Bly's translation is better

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	• Hunger Knut Hamsun Dover Publications, 2003 - 144 pages average customer review:based on 81 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Glad I read HUNGER but...

The unnamed narrator in HUNGER is isolated, impulsive, self-destructive, excessively self-critical, and nearly homeless. While his plight is surely pitiful and unnerving, this novel certainly offers special rewards to readers who believe that mighty books present compulsive narrators, viewing the world from their hidey-holes in garbage cans or the equivalent. No wonder the introduction to my edition was written by Paul Auster!

Fortunately, Hamsun guides his narrator into society. Here, we thank the women, who flirt with the narrator and accept him as a boarder despite his penury and borderline mental illness. Their influence and timely charity help him break his syndrome of perfectionism, self-mortification, arrogance, and remorse, placing him on the docks in Christiania where "... all the workaday life around me, the loading chants, the noise of the winches, the constant rattling of the iron chains, was incompatible with the moody, self absorbed..." As the Silhouettes sang in 1957, "GET A JOB shanna nah nahh shanna nanna nahh (bah-doop)...

For the record, I'd say other writers have presented the marginal and desperate lives of aspiring young writers with much greater complexity and reward than Hamsun. Charles Bukowski for example, allows his Henry Chinaski to risk just as much as this unnamed narrator. But in Factotum, Chinaski is funny while living a life with just as much sad integrity.

The afterword in my edition (Robert Bly) says the story of HUNGER is highly autobiographical. Surely, he knows. But this novel also strikes me as a brilliantly intuitive assemblage of weirdness, especially when you consider Hamsun wrote HUNGER in 1890. But this cluster of self-destructiveness has also become very familiar in our world, in part due to Psychology 101 classes. So, I ask: Is this a case where the clinician has actually surpassed the novelist?

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The Master

I won't repeat the mainstream review material because its covered in depth around this snippit. Hunger is a short book, you can read it in a few hours, and spend days with it on your mind. If you liked Hesse you'll love the early Hamsun. If you like Hunger you'll probably like Pan and Mysteries [there's a lot of connection between them).

Hamson, like Christiania, can't readily be left without it leaving a mark on you.

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Bly's translation is better

Pedants and scholars everywhere will celebrate this new translation -- indeed, already on Wikipedia, Sverre Lyngstad's translation is being called 'definitive'.

The only problem is, like all academic translations, it serves as more of a primer or helpful guide to the Norwegian than quality English prose. You need only compare the opening sentence in each translation. Here's Lyngstad's:

"It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him..."

Sets its mark? There is such a thing as leaving a mark, making a mark, but setting a mark?

Now, here is Bly's newly-discredited version:

"All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania -- that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him ..."

Good, clear idiomatic English.

There are reasons why new pedantic translations are done and set up above good existing ones. For one, different publishing houses want to make money. Hilda Rosner's Siddhartha, for example, is clear and readable. But it's been around for fifty years. Better replace it with a few new ones -- Susan Bernofsky's, for example. The only problem is that today's less than rigorous English leads to faltering prosody, as in Bernofsky's, and worse, to sentences that try to 'capture the ambiguity' of the original, leaving the reader with murky or awkward constructions (see above). Look at Penguin Classics and its translations of Nietzsche: taking an exciting, provocative author and rendering him dry, sensible, and British. R.J. Hollingdale is widely celebrated as the best translator of Nietzsche in these translations. And universal murder is done to Walter Kaufmann and his translations because he didn't adhere to the strictly pedantic notion of translation that renders one safe in academic debates (the gesture of murdering the father, routinely done to Kaufmann in Nietzsche studies).

Lyngstad is probably Norwegian, and it is probably believed that this makes him a better translator of Hunger having been written in Norwegian. But the English is nothing more than a phrase-by-phrase, word-by-word fully defensible transliteration of the original, while Bly's, whatever its "errors" can be said to be literature, even as a translation.

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An Early Modernist

A wonderful book; I was surprised at the beautiful narrative style and imagery, especially for a book written in the middle of the nineteenth century. Its not cheerful, but one of the better books I've read recently.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

This powerful, autobiographical novel by a Nobel Prize-winning author made literary history when it was first published in 1890. A modern classic about a penniless, unemployed young writer, the book paints an unforgettable portrait of a man driven to the edge of self-destruction by forces beyond his control.

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