pleasure for me to present this selection of his poetry for a Chinese readership. There are several reasons why the poetry of Norway’s most prominent poet in the 20th century should be of interest for Chinese readers, but there is one particular reason, namely Hauge’s intimate relation to Classical Chinese poetry. He even engaged some of the giants of Classical Chinese poetry, like Qu Yuan, Tao Qian and Li Bai in ”conversations” about life and art. All the poems where Hauge touches upon Chinese poets and poetry are included in this anthology.  

Hauge lived all his life in the small village of Ulvik in Western Norway. This is part of the spectacular Western Norwegian fiord (haixia) landscape, which was dug out by glaciers during the last Ice Age and which cuts deep into mountainous regions. Hauge was educated as a gardener in local vocational schools. His parents were farmers and fruit growers, and he carried on the cultivation of fruit on the small farm of his parents. The fiord landscape is very suitable for fruit cultivation, because the temperature stored in the mass of water to some extent evens out the cold mountain air.

Springtime scenery of fruit trees in bloom by the fiord against a backdrop of snowcapped mountains is probably the strongest natural image Norwegians enjoy. But real life in a postcard-like environment could at times be hard. As Hauge says in one of his poems, growing apples at 61 degrees north (Beijing is at 40 degrees north) is no mean feat, but the income was meager.

Hauge’s further education was barred because of his difficulties with the subject of mathematics. From early on, he acquired wide knowledge of European and American literature through self study, in the process teaching himself English, French and German. He would no doubt have aspired to an academic career, but we should be happy that this was not brought into fruition, even if he himself at times lamented his fate in life as a ” weed-cutter”.

Hauge suffered repeatedly from mental breakdowns, the first time in 1930s and last time in the 1960s. While in the mental hospital, he was unable to write, but the poems which deal with his madness, written after he regained his senses, speak strongly to the reader.

From his poetry, we can read that he longed for a life companion, but that he perhaps also was reluctant to get too involved with women. However, from the early 1970s, he developed a close relationship with the artist Bodil Cappelen, at the initiative of the latter. In 1978, they married, and this unique relationship lasted until Hauge passed away. Cappelen is still active as an artist at the age of 78.

Hauge’s poetic world may be said to have moved from romanticism towards modernism, from symbolic towards concrete poetry, and from personal towards impersonal poetics, all the time oscillating between landscape and dreamscape. However, such a description is also an oversimplification, because Hauge explored various poetic directions throughout his career. He speaks out against both overemphasis on metric constraints and modernist formalism.

As the readers of this anthology will observe, it is possible to discern a turn towards the simpler and briefer during the later part of Hauge’s career. In such poems, one may find that everyday observations are given a subtle uplift towards the universal, frequently by means of effective use of antithesis.

Another significant feature of Hauge’s poetry is the span between the local and the cosmopolitan. This seemingly contradictory position can be explained in the larger political context of Norway’s modern history. Norway was for almost four hundred years, until 1814, a semi-colony under Denmark, and subsequently in a union with Sweden until 1905, when the country regained its independence. The nationalist revival in Norway in the nineteenth century was to a significant extent inspired by regional traditional cultures, which reached out to similar currents in Europe for inspiration. This peculiar constellation, where the local and regional reaches out to the international, continued into the twentieth century, and is a vital force shaping Norwegian intellectual life even today.

Language issues played an important part in this respect. Old Norwegian language had been replaced by Danish as the language of state administration. However, starting in the 1850’s, there was a conscious revival of traditional Norwegian. In the early twentieth century, it was recognized that Norway in reality had two languages, a Danish-derived language for administration, and a dialect-based reconstruction of the remains of Old Norwegian.

Hauge’s poetry finds itself in the centre of this language conflict. He positioned himself among the most ardent protectors of traditional versions of the dialect-based language. The strange thing is, whereas Hauge’s position on linguistic norms would normally have aroused bitter controversy, his poetry has never been challenged on the basis of these norms – rather the opposite! For Chinese readers, this may seem like cultural trivia, but it is a significant feature of Hauge’s poetic legacy.

Hauge published seven collections of poetry, the first one in 1946, and the last one in 1980. In addition, he translated a number of Western, mostly modern, poets into Norwegian. For full seventy years, from 1924 and until his death in 1994, he kept a diary, which was published posthumously in five volumes and which constitutes a great literary oeuvre in its own right.

As mentioned, Hauge was early attracted to Chinese philosophy. The first sign of that dates from 1931, when he as a young gardener at the age of 21 writes three quotations from the Daodejing onto the pages of a booklet entitled Manual about weed treatment. However, access to classical Chinese poetry in translation was not available to him until the early 1950s. In a collection of poetry published in 1961, he includes two poems about Qu Yuan and Li Bai.

In 1962, Hauge gets hold of the first widely available anthology of Chinese poetry in the West, namely The Penguin Book of Chinese Verse. In his diary, he says that he this anthology kept his attention throughout the summer that year. Two years later he gets hold of the first Penguin edition of Arthur Waley’s translations of Chinese poems. Thereafter, Waley remains his favorite translator of Chinese poetry.

From the early sixties and until old age, Hauge is constantly preoccupied with Chinese poetry and philosophy. His philosophical interests focused on Daoism and Chan Buddhism in its Japanese form i.e. Zen. Especially in his short and pointed verses, we can clearly see the imprint of Chinese and also Japanese poetry, but such verses also bear resemblance to the most ancient Norwegian poetry.

The most obscure poem that deals with China is ”Facing China’s Door”, written after one of his stays in the mental hospital. It is generally known that ”China’s door” was a yellow door through which the inmates were served food, but the deeper meaning of some of the stanzas will forever remain an enigma, because Hauge himself was reluctant to reveal their meaning to any of his contemporaries.

The only time Hauge personally met with a Chinese writer was in 1986, when I and my wife brought the young writer Zhang Xinxin, who then visited Norway, to Hauge’s house. At the time, I was in the process of translating Zhang Xinxin’s and Sang Ye’s Beijing ren into Norwegian. Another opening occurred around New Year 1989, when the poet Bei Dao spent half a year as a visiting scholar at our Department the University of Oslo. We were on our way to Hauge’s home in Western Norway, crossing the mountains between Eastern and Western Norway in deep winter, but had to return, because Hauge’s health was faltering. Thus, the possibility of a historical meeting between two poets from very different backgrounds – but with a common dedication to poetry – was missed.

Poetry is the most pregnant and fatal of literary genres. A single word can signal the difference between elation and dismay. For this venture, I needed both initial support on the home front and a qualified transmitter in the target language. Fortunately, I have been blessed with both.

My wife, Liu Baisha, an Associate Professor of Chinese at the University of Oslo, undertook a necessary cleaning out of lexical weed in my initial close translations of Hauge’s poems into Chinese, and has also overseen later revisions. When searching for a Chinese companion to translate Hauge’s poems, I was advised by my good colleague Wang Hui to approach Xi Chuan. I read his Qian – shen (2006), which is a world apart from Hauge’s poetry, but I still felt that there were certain affinities between the two poets somewhere deep down when it comes to imagery, references, and surprising turns. After having approached Xi Chuan in a somewhat insisting Western manner, I am happy to say that I was not wrong: Hauge’s poems did eventually trigger off a genuine interest from Xi Chuan’s side. For me, the working sessions with Xi Chuan have been the intellectually most rewarding moments in my forty years as a China scholar.

In Norway, Hauge has remained a poet for all seasons. It is our hope that the introduction of Hauge’s poetry into Chinese will have a similar result, by linking an exceptional personality who had a great heart for Chinese poetry with a Chinese readership living under greatly changed circumstances.

Oslo, August 2008
Harald Bøckman