The Concordia sentinel. (Vidalia, Concordia Parish, La.) 1882-current, 1921-01-08

Hefdenstam, the Swede, and after q
gap Of three years it is now the turn
or hnut Hamsun, the Norwegian. Evi-
IDENTIFY If Americans are to keep up
with the times they must pay mere
attention TO the Scandinavian Ian
guages or put the translators to work.
1t is no impeachment of the judges
or the prize-winner that Hamsun's
fame should have been so long in
crossing the Atlantic, although his ro-
nance, Hunger" was published as
long ago as 1888. The Nobel prize,
under the terms of the founder. is TO
be given annually 'to the person who
shall have produced the greatest work,
in the ideal sense, in the world of let
ters." The names are apparently those
of authors with wide continental rep
UtatiOn rather than those most es-
teemed by their own compatriots.
Hamsun is evidently a born writer.
Perhaps his boyhOod in the Far North
helped to make him a writer, poet anil
dreamer. The long arctic nights may
have brought out the hereditary trait.
For such a nature as his is described,
''paradoxical and rebeIlious as it is
poetic and picturesque" Seems neces-
sarily the final fruit of powerful he
reditary tendencies, and his peasant
forbears are said to have been marked
out from their neighbors at least once
in each generation by an artistic
tendency that made Of them skilled
craftsmen. At any rate, from the
time he learned to make his letters
he was striving at literary creation,
and when at seventeen he consented
to be apprenticed to a shoemaker 1t
was in order that he might earn the
money to have printed at his own ex-
pense his first two complete works,
a short novel and long poem.
The next use he made of his APP
premiership was to jump the job with
some more savings and go to Chris
tiania, where he hoped to work his
way through the university. But
in that hope he failed. There were
two reasons for this failure. The
more important was that he had
hoped to pay for his. lectures by sell
ing stuff to the Ch=istiania publishers
of newspapers and periodicals and
he couldn't do 1t. They did not want
his poetry. his fiction or his essays.
This failure produced the second rea-
son why he could not remain at the
university. He became either an un-
bearable nuisance to his fellow stu
dents or the butt of their jibes. They
did not understand him and he made
no effort to be understood. So he.
left the university and came to Amer
lea.
Hamsun, like other geniuses. was
apparently born to be misunderstood.
Anyway, shallow Soil" published in
1898. was the result of Hamsun's life
among the Bohemians of Christiania
after his street car experience in Chi
cago. 1t does not seem TO have been
a pleasant period in his life. Evil
IDENTIFY he was no better understood
or liked by the bohemians than he
had been by the students at the uni
versity dozen years before. Ham
sun took his revenge by his violent
attack on the bohemians in "Shal-
low Soil" The same life has been de-
scribed by Strindberg in much more
good-humored way.
Hamsun's career and final success
seem to point anew the moral that u
IS hard to keep a good man down. he
had hard life, and success seemed a .
mere ignls fatuus, but he kept on
trying