk. Obviously, language politics, something that is of importance to literary translators, also features. But if you use the search facility on the website, you can find quite a lot of reviews, available online, of authors, mainly ones writing in nynorsk, such as Jon Fosse, Tarjei Vesaas and Kjartan Fløgstad.

Website: http://www.dagogtid.no/index.cfm

Recently (20th February 2009), they had an interesting article on "Den beste boka i Norden":

http://www.dagogtid.no/nyhet.cfm?nyhetid=1471