The influence of Scots, especially of Robert Burns, on Danish poets and authors

Abstract

The main theme of this paper is the Jutlandic poet and author Jeppe Aakjær’s translations of several poems by Robert Burns in the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. In addition, translations of Burns’ poems in the middle of the 20th century by another dialect-poet, Martin N. Hansen, are taken into account, as well as a translation of one of the longer poems by the author Hans Kirk. However, the inspiration from Scots already began in the early 19th century with the author St. St. Blicher. 1. Early inspiration around 1800: St. St. Blicher translating Ossian and Laidlaw During his years of study in Copenhagen, the Danish poet and author Steen Steensen Blicher (1782–1849) became very engaged in the Ossian epic poems. He certainly believed in the claim of James Macpherson (1736–1795) that, at remote places in Scotland, he had found the long stories of the Celtic past by the bard Ossian, and had published them in 1761 and 1763, although Samuel Johnson and others had raised serious doubts as to the originality of the poems, implying that Macpherson had written them himself. Blicher’s translation into Standard Danish in two volumes, fi rst published in 1807 and 1809 (Blicher 1920), was quite well acknowledged, and at the time he was called “Ossians heldige Oversætter” [Ossian’s skillful translator] (Nørvig 1943: 54). Stylistically, the poems may be described as a ‘conglomerate of the Bible, the Iliad and the Aeneid’ which corresponded to the image people at Macpherson’s time wanted to