Nu går jeg! Nu går jeg! Kan De ikke se, at jeg allerede har Hånden på Låsen? Farvel! Farvel, siger jeg! … jeg viser Dem det Sted, hvor jeg vilde knælet for Dem, der borte på den røde Rose i Tæppet. I loved best the passage toward the end of his early novel Hunger, in which the protagonist begs his beloved for permission to kneel before her on the carpet: I couldn’t get enough of his sweeping but detailed accounts of isolated emotional lives.

It was a thrill to read his novels while living in the same towns and territories where Hamsun had lived a century earlier-reading first in English, then terribly slowly in the original. I’d become enchanted by the introverted-but-swashbuckling novels of Knut Hamsun, the Nobel Prize-winning national bard whose malignant politics as a ninety-year-old have complicated his legacy. I’d begun studying Norwegian during my first solitary summer in the far north, years before I’d relocated to the more bustling Oslo. The words “over” and “under” were the same in both our languages, which felt like having so much in common. Nær, i, and bak all resembled their English equivalents, but only if I looked closely: the “e” and “a” in “near” switched order the “c” in “back” and the “n” in “in” disappeared. He’d put our hunk of Jarlsberg near the sink, then in the sink, then behind.

He liked it when I messed up prepositions. I often wondered whether my relationships and friendships abroad were boosted by this kind of linguistic pleasure. Selecting a jar of mustard at the supermarket, he’d say, “We’ll take him!” I dislike mustard, but I loved the phrasing. One of those years I spent dating this man from the heart of the country, a man whose regional dialect compelled him to call inanimate objects by “he” or “she” even though formal Norwegian, unlike French, didn’t require it. And then I’d begin the steps that follow knowing: understanding, translating, thinking, translating, and speaking my split mind.įor the better part of two years I operated entirely in Norwegian, in a self-taught and unstable form of the language that the locals humored. I know you know what I said, he’d insist. I’d argue that I was being extra cautious in order to avoid a potentially hurtful mistranslation. We were living together in Oslo, on his turf and in his mother tongue.

Perhaps that is the chief luxury of socializing in a foreign language: it’s easier to pretend ignorance. If he said something I didn’t want to hear, he claimed, I would forget the vocabulary necessary to translate it. My Norwegian ex-boyfriend always accused me of selective comprehension.

Knut hamsun glad