Translators’ Seminar: Taube in Translation

Musician and translator Johannes Refsdal guides us through his Norwegian translation of “The Seventeenth Ballad” by Evert Taube, Sweden’s great troubadour. This musical lecture on translation is based on an essay that takes the translation of Taube’s “Sjuttonde balladen” as its starting point. The essay was published in the Scandinavian issue of the magazine Mellom in 2025.

The lecture will be held in Norwegian.

Literature thrives on movement – between people, languages, and experiences. Translating is like bringing a work into a new landscape, with all that this entails in terms of trust, interpretation and creative choices. At a time when artificial intelligence threatens to reduce language to a mere function, the art of translation reminds us that language is first and foremost human: felt, experienced and lived.

With the Translators’ Seminar, we shine a spotlight on translation as a creative act and a prerequisite for literary breadth and diversity. The world is bigger than Norway – and when literature is translated into Norwegian, it also becomes part of Norwegian literature. The series is a collaboration between LitFestBergen and the Norwegian Translators’ Association (NO).