Det er den draumen - a poem in two translations by Olav H. Hauge

As term draws to an end and work intensifies before the vacation, I have little time to do much work of my own. I have little time for research, I have little time to prepare possible projects, and I have little time to do much reading beyond that which is necessitated by my various duties as a supervisor and teacher. To unwind, and to calm my mind, I have turned to translating poetry, as seen in several blogposts from the past month in which I rendered works by Spanish poet Raquel Lanseros into Norwegian. This time, however, I go in the opposite direction, and I present one of my all-time favourite poems in two translations from Norwegian, one in Spanish, one in English.

The poem in question is "Det er den draumen" by Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge (1908-94), published in the poetry collection Dropar i austavind (Drops in an east wind) from 1966. The title of this collection should perhaps also be understood as a pun, since drápa is an Old Norse word for a praise-poem. Olav H. Hauge is one of the most important Norwegian writers of all time, and several of his poems have become an integral part of the Norwegian cultural identity. He was born in the village of Ulvik in Hardanger in the Western Norwegian fjords at a time when rural Norway was marked by poverty, rigid hierarchies and severe isolation in the winters.

While education in the districts was not very comprehensive, he did learn German, and he learned French on his own initiative, and he also learned English through reading materials sent by his uncle in the US, as well as through his friendship with the local librarian who had stayed in the US for several decades before returning home to Norway. Hauge was educated as a gardener, and he is still often referred to as the gardener from Ulvik.

Olav H. Hauge published his first collection of poems in 1946, Glør i oska (Embers in the ashes). These poems were marked by traditional rhyme scheme and a clear influence from Norwegian folklore, Norse mythology and Christian imagery. While all these elements remained throughout his writing years, he eventually became an avid proponent of free verse, and wrote poems about his embrace of modernism. Even so, he continued to write sonnets, a form he cherished, and a form few other Norwegian poets have used. He was also an avid translator from English, German and French, and these have been published in a collected volume. Hauge has himself been translated into several languages, and the perhaps most accessible English translations have been made by American poet Robert Bly who also met with Hauge and corresponded with him.

Several of Hauge's poems are greatly beloved by the Norwegian readership. This was proved in 2016 when the Norwegian National Broadcast (NRK) organised a poll to see which was the favourite poem of the Norwegian people. Hauge had two poems among the final six, and he won with the poem I have translated here, called "Det er den draumen". Personally,this is my second-favourite poem by Hauge - my favourite one will probably feature in a future blogpost - and to share this work as widely as I can, I have translated it here into Spanish and English.

For a reading of the poem by Hauge himself, a recording is available here.


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.



Es este sueño

Es este sueño que llevamos
que algo asombroso sucederá,
que necesita suceder –
que el tiempo se abrirá,
que el corazon se abrirá,
que puertos se abrirán,
que la montaña se abrirá,
que fuentes estallarán –
que el sueño se abrirá,
que, en una madrugada, entraremos
en una bahia que no conocíamos.  

It is that dream

It is that dream we carry
that something wonderful will happen,
that it must happen –
that time will open up,
that the heart will open up,
that doors will open up,
that springs will burst –
that the dream will open up,
that we, one morning, will sail into
a narrow inlet we did not know about.



A note on the text and the translations


Hauge wrote in an old version of Norwegian Nynorsk, one that was more attuned to his particular dialect, and whose endings are now considered obsolete. This version was called "landsmål", the rural tongue, or the speech of the districts, and it is in several ways different from the current version, Nynorsk (New Norwegian), in which several features are more harmonised with Bokmål, the other official version of Norwegian, which is based on the Eastern dialects influenced in large part by Danish.

As the text of the original poem is quite straightforward, there are few aspects that require extensive commentary. I did struggle with the decision to use the word "suceder" in my Spanish translation, as "pasar" and "ocurrir" are also possible options. I ended up with "suceder" because I think this is the word that most accurately captures the magnitude invoked by Hauge's description.

One word has caused me a lot of trouble, both in English and in Spanish. This is the word "våg", which is a geographical word, and these words are always among the hardest to faithfully render in a language marked by a different topography. "Våg" means both wave and small bay, i.e. a place where the waves come to their end. The word is not fully captured by the Spanish "bahía", as this is usually applied to landscapes of a greater scale, but while I did consider calling it a little fjord, "fiordito", I found that this neologism did not carry the necessary gravitas to render Hauge's words. The English "narrow inlet" is more accurate, although this is almost too bland to envision the landscape of the fjords. However, since this has to do with how languages develop in their specific topographies, I have settled for this.