And through the cranks and offices of man The strongest and small inferior veins, Receive from me that natural competency Whereby they live.
with our translator's version (lines 50-51)
jeg den flyde lader Igjennem Menneskets meest fine Dele.
This is not even good paraphrase; it is simply bald and helpless rendering.
On the other hand, it would be grossly unfair to dismiss it all with a sneer. The translator has succeeded for the most part in giving the sense of Shakespeare in smooth and sounding verse, in itself no small achievement. Rhetoric replaces poetry, it is true, and paraphrase dries up the freshness and the sparkle of the metaphor. But a Norwegian of that day who got his first taste of Shakespeare from the translation before us, would at least feel that here was the power of words, the music and sonorousness of elevated dramatic poetry.
One more extract and I am done. It is Coriolanus' outburst of wrath against the pretensions of the tribunes (III, 1). With all its imperfections, the translation is almost adequate.
_Coriolanus_: Skal! Patrisier, I ædle, men ei vise! I høie Senatorer, som mon mangle Al Overlæg, hvi lod I Hydra vælge En Tjener som med sit bestemte Skal --Skjøndt blot Uhyrets Talerør og Lyd-- Ei mangler Mod, at sige at han vil Forvandle Eders Havstrøm til en Sump, Og som vil gjøre Jer Kanal til sin. Hvis han har Magten, lad Enfoldighed Da for ham bukke; har han ingen Magt, Da vækker Eders Mildhed af sin Dvale, Den farlig er; hvis I ei mangle Klogskab, Da handler ei som Daaren; mangler den, Lad denne ved Jer Side faae en Pude. Plebeier ere I, hvis Senatorer De ere, og de ere mindre ei Naar begge Eders Stemmer sammenblandes Og naar de kildres meest ved Fornemhed. De vælge deres egen Øvrighed, Og saadan Een, der sætte tør sit Skal, Ja sit gemene Skal mod en Forsamling, Der mer agtværdig er end nogensinde Man fandt i Grækenland. Ved Jupiter! Sligt Consulen fornedrer! Og det smerter Min Sjæl at vide, hvor der findes tvende Autoriteter, ingen af dem størst, Der kan Forvirring lettelig faae Indpas I Gabet, som er mellem dem, og hæve Den ene ved den anden.
In 1865, Paul Botten Hansen, best known to the English-speaking world for his relations with Bjørnson and Ibsen, reviewed[11] the eleventh installment of Lembcke's translation of Shakespeare. The article does not venture into criticism, but is almost entirely a resumé of Shakespeare translation in Norway and Denmark. It is less well informed than we should expect, and contains, among several other slips, the following "...in 1855, Niels Hauge, deceased the following year as teacher in Kragerø, translated _Macbeth_, the first faithful version of this masterpiece which Dano-Norwegian literature could boast of." Botten Hansen mentions only one previous Danish or Norwegian version of Shakespeare--Foersom's adaptation of Schiller's stage version (1816). He is quite obviously ignorant of Rosenfeldt's translation of 1790; and the Rahbek-Sanders translation of 1801 seems also to have escaped him, although Hauge expressly refers to this work in his introduction. Both of these early attempts are in prose; Foersom's, to be sure, is in blank verse, but Foersom's _Macbeth_ is not Shakespeare's. Accordingly, it is, in a sense, true that Hauge in 1855 did give the Dano-Norwegian public their first taste of an unspoiled _Macbeth_ in the vernacular.[12]