Hauge, Olav H., 1908-1994

Olav Håkonson Hauge (18 August 1908 – 23 May 1994) was a Norwegian horticulturist, translator and poet. Hauge was born at the village of Ulvik in Hordaland, Norway. His parents, Håkon Hauge (1877-1954) and Katrina Hakestad (1873-1975), were farmers. Hauge attended middle school in Ulvik 1925–1926. He learned English and German in school and later taught himself French by reading. He spent many years training in horticulture and fruit cultivation. He went to Hjeltnes Horticulture School (Hjeltnes videregående skole) in Ulvik (1927 and 1933–34), Norwegian University of Life Sciences at Ås (1930) and the State Research Center (Statens forsøksgardt) at Hermannsverk in Sogn og Fjordane (1931-1933). He lived his whole life in Ulvik working as a gardener in his own apple orchard. (Olav H. Hauge Centre website: https://www.haugesenteret.no/om-olav-h-hauge/biografi/)

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. 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 also wrote poetry in homage to fellow poets William Blake, Paul Celan, Gérard de Nerval and Emily Dickinson. He was also inspired by classical Chinese poetry, e.g. in his poem "T`ao Ch`ien" in the collection Spør vinden. (Olav H. Hauge Centre website: https://www.haugesenteret.no/om-olav-h-hauge/biografi/)

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