English translation: The Least of These. Translated by Bernt Jebsen and Douglas K. Stafford. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1959.  Out of print.

Summary (abridged from Janet Garton)
The Least of These: Critique of the 1959 English translation by Esther Greenleaf Mürer
Related pages

Summary

(Abridged from Janet Garton, Jens Bjørneboe: Prophet without Honor (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1985)

Jonas is a little boy from the poor east end of Oslo. He is a happy and imaginative child, but unfortunately dyslexic. When he starts school, he fails to learn to read, and for this reason is assessed as backward. He is persecuted and ridiculed for "holding up" the progress of his class, and threatened with being sent to "Idiotten," a special school for the educationally subnormal. His carefree existence turns into a nightmare, which eventually becomes so unbearable that he runs away from home. He is discovered as a stowaway on a ship and nursed back to strength and trust in the rest of the world by Jungmannen, one of the crew. When they return to Oslo, Jonas is sent to a different sort of school, a school that is not concerned with marks and prestige and being on top, but with education in the original sense, with drawing out the innate qualities of the child, encouraging him through stories, songs, and free activity to relate personally to his environment and to the inherited knowledge of mankind. He rediscovers his original enthusiasm for learning and begins to learn to read....

As well as being an intimate study of an eight-year-old's perception of the world, Jonas is a novel of many layers.To see it as a novel about the school system is to miss a deeper and more unifying plane on which the novel operates. The clue to this deeper level is found in the myths and legends to which references are scattered throughout the novel. The central legend ..is [that] of the Holy Grail. The knights of the Holy Grail are the seekers, the "homeless souls" of this earth, who cannot be satisfied but must always search on. When they forget the quest for the Holy Grail, they turn against each other.

Those characters in the novel who bear the characteristics of the knights of the Holy Grail form a spiritual brotherhood that provides a common theme for the different sections of the novel. It is a restatement in metaphysical terms of the importance of deviators, heretics, and neurotics; it is they who carry the important messages, which must not be forgotten if we are not all to become salamanders, and who are condemned to suffer for the truths they bear. In their sickness lies the health of mankind.

An American version of Jonas, translated by Bernt Jebsen and Douglas K. Stafford, was published by Bobbs Merrill in 1959 under the title The Least of These. Substantial changes were made to the original in this edition: additions, cuts, paraphrases, and changes in the order of the chapters.

A brief foreword by Bjørneboe reads in its entirety:

It is a great pleasure for me to give my heartiest thanks to Dr. Douglas K. Stafford, Professor of Educational Philosophy, who was the first American to read this book, and who, through his kindness and enthusiasm, has made the American edition of The Least of These possible.

It would be interesting to know more about how this translation came to be. Tone Bjørneboe tells me that Douglas K. Stafford was an African-American, but is unable to tell me more. Where he was professor I do not know. I have not been able to find out anything whatever about Bernt Jebsen.

Another question is who was responsible for the changes. In an essay on the Odin Theater's adaptation of The Bird Lovers (VSEA 1970) Bjørneboe says, a propos of authors' resistance to having their work tampered with: "A really able publisher's consultant is such a rare phenomenon that I hardly have met it more than twice in my life—the first time in the U.S. and the second time in Norway, many years later. Both times it led to significant improvements of the book, and I deeply grateful to them both."

The first instance can only be The Least of These. This would seem to indicate that the changes were made by a publisher's editor in consultation with the author.

In the following table, the first column lists the chapters in The Least of These (LOT). The second shows which chapters or parts of chapters in the original the LOT chapters contain.

LOT Chapter	Jonas Chapter
1	5, first few paras of 1, beginning of 7
2	1
3	9 (most of it: Jungmannens historie)
4	2
5	3 (first half)
6	4
7-8	3 (second half)
9	6
10	7 (4 p cut)
11	8, rest of 9, 10
12	11
13 & 14	12, substantially cut and rearranged

Thus, LOT starts out with chapter 5 of Jonas, followed by the first few paragraphs of chapter 1 and the beginning of chapter 7. The rest of the original chapter 1 follows in LOT chapter 2. "The Jungmann's Story" (chapter 9) comes next. (Jungmann—lit. "Young man"—is the nautical rank called in English "Apprentice"; the double meaning can be seen as foreshadowing the "Servant of Justice" in Moment of Freedom and the "renovation worker" in Powderhouse. In LOT it is translated as "Helmsman," which misses the mark.)

What this does to the structure of the novel would be fascinating to explore. Presumably they wanted to start in medias res like the Aeneid; but putting the Jungmann's Story early and then forgetting all about him until chapter 11 is just confusing. The Parsifal motif is vitiated, as is the twofold symmetry of the original—to which, as Egil Wyller notes, the Jungmann's Story is pivotal:

[The Jungmann] is likewise a refugee from a school, as teacher, and in this inner union between the two refugees on the ship the first half of Jonas, in which the boy is the main character, is linked to the second part, where the Jungmann is the main character. It is indicative of the book's tight construction that this unifying chapter lies so exactly in the book's middle that there are 158 pages before it and 156 pages after. [Egil A. Wyller, "Jens Bjørneboe's Jonas: en analyse." Samtiden, 65 (1956): 158f.]

There are other kinds of changes in The Least of These. Many are inspired by the difficulties of translating across cultures. In Norwegian, spelling has long been a complex political matter with many partisan nuances. Allusions to this fact in Jonas are both unintelligible to Americans and untranslatable, and have accordingly (and justifiably) been abridged.

The resulting confusion can be seen in The Least of These. It looks as if the translators, or perhaps their editor at Bobbs Merrill, tried valiantly to make sense, any sense, out of the passage. In a dialogue between the elderly educator and journalist Abraham Werner and the up-and-coming young journalist Ligård, the key phrase is mistranslated:

"And do you know what [Jæger] used to say? 'Metaphysics,' he said, 'metaphysics is suicide.' Norwegian radicalism begins with Jæger's phrase on its banner. And of course we've allowed it to be forgotten."

This is then elucidated in a paragraph which is not in the original at all:

"Jæger was a practical man. He understood that metaphysics brings slow paralysis. It becomes a cover-up, a means of insisting on the impracticality of being practical, a means of maintaining the status quo. He wanted to do what was needed and necessary, what was, above all, practical. He wasn't interested in the opposition calling him 'impractical' because he set out to do what was wanted but had never been done before. It's the status quo I find impractical. It does nobody any good. And that's the reason I find your praise of suffering revolting." (295)

One wonders how closely Bjørneboe read the translation. His eagerness to be published in English—the major world language—may have clouded his judgment. The changes in The Least of These were designed to make the novel more accessible to American readers, but at the cost of doing real violence to the book's intricate stucture—the hidden eight-ninths of the iceberg.

Should Jonas be made available once again in English, it is clear that a simple reprinting of The Least of These, even if it were feasible, would not suffice. A new and faithful translation is needed.

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This page added February 2001