THE narrator of Knut Hamsun's strange first novel, Hunger (1890), is burdened neither by dreams of heroic deeds nor a social conscience, but is wholly preoccupied by his own unrelenting failure. Reduced to the most alarming poverty and starving to the point that he bites his own finger, he is nonetheless primarily angry and frustrated at the world's failure to recognise him for the literary genius he considers himself to be. In the intervals between pawning the few things he still owns, such as his vest and the buttons off his coat, he frets about the great article he is planning to write.
As early as the first couple of pages it is obvious that his self-absorption has enabled him to build a high wall between himself and reality. "It had been going steadily downhill for me all along... All summer long I had haunted the cemeteries and Palace Park, where I would sit and prepare articles for the newspapers, column after column about all sorts of things - strange whimsies, moods, caprices of my restless brain ... I wasn't very often discouraged by the editor's no ..."
Hamsun's novel is a work of pioneering Modernism and is remarkable for its blatant subjectivity. The narrator is selfish and unappealing and does not care about poverty in general, its only significance being how it affects him. Yet if it is to be acknowledged as a Modernist precursor, it is important not to overlook its debt to Dostoyevsky, particularly to the self-tormenting Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (1866) or the Underground Man in Notes from the Underground (1864). Hamsun's narrative is also an example of the urban novel, one man's odyssey around a great city, in this case Kristiania (now Oslo), referred to by the narrator in his opening sentence as "that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him
The Edinburgh publisher Canongate has now published Hunger (£6.99 in UK) under a new imprint, Rebel Inc., and in a new translation by Sverre Lyngstad, a Norwegian academic. The novel remains black, funny, evocative, exasperating. A reissue of a classic work is always a cause for celebration, since it subjects an established work to reassessment and sometimes gives new life to a book by attracting new readers.
Yet there is something unsettling about this Canongate edition. Firstly, Duncan McLean's highly personalised foreword, although proclaiming loud support for the book, is a bit too matey to be taken seriously. "I remember finding Hunger in an Edinburgh junk shop ... What grabbed me about Hunger was its immediacy, its impact . . ." This is interesting, because it serves to counter the astonishingly arrogant and ill-founded claims made by its new translator. McLean clearly read and enjoyed Hunger in the Bly translation many years before Lyngstad appeared on the scene to translate it for us.
Anyone who has ever read a novel in translation - anyone with an interest in modern literature - owes a huge debt to translators, an elite few of whom have elevated translation to an art. Even so, any reader will acknowledge that the business of transferring literature from one language to another must sacrifice something between the original and the new version. Lyngstad appears to believe that the success of his translation lies in denouncing previous translations. He writes in his outrageously aggressive preface:
"Both the English rendering of 1899 by George Egerton, alias of Mary Chavelita Dunne, and Robert Bly's American one of 1967 have egregious flaws that might cause any author to despair of ever being understood beyond the confines of his or her own national culture."
In attacking Bly's version, Lyngstad churlishly declares: "Automobile manufacturers have a long-standing tradition of recalling cars that are defective. We all understand why there might otherwise occur damage to and loss of human life. It is a pity that publishers do not take potential cultural damage with equal seriousness, damage to the writer's reputation and to all those who are deceived into believing that they have a reasonably reliable text in front of them. The American translation of Hamsun's Hunger is definitely due for recall.
Forewords and prefaces are meant to enhance a text, to place the work within a wider context and provide the reader with more information. McLean's lightweight foreword compares poorly with the thoughtful introduction written by Isaac Bashevis Singer to accompany the 1967 American edition translated by Robert Bly, whose translator's preface is also excellent. Lyngstad's preface is a disgrace.
Before writing Hunger, Hamsun had spent two periods working in the United States. and the novel in its urgency has an American feel to it. Hamsun would later move on to more epic scale, and won the 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature. His pro-Nazi stance certainly affected his literary status. He lived until 1952, when he died at the age of 93.
For all Lyngstad's boasting, his version is no better than Bly's; the changes are largely confined to colloquialisms, and many are petty and insignificant. Neither version diminishes the greatness of this maverick, bitter work. The retranslating and reissuing of classics should not be allowed to degenerate into cheap assaults on earlier editions. Perhaps someone should inform Lyngstad that no translation - not even his - is absolute; that honour belongs to the original book.
