Hunger [Paperback]

Knut Hamsun's *Hunger* is a powerful study of a man too intelligent and too sensitive for his own good--or anyone else's for that matter. He's a younger version of Dostoyevsky's "underground man" driven by Poe's "imp of the perverse." Living hand-to-mouth, always down to his last kroner, reeling dizzy from hunger, Hamsun's narrator, a freelance journalist and would-be litterateur, is part crank, part brilliant eccentric whose hypersensitivity and untimely observations of the shortcomings of human nature seem to insure his failure among the society he loathes.

The victim as well as the author of his own misfortunes, the hero--properly speaking, the anti-hero--of *Hunger* can't even stumble into good fortune without somehow sabotaging himself. He pushes himself to indulge in the most offensive and inappropriate public behavior so compulsively you begin to wonder if he isn't insane, especially inasmuch as he often engages himself in conversation and goads himself to self-destruction as if he were really talking to and arguing with another person altogether. He even manages to spoil the beginnings of a most improbable love-affair with a woman who finds herself intrigued by such a strange and haunted man.

Is his poverty, his periodic homelessness, his ever-present hunger a consequence of his schizoid behavior or is his schizoid behavior a consequence of his hunger, grinding poverty, and brutal degradation at the hands of a society that doesn't recognize the geniuses among it? The question is left open to debate and that's one of the things that makes *Hunger* such an endlessly compelling novel.

By articulating such questions and outlining the contours of alienation, Hamsun paints a bleak landscape where genius struggles between mediocrity and madness and where each of us is not much more than a ham sandwich away from being swallowed up by utter destitution.

This translation is absolute garbage. Hamsun's rich language and unforgettable style have been washed away to make for an easier read. Nuances are erased and sentences made bland, time is distorted -- readers ignorant of the original are being robbed. This, like the Sverre Lyngstad translation, is a disgrace. I could translate better than this myself. Here's an example of his butchering, not chosen for being particularly bad; it is just a paragraph on the first page.

"I was lying awake in my attic room; a clock struck six somewhere below; it was fairly light already and people were beginning to move up and down the stairs. Over near the door, where my wall was papered with old issues of the Morning Times, I could make out a message from the Chief of Lighthouses, and just to the left of that an advertisement for fresh bread, showing a big, fat loaf: Fabian Olsen's bakery."

Here is the original (modernized spelling, and "at" written as "å"):

Jeg ligger våken på min kvist og hører en klokke nedenunder meg slå seks slag; det var allerede ganske lyst og folk begynte å ferdes opp og ned i trappene. Nede ved døren hvor mitt rom var tapetsert med gamle numre av Morgenbladet kunne jeg så tydelig se en bekjentgjørelse fra Fyrdirektøren, og litt tilvenstre derfra et fett, bugnende avertissement fra baker Fabian Olsen om nybakt brød.

I realize that to those of you -- a majority no doubt -- who do not know any Norwegian, it will be difficult to trust any alternative translation I provide. Nonetheless I will make the attempt, sticking very closely to the original. The purpose is not to provide a pleasant read, but to illustrate the gap between what Hamsun wrote and the translation you're being served.

I lie awake in my attic room and hear a clock down below me strike six; it was already quite bright and people were beginning* to wander up and down the stairs. Down by the door where my room was papered with old issues of "Morgenbladet", I could very clearly see** a notice from the Lighthouse Director, and slightly left therefrom a grand***, bulging advertisement from baker Fabian Olsen about new-baked bread.

*direct translation: began
**"kunne jeg så tydelig se" literally means "I could so clearly see", but the translation doesn't do what the Norwegian does. There's almost something paranoid about it, something highly aware. You immediately start conjuring images of the protagonist gazing suspiciously at the advertisement. Reading the words with the right voice goes along way, but it doesn't happen automatically like it does in Norwegian.
***literally: fat, greasy -- suffice to say that grand is not ideal

All in all, the number of faults in this quite randomly selected paragraph are many. First of all, "was lying awake" is just plain wrong use of time. It happens in present tense. He *heard* the clock strike six, it was not merely something that happened. The clock certainly did not strike six *somewhere* -- he took that out of nowhere. The first semi-colon is arbitrary and out of place. The door is down below, something the translation doesn't bother telling you. A "bekjentgjørelse" is certainly not just a message, but more like an announcement that makes its readers familiar with something. Notice is the closest I could think of. "Ferdes" only means "move" in the same way fare, travel, wander, walk and stroll means move. As for the picture of a big fat loaf on the advertisement, the translator made that up himself.

I repeat that this was an almost randomly selected passage. God knows what a more careful read might reveal.

I picked up Hunger because I am a fan of Charles Bukowski's writing, and he mentions several times in his works that Knut Hamsun is his favorite author. After finishing Hunger, I understand why - its main character is very real, intensely psychological, living through what he must, learning what he has to learn to heal some broken part of himself. I now realize Bukowski took these themes for his work and made them his own. In the excellent afterword to this edition (must reading), Robert Bly says "...Hunger is a cathedral. It is a cathedral because the whole novel is a resonating chamber for an unknown part of the personality." The central focus of Hunger is precisely what is not there - the part of the main character's personality that makes him do the things he does, the unconscious. Where do the impulses of the unconscious come from, and what do they say about us and about the times in which we live?

Written in 1890, Hunger was a new kind of novel for the 20th century, later influencing Hemingway, Saramago, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Camus, and many others. Hunger is not symbolic. The main character is really hungry as he wanders the streets of Christiana (Oslo) with little in his pockets but a pencil nub and a few sheets of paper on which to write another article he hopefully can sell to the newspaper for a few kroner. He goes for days without eating, writes feverishly, wanders the streets at all times of day and night, contemplates eating his own pockets, tries to pawn the buttons off his own coat, sells some articles, is OK for a while, and then starves again. At times the protagonist seems to lapse into insanity, giving what little he has away and seemingly subverting his own efforts. At other times he appears to be a genius. In the words of Samuel Beckett, this is a type of writing that "admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else."

Hunger's unnamed main character is drawn from Hamsun's own 10 years of being down and out on the streets of Christiana. Hamsun's character was new and shocking because he trusts and obeys the impulses of his unconscious with no judgment, hysteria, or self pity, in direct contradiction to the mainstream literature of the day. Robert Bly states that "there is a sense throughout the entire novel that his starvation was somehow planned by his unconscious - that somehow his unconscious has chosen suffering as a way for some part of him to get well." He goes on to say that "His obedience to the unconscious, even at the cost of physical suffering, is the right thing; it is the road of genius and learning."

In Hunger, we haunt the city streets with Hamsun, live in his mind, and never really leave. Highly recommended.

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