Category Norwegian

Narrating and Translating Love and Grief in “TI AMO”: Norwegian Author Hanne Ørstavik and English Translator Martin Aitken in Conversation with Nataliya Deleva

“Ti Amo” is a sensual and honest exploration of love, of the heavy feeling permeating the weeks and months before the impending death of a loved one, the memories that engulf you before the imminent parting.

Fosse-Boathouse

“Write, Don’t Think”: Jon Fosse’s Boathouse, translated by May-Brit Akerholt

Reviewed by David Smith In the late 1980s, around the time he wrote Boathouse, Jon Fosse was a teacher at the Creative Writing Academy in Bergen, Norway. (One of his students was a nineteen-year-old Karl Ove Knausgaard, as related in book 5 of My Struggle.) “When I was a teacher,” Fosse has said, “I would […]

Vesaas-The Birds

The Stunted Spruce: Tarjei Vesaas’s The Birds, translated by Michael Barnes and Torbjørn Støverud

Reviewed by David Smith Decades after his passing, the prominence of Tarjei Vesaas in Norwegian letters is difficult to overstate. As Dag Solstad puts it, “There are few readers who do not count at least one book by Tarjei Vesaas as one of their truly great reading experiences.”[i] In the English-speaking world, however, Vesaas has […]