The Other Norwegian

Jon Fosse, whose work I’ve been translating for twenty-five years now, is not only a writer – he is a language activist. He writes in Nynorsk, the so-called minority Norwegian language, and has championed Nynorsk his whole career. He was involved in founding the second National Theater of Norway, which performs plays in Nynorsk, including his own, and he has also translated modern classics into Nynorsk – his version of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ is advertised as ‘the first translation of Joyce into Nynorsk’, who up until then had only been translated into the majority Norwegian language, Bokmål. When Fosse won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2023, he was often described in the press as a writer of a ‘minority language’, but just what that meant was often obscure to anyone outside of Norway.