Ver inkje hennar Taus; dan Ovundsykja,
so sjukleg grøn er hennar Jomfru-Klædnad;
d'er berre Narr, som ber han. Sleng han av!
Ja, d'er mi Fru, d'er dan eg held i Hugen;
aa, giv ho hadde vist dat, at ho er dat!
Ho talar, utan Ord. Kvat skal ho med dei?
Ho tala kann med Augom;—eg vil svara.
Eg er for djerv; d'er inkje meg ho ser paa,
d'er tvo av fegste Stjernom dar paa Himlen,
som gekk ei Ærend, og fekk hennar Augo
te blinka i sin Stad, til dei kem atter.
Enn um dei var dar sjølve Augo hennar.
Kinn-Ljosken hennar hadde skemt dei Stjernor,
som Dagsljos skemmer Lampen; hennar Augo
hadd' straatt so bjart eit Ljos i Himmels Høgdi,
at Fuglar song og Trudde, dat var Dag.
Sjaa, kor ho hallar Kinni lint paa Handi,
Aa, giv eg var ein Vott paa denne Handi
at eg fekk strjuka Kinni den.—Ho talar.—
Aa tala meir, Ljos-Engel, med du lyser
so klaart i denne Natti kring mitt Hovud,
som naar dat kem ein utfløygd Himmels Sending
mot Folk, som keika seg og stira beint upp
med undrarsame kvit-snudd' Augo mot han,
naar han skrid um dan seinleg-sigand' Skyi
og sigler yver høge Himmels Barmen.

It was no peasant jargon that Aasen had invented; it was a literary language of great power and beauty with the dignity and fulness of any other literary medium. But it was new and untried. It had no literature. Aasen, accordingly, set about creating one. Indeed, much of what he wrote had no other purpose. What, then, shall we say of the first appearance of Shakespeare in "Ny Norsk"?

First, that it was remarkably felicitous.

That is no inadequate rendering of:

And equally good are the closing lines beginning:

Foersom is deservedly praised for his translation of the same lines, but a comparison of the two is not altogether disastrous to Aasen, though, to be sure, his lines lack some of Foersom's insinuating softness:

But lines like these have an admirable and perfect loveliness:

Aasen busied himself for some years with this effort to naturalize his Landsmaal in all the forms of literature. Apparently this was always uppermost in his thoughts. We find him trying himself in this sort of work in the years before and after the publication of Prøver af Landsmaalet. In Skrifter i Samling is printed another little fragment of Romeo and Juliet, which the editor, without giving his reasons, assigns to a date earlier than that of the balcony scene. It is Mercutio's description of Queen Mab (Act I, Sc. 4). This is decidedly more successful than the other. The vocabulary of the Norwegian dialects is rich in words of fairy-lore, and one who knew this word treasure as Aasen did could render the fancies of Mercutio with something very near the exuberance of Shakespeare himself:

The translation ends with Mercutio's words:

In my opinion this is consummately well done—at once accurate and redolent of poesy; and certainly Aasen would have been justified in feeling that Landsmaal is equal to Shakespeare's most airy passages. The slight inaccuracy of one of the lines:

for Shakespeare's:

is of no consequence. The discrepancy was doubtless as obvious to the translator as it is to us.

From about the same time we have another Shakespeare fragment from Aasen's hand. Like the Queen Mab passage, it was not published till 1911.^I.16 It is scarcely surprising that it is a rendering of Hamlet's soliloquy: "To be or not to be." This is, of course, a more difficult undertaking. For the interests that make up the life of the people—their family and community affairs, their arts and crafts and folk-lore, the dialects of Norway, like the dialects of any other country, have a vocabulary amazingly rich and complete.^I.17 But not all ideas belong in the realm of the every-day, and the great difficulty of the Landsmaal movement is precisely this—that it must develop a "culture language." To a large degree it has already done so. The rest is largely a matter of time. And surely Ivar Aasen's translation of the famous soliloquy proved that the task of giving, even to thought as sophisticated as this, adequate and final expression is not impossible. The whole is worth giving: