Lutefisk and lefse! Please translate Norwegian.

May 5, 2019 9:58 AM

I’m interested in purchasing this bentwood box, however, given how I plan to use it, I need at least a rough idea of what the text on the outside is saying (image #2). If someone could translate the visible text, I would greatly appreciate it!!
posted by jenquat to Writing & Language (5 answers total)

Best answer: I spoke with someone who is a native speaker of Swedish and English and fluent speaker of Norwegian. He had some trouble making out the characters on the box, but thinks it might read "og lag som æ fagert dikt det" in Norwegian which would translate to something like "and lay your beautiful poems in here".
posted by Sfving at 10:58 AM on May 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks so much... that makes it even better.
posted by jenquat at 1:20 PM on May 5, 2019

That seems cheap for nice work. Enjoy it! :7)
posted by wenestvedt at 7:34 PM on May 5, 2019

I think the translation of the text Sfving gives would be more like "And lay/lays/layers like a beautiful poem, which..." It's hard to tell from the pictures but there might be words between the "og" and the "lag", and again after the "det" there seems to be some other text curling around the side.

Also it seems to me likely to be a quote, somehow.

So I did a bit of googling and found this line:

"Og rosa laag som eit fagert dikt, men d'er da synd, dei skal gløyma slikt." (Sometimes with "Laag" as "lag". It seems possible that this box might have some part of that on it. I can only find it in webpages that are collections of quotes from poetry, and can't figure out the original poem it came from. Also I speak Swedish and Danish, not Norwegian, and this isn't even a standard modern Norwegian, so I can't quite get the sense of it.

Something like "and pink layers like a beautiful poem, but whoever thinks about it soon forgets it"?
posted by lollusc at 1:52 AM on May 6, 2019

The 4th photo seems to offer a loose translation (as you probably already noticed): "The peace you weave into your own lives' poetry are the things it is a pity to forget." Nice- if you bought it and manage to update with images of the full original script I'd be curious to see it :) (dialect is complicated in Norwegian so its not unusual for the source to be difficult to research)
posted by iiniisfree at 4:14 AM on May 6, 2019