Manny’s Reviews > Vildanden > Status Update
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GREGERS.
Og så har hun vært på havsens bunn.
HEDVIG (ser flygtig hen på ham, undertrykker et smil og
spør):
Hvorfor sier De havsens bunn?
GREGERS.
Hvad skulde jeg ellers si?
HEDVIG.
De kunde si havets bund--eller havbunnen.
GREGERS.
Å, kan jeg ikke lige så godt si havsens bunn?
HEDVIG.
Jo; men for mig høres det så underligt, når andre mennesker
sier havsens bunn.
— Oct 30, 2025 12:18AM
Og så har hun vært på havsens bunn.
HEDVIG (ser flygtig hen på ham, undertrykker et smil og
spør):
Hvorfor sier De havsens bunn?
GREGERS.
Hvad skulde jeg ellers si?
HEDVIG.
De kunde si havets bund--eller havbunnen.
GREGERS.
Å, kan jeg ikke lige så godt si havsens bunn?
HEDVIG.
Jo; men for mig høres det så underligt, når andre mennesker
sier havsens bunn.
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P.E.
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Nov 01, 2025 05:08AM
o.O Is there some disguised pun in it? Are they looking for a fight? :D
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This phrase, "havsens bunn", is central to the play and must have caused the translators headaches. As little Hedwig points out, it should (I believe, anyway) be just a poetic way of saying the more normal "havets bund" or "havbunnen", meaning "the bottom of the sea". But somehow it isn't.
I looked at the Project Gutenberg English translation, which is as follows:Gregers. And so she has been to the ocean depths.It is really not the same, since the transposition from "havbunnen" to "havsens bunn" is much closer, and it is all the more mysterious that they should be quite different. The translator, Eleanor Marx Aveling, notes in her introduction:
Hedvig (looks up at him for a moment and smiles). Why do you say “the ocean depths?”
Gregers. What else should I say?
Hedvig. You might have said the “bottom of the sea,” or the “sea bottom.”
Gregers. Oh! mayn’t I just as well say in the ocean depths?
Hedvig. Of course, only it sounds so odd to hear people talk of the depths of the ocean.
“Vildanden” is perhaps the most difficult of all Ibsen’s prose dramas to translate.
It truly looks like a mighty conundrum, the more we peer at this passage!
