Literary Bible Translation Tops Norway’s Bestseller List
December 30, 2011
A new translation of the Bible has taken the top spot in Norway’s bestseller list, selling 75,000 copies between October publication and Christmas, according to the publisher’s figures.
The Norwegian Bible Society used a team of 30 famous literary authors as consultants on the translation, including internationally known playwright Jon Fosse, and published a literary edition without chapters and verses.
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BLT 
Many things to say here.
First, there aren’t that many translations into Norwegian (with Swedish being the dominant Scandinavian language); so a new translation would be big news.
Second, according to the (almost impossible to read Wikipedia page, this version is a more formal (concordant) translations than the previous leading translation.)
Third, the sales figure of 75,000 really indicates how small Norway is — there are four major dialects of Norwegian: Nynorsk, Høgnorsk, Bokmål, Riksmål and several significant minority languages (Sami language family, Finnish-Kven, etc.) As a comparison, Crossway claims that just one edition of their Bible, the ESV Study Bible sold 180,000 units in the first five months of its release; and I understand that the ESV translation sells several million units each year — and it is currently number four on the CBA bestseller list — sales of the NIV, KJV, and NKJV far surpass this number.
Kurk — I am sorry — I accidentally wrote over your comment. I will try to recover it in the comment.
MEA CULPA!!!!! I overwrote Kurk’s comment. Here is what I think he wrote, before I accidentally overwrote it:
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Thanks for the analysis, Theophrastus.
1. The last complete translation of the Christian Bible in Norway (i.e., Hebrew Bible and New Testament) was in 1978. This current one, “Bibel 2011,” combines the new New Testament completed in 2005 with the new Old Testament finished in October of this year; six years ago, the Norwegian Bible Society started selling a volume with the old 1978 Old Testament plus the then-new 2005 New Testament.
2. The Norwegian wikipedia page seeems more readable than does the English wikipedia entry. It also links to a couple of useful reviews.
In the review by poet Gunnar Wærness, there’s a comparison of Bibel 2011 with Robert Alter’s English translation of the Five Books of Moses:
In the review by literary critic Alf Kjetil Walgermo, there’s a look a how the translators of Bibel 2011 have rendered gender:
Of course, both reviews are much more substantial than the bit quotations I’ve given here can show. And I do not read Norwegian, so I cannot really say what either reviewer on the whole thinks about the new translation. It does appear that Alf Kjetil Walgermo is making some comparisons between the 1971 translation and this new literary translation of 2011.
3. Do you have any sense as to whether Bibel 2011 would appeal more to readers who use Nynorsk, Høgnorsk, Bokmål, or Riksmål? Does that really matter? Is there anything parallel in the North American English language context? Well, there’s Canadian, Chicagoan, Ebonics, Texan, and I’m kidding. The numbers of English readers and the numbers of English varieties and the numbers of English Bible translations make for difficult comparisons with the Norwegian context. But how significant is it that poets were the consultants on this 2011 project and that it’s being newly touted as literary or reviewed as poetry (as per Gunnar Wærness’s review).
It’s interesting to see that the Norwegian Bible Society not only solicited the Church’s help in promoting the new translation but that they also asked farmers to enter a contest to use bales of hay wrapped in plastic to advertise Bibel 2011 for a discount on purchases; see here:
http://www.bibel.no/nb-NO/Hovedmeny/Nyheter/Nyheter/Nyheter2011/Nyhet27-11.aspx?p=1&
And here is my response to Kurk (that accidentally overwrote his comment):
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Actually, it is rather surprising how standardized American English is. Virtually all written English literature in the US is in a common dialect. There is some difference in pronunciation, but certainly far less than in the Britain. The approach of American English towards dialects is to swallow them whole (that is why we have so much Yiddish and Spanglish and even “Ebonics” in standard American English.)
In comparison with, say, the French dialects of France or the Spanish dialects of Spain or the German dialects of Germany, American English is downright homogenous. (Certainly, any educated speaker of American English can expect to read any English newspaper published in the US with no difficulty whatsoever.)
My understanding is that same is not true in Norway. Unlike Joyce, who learned Norwegian just so he could read Ibsen in the original, I cannot claim to know any Scandinavian language, so I cannot make any sense of the references you cite. I do know that Norway has long has a complex relationship with Swedish literature, which I understand to be the dominant Scandinavian language, and I understand that much of Norwegian language politics has this issue at the back of it.
But in the end, Norway is sparsely populated with only 5.5 million people (and that includes the Finnish section of Norway — Finnish being an Ural-Altaic language [although there is controversy over whether that language group even exists.]) That’s roughly comparable to the population of the metro Dallas-Fort Worth area (where they sell a disproportionate number of Bibles, I know.) Can you imagine writing a history of Dallas-Ft. Worth literature? Or describing the intellectual relationship between Dallas, Houston, and Austin?
You recovered my comment just fine; so thank you. And even more, Theophrastus, I find your own comments very helpful.
To try to get the gist of what the two reviewers I linked to were writing, I used online translators. Some of the phrases, however, don’t get translated (and obviously the machine translations don’t handle syntax or idiomatic / metaphoric phrasing either); what is clear is that this Norwegian is Bokmål.
Better information (for those of us who cannot read any Norwegian and who must find it in English):
The Norwegian Bible Society has a webpage in English that has this initial paragraph —
And blogger / graphic designer Frode Bo Helland also writes a post in English with wonderful photos of the Bibel 2011, mainly to show the various editions (in Bokmål and in Nynorsk, in print and in electronic formats) with artwork covers and literary fonts.
The post starts this way —
And the captions for three of the several photographic images are as follows (which I’ve hyperlinked to the images) —
And the Spokane, Washington, USA company, Olive Tree Bible Software, has the rights to the electronic editions of the Bibel 2011, it seems. On one webpage announcing the new Norwegian Bible, there’s this bit of near sarcastic and Amero-Centric introduction and overview in English —