Norwegian influences on Spanish modernism : Ibsen, Hamsun and Unamuno

Abstract

Scarcely has the influence of Norwegian literature on Spanish letters been researched. Generally speaking, Norwegian authors have remained largely unknown to Spanish scholars and readers, to the point that Spanish translations of, for instance, Bjørnson’s and Hamsun’s works are, still today, a rarity. Gagen (69) has sustained, some Scandinavian playwrights, particularly Ibsen and Strindberg, were known in Spanish literary circles already in the 1890s; yet the quantity of critical studies into their reception in Spain is scarce. This situation has limited our understanding of Spanish Modernism; for example, Nil Santiáñez (119) has contended that Spain was the first nation where the term modernism was used to put Spanish literature at the front of Modernism; however, there had been a Modernist or pre-Modernist literary trend in Scandinavia known as det moderne Gennembruds Mænd (the men of the modern breakthrough), as Georg Brandes called it in 1883. Indeed, some of the deepest and strongest roots of Modernism are to be found in Scandinavian soil, particularly in the later works of Ibsen and Strindberg but also in other authors such as Jens Peter Jacobsen, Sophus Claussen, Gustaf Fröding, Sigbjørn Obstfelder, Herman Bang and Knut Hamsun, to name but a few.