How should you read a poetry anthology? Cover to cover? Chronologically? By theme? With typical indecisiveness, I’m making my way through Being Human (the Bloodaxe anthology, not the BBC series) by letting it drop open at various pages and seeing which poets I end up with. Yesterday, I was pleased to find the pages parting at Olav Hauge‘s ‘Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses’, translated into English by Robin Fulton. I’ll be spending Easter in Norway, a few hours from Hauge’s lifelong home in Ulvik, so ‘Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses’ seemed entirely appropriate.
In many respects, Hauge fits the Being Human mould: Neil Astley has been lauded and lambasted for filling his books with ‘accessible’ poetry. The debate over what’s accessible and whether it’s worth promoting at the expense of what’s less accessible is potentially infinite and not worth entering into here (yet), but it’s clear that Billy Collins and Samuel Menashe are more likely candidates for an Astley anthology than R.F. Langley or J.H. Prynne. Hauge is closer to the Collins-Menashe camp: his poems seem light, anecdotal, closer to conversation than the dense, esoteric (but often bewitching) work associated with poets like Langley and Prynne.
Perhaps the comparison is disingenuous. Surely a poet’s work should be left to stand alone, and surely there’s little to be gained from assessing a Norwegian poet in relation to English-language writers he neither met nor read. Hauge’s life is certainly fascinating enough to seem unique: he lived to 85, always in Ulvik, working as a gardener and living off poetry and the proceeds from his apple trees. Although he wrote in local dialect, he was committed to international poetry, translating Yeats, Browning, Mallarmé, Rimbaud and Celan (amongst many others) into Norwegian.
Paradoxically, his love of the natural world ties him to a particular time and place (Western Norway) whilst appearing (as all the best poetry appears) strangely timeless. Here, left to stand alone, is ‘Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses’, first in Robin Fulton’s translation and then in the Norwegian original:
Leaf-Huts and Snow-Houses
There’s not much to
these verses, only
a few words piled up
at random.
I think
nonetheless
it’s fine
to make them, then
for a little while
I have something like a house.
I remember leaf-huts
we built
when we were small:
to creep in and sit
listening to the rain,
feel alone in the wilderness,
drops on your nose
and your hair —
Or snow-houses at Christmas,
to creep in and
close the hole with a sack,
light a candle and stay there
on cold evenings.
