Luminous Spaces: Olav H. Hauge: Selected Poems & Journals

by Olav H. Hauge, Olav Grinde (Editor)

"'During those years when I lived a truly spiritual life, they called me sick and locked me up.' Intense forces are in play in the writings of Norwegian poet and diarist Olav H. Hauge. His Luminous Spaces is the life work of a restless mind and a troubled heart seeking insight into the spiritual, alert to the bleakness and beauties of nature, and intimate with philosophy and literature. His prose is rich, his poetry finely cut. Here is writing born of the need to know and the will to survive. Like the conch of which he wrote, his writings record the building of a soul to speak from solitude."—Marvin Bell Luminous Spaces spans seventy years of Olav H. Hauge's poetry with over 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 It also includes a generous selection from his four thousand pages of journals, previously unpublished in translation, and an intimate forward by his widow, Bodil Cappelen.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 (1908–1994) is one of the main poets of twentieth-century Norwegian literature. Olav Grinde is a writer and translator whose works include Night Selected Poems of Rolf Jacobsen .

Genres: Poetry

420 pages, Paperback

First published April 12, 2016

About the author

Olav Håkonson Hauge was a Norwegian poet. He was born in Ulvik and lived his whole life there, working as a gardener in his own orchard.

Aside from writing his own poems, he was internationally oriented, and translated poems by Alfred Tennyson, William Butler Yeats, Robert Browning, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephen Crane, Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg Trakl, Paul Celan, Bertolt Brecht and Robert Bly to Norwegian.

He was also inspired by classical Chinese poetry, e.g. in his poem "T`ao Ch`ien" in the collection Spør vinden (Ask the wind).

Hauge's first poems were published in 1946, all in a traditional form. He later wrote modernist poetry and in particular concrete poetry that inspired other, younger Norwegian poets, such as Jan Erik Vold.

Reviews

[Scott Bielinski · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I never call myself a poet. It's so rare I am one. Most often I am an ordinary man."

Filled with beautiful insights and poems. Hauge's sense of wonder and curiosity make him an enchanting poet. While the work on his orchard farm often sounds lovely, it's as much a source of frustration as it is inspiration for his poems. A good reminder to not overly idealize the literary and the "rural" life.

On February 23, 1960:

"The morning sky is blue as a bell when I get up, and it is very striking before I turn on the lights. To the west, the moon floats behind the black branches of the cherry tree, one edge grey and blurry, but its nail is luminous and hard." (144)

It Is That Dream

It is the dream we carry
that something wonderful will happen,
that it must happen -
that time will open,
that our hearts may open,
that doors shall open,
and the mountain shall open
that springs will gush forth -
that our dream will open,
and that one morning we'll glide
into a cove we didn't know.

[Juuso · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I never call myself a poet. It's so rarely I am one. Most often I am an ordinary man."

[Matt Bristol · Rating 4 out of 5]

I worked on a farm in Ulvik for a season, just down the road from Hauge's orchard, which I walked in on a couple afternoons. The spring was amazing on the fjord, and the mountains are like friends. This collection transports me back

[Julie Skybakmoen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My all-time favourite poet.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. I bought the book for his journals, which I wish there had been more of, but his poems are solid. Sparse. Modern and yet not.