rtainly Aasen would have been justified in
feeling that Landsmaal is equal to Shakespeare's most airy passages. The
slight inaccuracy of one of the lines:

Av Maanestraalanne paa Vatn er Selen,

for Shakespeare's:

The colors of the moonshine's watery beams,

is of no consequence. The discrepancy was doubtless as obvious to the
translator as it is to us.

From about the same time we have another Shakespeare fragment from
Aasen's hand. Like the Queen Mab passage, it was not published till
1911.[16] It is scarcely surprising that it is a rendering of Hamlet's
soliloquy: "To be or not to be." This is, of course, a more difficult
undertaking. For the interests that make up the life of the
people--their family and community affairs, their arts and crafts and
folk-lore, the dialects of Norway, like the dialects of any other
country, have a vocabulary amazingly rich and complete.[17] But not all
ideas belong in the realm of the every-day, and the great difficulty of
the Landsmaal movement is precisely this--that it must develop a
"culture language." To a large degree it has already done so. The rest
is largely a matter of time. And surely Ivar Aasen's translation of the
famous soliloquy proved that the task of giving, even to thought as
sophisticated as this, adequate and final expression is not impossible.
The whole is worth giving:

Te vera elder ei,--d'er da her spyrst um;
um d'er meir heirlegt i sitt Brjost aa tola
kvar Styng og Stoyt av ein hardsokjen Lagnad
eld taka Vaapn imot eit Hav med Harmar,
staa mot og slaa dei veg?--Te doy, te sova,
alt fraa seg gjort,--og i ein Somn te enda
dan Hjarteverk, dei tusend timleg' Stoytar,
som Kjot er Erving til, da var ein Ende
rett storleg ynskjande. Te doy, te sova,
ja sova, kanskje droyma,--au, d'er Knuten.
Fyr' i dan Daudesomn, kva Draum kann koma,
naar mid ha kastat av dei daudleg Bandi,
da kann vel giv' oss Tankar; da er Sakji,
som gjerer Useldom so lang i Livet:
kven vilde tolt slikt Hogg og Haad i Tidi,
slik sterk Manns Urett, stolt Manns Skamlaus Medferd,
slik vanvyrd Elskhugs Harm, slik Rettarloysa,
slikt Embaet's Ovmod, slik Tilbakaspenning,
som tolug, verdug Mann faer av uverdug;
kven vilde da, naar sjolv han kunde loysa
seg med ein nakjen Odd? Kven bar dan Byrda
so sveitt og stynjand i so leid ein Livnad,
naar inkj'an ottast eitkvart etter Dauden,
da uforfarne Land, som ingjen Ferdmann
er komen atter fr