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Tarjei Vesaas enjoys the paradoxical privilege of being at the same time Norway's most provincial and most cosmopolitan writer. He has spent practically all of his life in relative seclusion among the Telemark farmers whose dialect he speaks and writes, yet he has also travelled widely abroad, and his contact with foreign literature has helped develop his personal style, the most modern and most European in Norway. Vesaas uses Norway's second language, nynorsk, which has somewhat restricted his Norwegian popularity; on the other hand he has won many admirers in the neighboring countries and in recent years has seen his books appear simultaneously in nynorsk, Danish, and Swedish. His position in Norwegian letters is comparable to that of Pär Lagerkvist in Sweden and Martin A. Hansen in Denmark.

Tarjei Vesaas was born in 1897 at Vinje in Telemark, a district known for its great traditions in rustic arts, folk music, and medieval ballads. Telemark is the home of the fourteenth-century visionary poem Draumkvædet as well as of a number of modern poets, notably Aasmund Vinje (1818-70) whose outlook, like that of Vesaas, was European, though he wrote in nynorsk. Among contemporary Telemark artists sculptor Dyre Vaa, poetess Aslaug Vaa, and composer Eyvind Groven are second cousins of Vesaas; the rosemaling specialist Øystein Vesaas is his uncle.

Vesaas' teens fell in the years of the First World War. He was a lonely and sensitive boy who felt as his own the suffering and broken hopes of youth on the battlefields of Europe. Being the oldest son, he was expected to take over the family farm, even though working with the soil did not satisfy his ambitions; he was a good student and wanted to go on studying. Instead he had to leave school at the age of fourteen, and with the exception of a year at Voss Folk High School, never   [p. viii]   continued his formal training. For all that he remained a great reader, and the books of Knut Hamsun, Rudyard Kipling, Selma Lagerlöf, and Tagore set him dreaming of a new world, more colorful than Vinje parish, which he now wanted to explore. In 1917 he spent the winter at Voss near Bergen; in 1919 he served seven months with the Royal Guards in Oslo. He went abroad for the first time in 1926 and in the following ten years visited a number of European countries: Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Italy, France, England, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Austria. In 1934 he married Halldis Moren, a well-known poetess, and settled in Vinje on the farm Midtbø, which he had bought from an uncle. Since 1947 Vesaas has received a yearly stipend from the Norwegian State. He won the 1952 Venice Triennale Prize for the best European prose work of that year, and in 1964 he was awarded the Nordic Council Prize for Literature.

Travelling still excites this writer. He sets out on his journeys with all the intellectual curiosity of a bright school boy unspoiled by inverted snobbery or by cultural pessimism. He relaxes completely on a crowded ocean beach, and has no objections to juke boxes or to electric power plants, even when they threaten to impinge upon the rustic idylls of Telemark. Vesaas can accept the spirit of modern times more easily than many of his restless and disillusioned colleagues because, unlike them, he is still firmly anchored in the old culture of his inland home. His frequent jaunts abroad do not inspire him directly, but act as a catalyst for his only true inspiration, the everyday miracles of Vinje parish. He writes of what are, socially and intellectually speaking, very ordinary people. He is not concerned with analyzing them as products of a Norwegian rural community; rather he wishes to interpret their conduct in terms of the surrounding landscape. Hence he uses a language laden with images of the mountains, waterways, and pine forests of Vinje, and he believes that such images or symbols disclose secrets about his characters which conventional language cannot convey. In this sense Vesaas belongs to the modernist movement in European literature,   [p. ix]   standing somewhere between Kafka and Robbe-Grillet, but mainly he belongs to Telemark, whose ballad poetry from Draumkvædet to modern nystev shows an unbroken tradition of symbolic language.