is of no consequence. The discrepancy was doubtless as obvious to the
translator as it is to us.

From about the same time we have another Shakespeare fragment from
Aasen's hand. Like the Queen Mab passage, it was not published till
1911.[16] It is scarcely surprising that it is a rendering of Hamlet's
soliloquy: "To be or not to be." This is, of course, a more difficult
undertaking. For the interests that make up the life of the
people--their family and community affairs, their arts and crafts and
folk-lore, the dialects of Norway, like the dialects of any other
country, have a vocabulary amazingly rich and complete.[17] But not all
ideas belong in the realm of the every-day, and the great difficulty of
the Landsmaal movement is precisely this--that it must develop a
"culture language." To a large degree it has already done so. The rest
is largely a matter of time. And surely Ivar Aasen's translation of the
famous soliloquy proved that the task of giving, even to thought as
sophisticated as this, adequate and final expression is not impossible.
The whole is worth giving:

Te vera elder ei,--d'er da her spyrst um;
um d'er meir heirlegt i sitt Brjost aa tola
kvar Styng og Støyt av ein hardsøkjen Lagnad
eld taka Vaapn imot eit Hav med Harmar,
staa mot og slaa dei veg?--Te døy, te sova,
alt fraa seg gjort,--og i ein Sømn te enda
dan Hjarteverk, dei tusend timleg' Støytar,
som Kjøt er Erving til, da var ein Ende
rett storleg ynskjande. Te døy, te sova,
ja sova, kanskje drøyma,--au, d'er Knuten.