The Water Carrier (Vannbæreren).

Marietta Maddrell has translated six of Hans Herbjørnsruds short stories to English. I have been so lucky to get the chance to read one of them, The Water Carrier (Vannbæreren).

Now you get the chance to read a few lines from the beginning of this short story as well!

The Water Carrier

One August evening in 1976, while I was sitting alone at the former cotter’s house we had

leased on the west side of Randsfjord and was writing the beginning of my first story, I had a visit

from an elderly man whom I had not spoken with before.

He was called Tormod Sveen and was 78 years old, that much I knew already from other people,

who had also told me that he had been a teacher in his time on the other side of the water, at

Hov. But after being pensioned off, he moved here to Ringelia and was now living on the first

floor in the old schoolhouse down by the co­op.

Four days before Tormod came to visit, I had burned myself right through a sickeningly literary

flowery language and fallen down to the bottom of a raw personal reality in which each word had

to be written with the whole body. It happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that I experienced it

as a fall, a trapdoor had been jerked away from under my feet, and before I knew what was

happening, I fell right down into a tactile erogenous language which surrounded me like water, like

air. At once the world became changed there and then, or rather I was changed. Suddenly I

found myself in a living, warm and breathing body of language which could go freely about in the

world and look around and touch trees and stones and water and animals and people. It felt as if

I had become a completely different person and been given a totally new and unused body, and I

became so jumping with joy that I could not sit still, but had to go out and run every time I had

finished writing.

Thanks to Hans Herbjørnsrud and Marietta Maddrell