raa ho vende,
ved kvar den eid som falske menn hev svori--
langt fleir enn kvinnelippur fram hev bori,
at paa den staden du hev nemnt for meg,
der skal i morgo natt eg mote deg.

In spite of the translator's obvious effort to put fire into the
passage, his failure is all too evident. Even the ornament of these
lines--to which there is nothing to correspond in the original--only
makes the poetry more forcibly feeble:

ved duvune, dei reine og dei kvite
som flyg paa tun hjaa fagre Afrodite,

Shakespeare says quite simply:

By the simplicity of Venus Doves,

and to anyone but a Landsmaal fanatic it seems ridiculous to have
Theseus tell Hermia: "Demetrius er so gild ein kar som nokon."
"Demetrius is a worthy gentleman," says Shakespeare and this has
"the grand Manner." But to a cultivated Norwegian the translation is
"Bauernsprache," such as a local magnate might use in forcing a suitor
on his daughter.

All of which goes back to the present condition of Landsmaal. It has
little flexibility, little inward grace. It is not a finished literary
language. But, despite its archaisms, Landsmaal is a living language and
it has, therefore, unlike the Karathevusa of Greece, the possibility of
growth. The translations of Madhus and Aasen and Eggen have made notable
contributions to this development. They are worthy of all praise. Their
weaknesses are the result of conditions which time will change.

J

One might be tempted to believe from the foregoing that the
propagandists of "Maalet" had completely monopolized the noble task of
making Shakespeare accessible in the vernacular. And this is almost
true. But the reason is not far to seek. Aside from the fact that in
Norway, as elsewhere, Shakespeare is read mainly by cultivated people,
among whom a sound reading knowledge of English is general, we have
further to remember that the Foersom-Lembcke version has become standard
in Norway and no real need has been felt of a separate Norwegian version
in the dominant literary language. In Landsmaal the case is different.
This dialect must be trained to "Literaturfaehigkeit." It is not so much
that Norway must have her own Shakespeare as that Landsmaal must be put
to use in every type of literature. The results of this missionary
spirit we have seen.

One of the few translations of Shakespeare that have been made into
Riksmaal appeared in 1912, _Hamlet_, by C.H. Blom. As an experiment it
is worthy of respect, bu