(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
In these days of poor memory and oil production, we have Nynorsk to remind us of the country's historical roots, how these were democratic and republican. If Norway is a country that was born out of the dreams of German romanticism, through the reforms of 1814, then Norwegian nationalism is founded on popular representation, egalitarianism and civic spirit. And Nynorsk, with its particularly strong position around the breakup of the union, was in the internationally unusual situation of being able to create its language and its literature at the same time. Poem by poem, Nynorsk was built, one might say. The first New Norwegian poets were also linguistic pioneers.
Simple peasant background
Olav Nygard (1884–1924), here relevant in a new biography and study, is one of the cornerstones of New Norwegian poetry – comparable only to Olav Aukrust and Kristofer Uppdal. He came from a simple farming background and came from one of the country's smallest municipalities in Nordhordland, as one of ten siblings. He died aged just 39 of tuberculosis. One of the brothers described the poet's path to the poem as follows: "[T]here arose a cultural movement [...] which lasted until 1905, and which has never been stronger and richer. The revival had an impact on two different sides: youth work and political radicalism." Politically, he seems to have been in line with his friends, the cultural leaders Arne and Hulda Garborg, who complained about materialism and capitalism. They stuck to the farmer-friendly nature of the old Left, but cultivated republicanism and anarchism. In the environment, a Victor Hugo-like belief in the poet's leadership role was also valued, as with Aukrust: "I am bald and rune king / ... / Kvar min song er siger song."
Poem by poem, Nynorsk was built.
But Nygard never quite fits the role. His background was also different. Nygard grew up without a mother; she too died of tuberculosis, as did his great youth crush, aged just 19 – the same age as Nygard's son later dies. Tuberculosis surrounded his entire life.
The educational path was via folk colleges, the option open to the peasant and homesteader class. He partially supported himself as a farmer, but it did not go well, with debt as a result. The first winters in Oslo – in Fredensborgveien, still today not exactly a wealthy street in the capital – were spent in cold attic rooms, which cannot have helped against the development of the disease. Poor health made it impossible in the long run to live on "sleazy work, fire 40 øre a day".
A High Norwegian style
In his biography and reception history, Ronny Spaans takes us at a fast pace in three hundred pages through the poet's life and contemporaries. He emphasizes Nygard's modernity and raises doubts about whether Hulda Garborg and the national romantic contemporary really understood his poetry. Spaans believes that Nygard, like Kristofer Uppdal, has more in common with expressionist national language poets such as Sigbjørn Obstfelder and Olaf Bull.
While social criticism was most evident in the poetry collection Quince (1915), albeit in allegorical forms. The First World War is referred to, for example, as "King Satan sat on the throne". Nygard's modernism then lies not in the verse form, but in the formation of compound new words, and in a drastic figurative language:
I become breathless, staring with a mesmerizing mouth
– is it visual hallucinations? Wondering
forth or skintome the air; on good grounds
Ljose is making a game of lies, rise
through shimmering blue, silvery... See the light knot spin
himself in mansham... It burps me gneist-
scars in the spinal cord, the blood wave stagnates
through streams – : There's the spirit of Wergeland!
He wrote in a high-Norwegian style that has Shakespeare as its ideal ("Now the evening rises in western brown, / he treads on light feet through the tun..."). Otherwise, it is Shelley and Keats who are usually singled out as role models; also the dead young. It is in Keats with his compressed dense style that one finds a real similarity. Nygard undoubtedly belongs to the Norwegian lyric canon, and in our own time he was an important predecessor of Olav H. Hauge. In Hauge's diaries, which have now been published, he writes about Nygard: "You were never fat and full, you went to the bottom." The classic cultural trip in Europe, which Bull undertook, but also Uppdal, was never a possibility for Nygard. A "strong steel horse" (train!) to "fairy-blue Roman skies" – he could only dream of that, in poetry.
Shelley and Keats are usually cited as role models.
The fight against the disease
For the Riksmål audience, Nygard was an unknown name until the last few years. He received no scholarship. These late years of the poet's life are completely dominated by the fight against the disease, the bitterness cannot always be suppressed, as in the lines of the poem: "You pushed me out of the ring before I knew / the sweet earth sap, she as a sacred bond." He is already terminally ill at the time of the creation of his perhaps most famous poem "Til son min". The depiction of the deathbed is poignant, it is the wife who tells: "Then he said: I see a sun. Then I answer: it is the sun that will light you home, Olav. Yes, he said, and that was the last word he said.” Nygard dies in February, in a summer cottage at Ulsrud on the outskirts of Oslo, where he lives illegally, and is buried nearby at Østre Aker cemetery.
The social criticism was most evident in the poetry collection Quince, albeit in allegorical forms.
His wife, Rakel Nygard, lived another half century. By then he had become a cultural icon, and as Spaans puts it, "we had got the welfare state". But, Spaans continues, "life for Rakel Nygard had been the other way around: she had lived in poverty in Oslo as a seamstress and laundress" and had survived mentally by reading the thunderous poems of her late husband. Her story – for those who have become curiously interested – can be listened to in a remarkable interview in NRK's film archive, under the heading Meeting with Rakel Nygard, from 1961. Olav and Rakel Nygard's fate is almost incomprehensible to today's Norwegians. But all the more important for us to read today.
