Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27530 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Review
"Something new is happening here, some new thought about the nature of art is being proposed in Hunger. An art that is indistinguishable from the life of the artist who makes it . . . an art that is the direct expression of the effort to express itself." --Paul Auster (from his introduction)

"The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun. They were all Hansun's disciples: Thomas Mann and Arthur Schnitzler . . . and even such American writers as Fitzgerald and Hemingway." --Isaac Bashevis Singer

"After reading Hunger, one can easily understand why Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hunger should appeal to any reader who is interested in a masterpiece by one of this century's great novelists." --James Goldwasser, Detroit News
-- Review

Review
"Something new is happening here, some new thought about the nature of art is being proposed in Hunger. An art that is indistinguishable from the life of the artist who makes it . . . an art that is the direct expression of the effort to express itself." --Paul Auster (from his introduction)

"The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun. They were all Hansun's disciples: Thomas Mann and Arthur Schnitzler . . . and even such American writers as Fitzgerald and Hemingway." --Isaac Bashevis Singer

"After reading Hunger, one can easily understand why Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hunger should appeal to any reader who is interested in a masterpiece by one of this century's great novelists." --James Goldwasser, Detroit News

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Norwegian

Customer Reviews

Bly's translation is better
Pedants and scholars everywhere will celebrate this new translation -- indeed, already on Wikipedia, Sverre Lyngstad's translation is being called 'definitive'.

The only problem is, like all academic translations, it serves as more of a primer or helpful guide to the Norwegian than quality English prose. You need only compare the opening sentence in each translation. Here's Lyngstad's:

"It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him..."

Sets its mark? There is such a thing as leaving a mark, making a mark, but setting a mark?

Now, here is Bly's newly-discredited version:

"All of this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania -- that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him ..."

Good, clear idiomatic English.

There are reasons why new pedantic translations are done and set up above good existing ones. For one, different publishing houses want to make money. Hilda Rosner's Siddhartha, for example, is clear and readable. But it's been around for fifty years. Better replace it with a few new ones -- Susan Bernofsky's, for example. The only problem is that today's less than rigorous English leads to faltering prosody, as in Bernofsky's, and worse, to sentences that try to 'capture the ambiguity' of the original, leaving the reader with murky or awkward constructions (see above). Look at Penguin Classics and its translations of Nietzsche: taking an exciting, provocative author and rendering him dry, sensible, and British. R.J. Hollingdale is widely celebrated as the best translator of Nietzsche in these translations. And universal murder is done to Walter Kaufmann and his translations because he didn't adhere to the strictly pedantic notion of translation that renders one safe in academic debates (the gesture of murdering the father, routinely done to Kaufmann in Nietzsche studies).

Lyngstad is probably Norwegian, and it is probably believed that this makes him a better translator of Hunger having been written in Norwegian. But the English is nothing more than a phrase-by-phrase, word-by-word fully defensible transliteration of the original, while Bly's, whatever its "errors" can be said to be literature, even as a translation.

Glad I read HUNGER but...
The unnamed narrator in HUNGER is isolated, impulsive, self-destructive, excessively self-critical, and nearly homeless. While his plight is surely pitiful and unnerving, this novel certainly offers special rewards to readers who believe that mighty books present compulsive narrators, viewing the world from their hidey-holes in garbage cans or the equivalent. No wonder the introduction to my edition was written by Paul Auster!

Fortunately, Hamsun guides his narrator into society. Here, we thank the women, who flirt with the narrator and accept him as a boarder despite his penury and borderline mental illness. Their influence and timely charity help him break his syndrome of perfectionism, self-mortification, arrogance, and remorse, placing him on the docks in Christiania where "... all the workaday life around me, the loading chants, the noise of the winches, the constant rattling of the iron chains, was incompatible with the moody, self absorbed..." As the Silhouettes sang in 1957, "GET A JOB shanna nah nahh shanna nanna nahh (bah-doop)...

For the record, I'd say other writers have presented the marginal and desperate lives of aspiring young writers with much greater complexity and reward than Hamsun. Charles Bukowski for example, allows his Henry Chinaski to risk just as much as this unnamed narrator. But in Factotum, Chinaski is funny while living a life with just as much sad integrity.

The afterword in my edition (Robert Bly) says the story of HUNGER is highly autobiographical. Surely, he knows. But this novel also strikes me as a brilliantly intuitive assemblage of weirdness, especially when you consider Hamsun wrote HUNGER in 1890. But this cluster of self-destructiveness has also become very familiar in our world, in part due to Psychology 101 classes. So, I ask: Is this a case where the clinician has actually surpassed the novelist?

over-rated
I guess I'm a bit thick but I do not see what the big fuss is about. I picked this up because I had read somewhere that he was Bukowski's favorite author. This is the most boring book I have ever read. Yet it seems to get all kinds of praise ranging from "groundbreaking" to "revolutionary." The main character whines on endlessly about how the world is against him and how his genius is being ignored by publishers and therefore by the world in general. Instead of trying to find work he writes philosophical essays which he then tries unsuccessfully to publish then he attempts to pawn off what few belongings he has including a blanket, coat buttons, eyeglasses, hair-cut tickets. I won't spoil the end for you because I couldn't make it to the end. Page after page of this whining drivel was to much to bear and I gave up. (And I've finished some horrible books in my day.) This book should be titled pathetic. Not hunger. Hungry people beg or get a job. They don't write essays in the park. Save your money. I warned you.