Hans Herbjørnsrud

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Hans Herbjørnsrud (2017)

Hans Herbjørnsrud (born January 2, 1938 in Heddal , Norway ) is a Norwegian author of long stories and short stories . He grew up in the province of Telemark , worked at times as a teacher in Gudbrandsdalen in Eastern Norway and has been running his parents' farm near Notodden again since 1976 .

life and work

Herbjørnsrud continues a long tradition in his country and lives a double existence as author and farmer. His relatively late literary debut in 1979 with the prose volume Vitner was followed by six more narrow books by 2006, each containing stories of varying lengths from around 10 to 100 pages. While he was initially considered an insider tip and “author's author”, his oeuvre is now highly valued throughout Scandinavia . In 1997 Herbjørnsrud received the prestigious Critics' Prize , while the volumes Blinddøra and Vi vet så mye were each nominated for the Nordic Council's Literature Prize. His stories are available in several languages, such as German, English, French, Russian, Czech, Slovenian, Hungarian, Hindi and Bangla .

Language and identity

Herbjørnsrud's starting point is not infrequently the folk culture of his Telemark landscape, above all its rich tradition of ballads , without his stories being based on ideologically questionable local literature . On the contrary , the multifaceted relationship between the themes of language and identity place his work in a tradition of modernity that was received late in Norway. Herbjørnsrud often uses several forms of language and dialects as well as an ornamental rhetoric .

Herbjørnsrud's farm in Heddal

One of his best-known stories, Kai Sandemo (published in Norwegian in Blinddøra in 1997 , in German in a bilingual edition published in 2005) begins in Danish but gradually unfolds in several variants of Norwegian. With the help of this technique, the conflicts of the Norwegian first-person narrator, who committed fratricide in his home country and lived in Denmark after serving his prison sentence, are illustrated. The closer he approaches the incidents in the past in a long letter, including arson and incest , the less he is able to live up to the ideal of a rationalist existence. Almost imperceptibly he slips into the dialect of his youth and falls into a staccato , which indicates the collapse of order.

Realism and fantasy

The ballad-like style of the texts is composed of realistic and fantastic elements, which, however, can hardly be distinguished from one another as such. In the short story På Gamletun i Europa (for example: On an old courtyard in Europe , published in the volume Eks og Sett ), the inhabitants of a Norwegian farm were victims of a devastating flood at the beginning of the 17th century, which over the course of a few days the mythical Takes on the dimension of a flood . At the same time, this process on the periphery of Europe reflects the baroque attitude to life of lost divinity. A young girl survived the catastrophe in the crown of an ash tree and wrote a 29- stanza song about her experiences - "Stanzas as many as the alphabet of the language that she did not speak". According to the narrator in a poetological commentary, the many inexplicable elements in this ballad ensure that it is passed down to the present day and that “the wonder remains alive”. Statements like these place Herbjørnsrud's work, for some critics, close to magical realism .

Similarly, in the novella Die blinde Tür (from the book of the same name, Blinddøra ), he lets a locksmith oscillate between everyday life and magic with “ crooked laughter” and track down an “unheard of occurrence” in the tradition of Goethe : behind a blind door that is glorified as the “mahogany goddess” the skeleton of a child who was aborted by a maid in 1882.

intertextuality

Other special features of Herbjørnsrud's prose include its artful composition and intertextual interweaving. The story Jens Helland (from the volume Han ) is composed e.g. B. deals with the great Norwegian narrator Johan Borgen , while other texts the influence u. a. betrayed by Tarjei Vesaas and Aksel Sandemose . In a European context, Herbjørnsrud has been compared to Bruno Schulz , among others .

The German version of The Blind Door is a translation of the volume Blinddøra , as well as a free adaptation of the story Kai Sandemo , which was initially classified as untranslatable . In 2010 the short story book Die Brunnen was published .

Awards

bibliography

Primary literature

  • 1979: Vitner (witness)
  • 1984: Vannbæreren (The Water Carrier)
  • 1987: Han (Er)
  • 1992: Eks og Sett (Iks and Zett)
  • 1997: Blinddøra (The Blind Door)
  • 2001: Vi vet så mye (We know so much)
  • 2003: Samlede noveller (Collected Stories)
  • 2006: Brønnene (The Fountains)
  • 2013: Her kan alt skje. Noveller i utvalg (Anything can happen here. Selected stories)

Translations

  • The blind door. Translated from the Norwegian by Siegfried Weibel. Luchterhand Verlag, Munich 2000. ISBN 3-630-87069-4
  • Kai Sandemo / Kai Sandmoser. Edited by Elisabeth Berg and Uwe Englert. Post-poetry by Michael Baumgartner u. a. Mars Verlag, Frankfurt / Zurich 2005. ISBN 3-00-015759-X
  • The wells. Stories. Translated from the Norwegian by Ulrich Sonnenberg . Luchterhand Verlag, Munich 2010. ISBN 978-3-630-87269-8

Secondary literature (selection)

  • Linn Ullmann : Lift the tredje. Hans Herbjørnsruds tvisyn. In: Bøk , H. 2, 1994, pp. 77-88.
  • Frode Helland: Hans Herbjørnsruds novellesamling Blinddøra (1997). En lesning. In: Norsk litterær ordbok. Oslo 1999, pp. 134-149.
  • Benedikt Jager: The Locked Room of Memory. Approaching Hans Herbjørnsrud's story Blinddøra. In: Annegret Heitmann (Ed.): Work on Scandinavian Studies. 14th workshop of German-speaking Scandinavian studies, 1.-5. September 1999 in Munich. Frankfurt am Main 2001, pp. 509-517.
  • Eva Stadler, The function of mirrors and reflections in selected narrative texts by Hans Herbjørnsrud. Munich 2000 (= Master's thesis, Ludwig Maximilians University).
  • Geir Uvsløkk: Game pictures. Melankoli and identitet in a novella by Hans Herbjørnsrud. In: Norskrift , H. 99, 2000, pp. 20-32.
  • Uwe Englert: The blind door. In: Norrøna , H. 30, 2001, pp. 88-89.
  • Arild Vange: Sover you tekst? No, everyone is fed up. About the same and most of the waste, with the starting point in the review of Hans Herbjørnsrud's novella Kai Sandemo to tysk. In: Aasne Vikøy (ed.): Mellomrom. Tolv tekster om oversettelse. Bergen 2007, pp. 25-34.
  • Marit Holm (Ed.): Iscenesettelse av jeg'et. Realism and mystique. Compendium from Herbjørnsrud-seminaret 2005. Oslo / Notodden 2007.
  • Kaja Schjerven Mollerin: Seks fot under. Et essay from Hans Herbjørnsruds forfatterskap. Oslo 2011.

See also

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Herbjørnsrud, Hans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Norwegian author
DATE OF BIRTH January 2, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Heddal , Norway