Luminous Spaces spans seventy years of Hauge’s poetry with almost three hundred poems, a third of which have never appeared in English. It also includes a generous selection from his four thousand pages of journals previously unpublished in translation and an intimate forward by his widow, Bodil Cappelen.
"Ocean"
This is the ocean.
All serious,
vast and grey.
Yet just as the mind
in solitary moments
suddenly opens its
shifting reflections
to secret depths
so the ocean, too,
one blue morning
may open itself
to sky and solitude.
Look, says the gleaming ocean,
I too have stars
and blue depths.
Olav H. Hauge (19081994) lived nearly all of his life in his native Ulvik in Western Norway. A largely self-educated man, he earned his living as a farmer, orchardist, and gardener on a small plot. His poetry is now seen as one of the main achievements of twentieth-century Norwegian literature.
Olav Grinde is a writer and translator whose works include Night Open: Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen. He lives with his wife Shelah, and they divide their time between Boston, Massachusetts, and Bergen, Norway.
