I laid my bag on the table while I waited, and watched it silently mimicking the crooked crosses of letter-writers.
Yours truly, sincerely, forever, kiss kiss.
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Marcelo
Hei, jeg heter Marcelo og jeg bo i Brasil. Norsk mitt er
ikke godt, jeg skal snakke i Engelske nÂ…
Hi, I hope your English be good. In case of the message
above do not make any sense, here it is:
My name is Marcelo, I live in Brasil. My Norwegian is
not very good, although I think it is one of the most
beautiful languages in the world, but I am improving it
the best I can… You must be wondering the reason I end
up falling into your blog. Well, I enjoy visiting
Norwegian pages, in order to learn some stuff about this
country (my goal is one day to be able to read Ibsen in
the original), luckly your blog was in English…
I hope you return this message and we can start to share
something of ours. Finally, I would like to invite you
to visite my blog (although you will not understand a
thing, because it is in Portuguese). Here is the address:
http://www.barbaricvs.blogger.com.br/index.html
I am already waiting for you.
Bye-bye. Ha det godt!
Susana
oh my god, that is also the reason why James Joyce learned Norwegian, I wonder if Ibsen is responsible for a lot of headaches… 🙂
Jill
James Joyce learned Norwegian so he could read Ibsen? Good grief.
Eirik
What’s with the “good grief”? I can hardly think of a better reason for learning Norwegian. And compared to, say, Shakespeare or MoliÈre, the venerable Henrik is far easier on the little gray cells. “Ikke ¯l i en sÂdan stund, gi meg fl¯yten!” 🙂
Mum
There’s also that American actor, Earle Hyman, who began studying Norwegian, teaching himself to read and write it just so that he could read Ibsen in the original. Earle followed up by contacting Ibsen’s grandson and his wife, and arranged to visit them in 1957. Since then he’s become a regular visitor with a distinguished acting career on the Norwegian Stage (as well as being the screen grandfather to the Cosby family). I saw him play Othello once and he did it brilliantly in a fullbodied Norwegian dialect.
Meanwhile, that handbag thing, was the comment a bit of Ern Malley light or did I just not get it?
Mum
They say you laugh at a joke 3 times, once when you hear it, the second time when it’s explained to you and the third time when you wake up at 4 Am because you just GOT it! Well, I’m up packing for an early flight – and it’s not long after 4 AM. And now I SEE IT!!! Easily. The criss cross or kiss cross if you prefer! The frustrations of looking for a metaphor lurking in among the words rather than a straight forward visual symbol in the photo are totally disipated. Neat.
Jill
OK, so it’s perfectly standard to learn Norwegian so you can read Ibsen. I’ve never tried reading Ibsen in translation, spoilt as I am, but I’ve read Shakespeare in Norwegian and HATE it. So it does seem likely Ibsen is better in Norwegian.
Mum, so glad you saw the cross, I hadn’t even thought of people not seeing it – perhaps most people don’t?
Eirik
I, for one, did not get the cross point, and spent some time scratching my head. And speaking of not getting jokes… 😉
Marcelo
I think i’m gonna quit this reading Ibsen idea! Please…