English Translation of Til Ungdommen! (Song to the Youth!) / Kringsatt av Fiender (Surrounded by Enemies) by Nordahl Grieg

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I’ve read thousands of poems in my life. But the one I always return to is Til Ungdommen! (“To The Youth!”), now more favorably known as Kringsatt av Fiender (“Surrounded by Enemies”) by the Norwegian WWII poet Nordahl Grieg.

To me, it is a deep reminder that suffering is caused only by neglect and that evil1 must be fought with tooth and nail, not just in spirit. That war is contempt for life and that a single human saved can be the seed that creates a beautiful unknown future.

This poem can easily be said to be my life philsoophy.

Unfortunately, as I’ve read and re-read Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian versions, no English translation has ever done it justice2. So now I wrote my own (probably lackluster) version.

To the Youth!

Surrounded by enemies,
enter your era
In the midst of a bloody storm -
commit yourself to the fight
You might ask in fear
exposed, open;
what shall I use to fight?
what is my weapon?

Here is your shield against violence,
here is your sword:
belief in the value of life,
the worth of a human.
For all our futures,
seek it and seed it,
die if you must - but;
grow it and strengthen it!

Silently the cannon shells
roll off the manufacturing line.
Stop their striving for death,
stop them with will!
War is contempt for life.
Peace is to create.
Throw yourself in the battle,
death must lose!

Love and enrich with dreams
everything that once was.
Go towards the unknown,
force out an answer.
Unbuilt power plants,
unknown stars -
create them with saved lives
ingenious minds.

Honorable is humanity,
earth is rich!
If hunger and suffering exists,
it is because of neglect.
Destroy it! In the name of life
Injustice shall fall.
Sunshine and bread and spirit
is owed to everyone.

Then, the weapons
will powerlessly fall.
If we create respect for humans
we create peace.
The one who with their right arm
carry a burden,
priceless and irreplacable,
cannot be murdered.

This is our oath,
from sister to brother:
we’ll cherish and guard
humanity’s earth.
We will cradle
its beauty, its warmth -
as if we held a child
carefully in our arms!

  1. Or, Moloch ↩

  2. Most versions change the wording significantly, completely losing the original’s straightforwardness, simple language, and any semblance of the emotions it sparks. Specifically, words are changed to a more lyrical form, losing every aspect of the original’s spirit. I’m reminded of the 26 page foreword from Mogens Boisen, the great Danish translator, in his translation of “1001 Nights” where he lambasts former translators for their contempt of the source material, with changes to its original form that echo what we see with ‘To the Youth!’ The Arabic source does not shy away from straightforward and even vulgar passages that are changed to be “more palatable” for the 19th and 20th century culture. For example, in some versions of ‘To the Youth!’, “under en blodig storm” (“in the midst of a bloody storm”) is translated to “Battle is menacing.” Excuse me, what? An embarrassment to translators. I don’t know what causes this discrepancy in diction, but George Orwell has criticized this symptom before in his ‘Politics and the English Language’ from 1946 where he describes how modern English has lost all connection to meaning-making and emotion. To quote him directly, “Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.” And I hope you take this into account in this little aside, because as he says: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” ↩