Ola Raknes - Working For The Nynorsk

Working For The Nynorsk

In May 1908 Ola Raknes, then still a student, became manager and handyman for Norskt Maalkontor (literally "Norwegian language office"), an office dedicated to promoting the still young Nynorsk language. In this job which he had until 1910 he dealt with book sales and administrative chores for Det Norske Samlaget. He provided the momentum behind book publications as well as sales, and he brought the accounting into order, since it hadn't been attended to for the last three years. Being the first secretary of the Samlaget he made a significant contribution to the establishing of its first real administration in a time period when publishing in Nynorsk was starting to become self-sufficient (Skard, 1975). Ola Raknes joined the Studentmållaget i Oslo (A pro-Nynorsk organization among students in Oslo) which was founded in 1900, and he attained a central position, among other thngs he was elected chairman in 1913 but had to renounce the position. In later times he would serve as an often used speaker both in the 20s and 30s. Already as a student Ola Raknes published French-Norwegian Wordlist. Having returned from London he began working on English-Norwegian Dictionary, which was produced between 1922 and 1927. This as well as French-Norwegian Dictionary, which was written between 1939 and 1942, were both written for the "school book committee" within the Samlaget, where Raknes was a board member between 1915 and 1917.

Ola Raknes loved poetry, and together with I. C. Grøndahl he published the first Norwegian literature history volume in English in 1923. He was an appreciated literary translator, both of scholarly as well as artistic prose. He was the philological supervisor of Henrik Rytter's ten-volume translation of Shakespeare. Sigmund Skard writes of the two dictionaries which Ola Raknes wrote (Skard, 1975), that far from being mere glossaries, they were very personal works which again reflected the quest of Ola Raknes for his identity. Skard compares this work with that of Ivar Aasen more than 50 years earlier. Aasen had made his way through the entire tributary of Norwegian folk speech and compared it with another Nordic language: Danish. Skard writes that Raknes, "with strong power of empathy, integrated the values of two of the largest and oldest European cultural languages, procured everything that they possessed, from past to present, and confronted that with his own linguistic heritage and his personal linguistic sense. To check himself he drew in the living present-day speech in one of the richest East Norwegian rural dialects, in collaboration with his first wife, the poet Aslaug Vaa, as well as her father, the farmer Tor Vaa. Long into the future will these books be the daily benefit to everyone who works with the Norwegian language."

Both the school book committee and to some extent the popular writings committee of which he was also a member from 1911, acted as schools in publishing where the students had to deal with all aspects of book publishing: market evaluations, editorial reviews, recruitment of authors, practical editorial chores, deals with publishing houses or printers, distribution, marketing and economy. Ola Raknes' dictionaries were reputedly so meticulous that even the most abject taboo words were included, and they became important tools in the cultural struggle of the Nynorsk movement. From 1922 to 1930 he again worked for the Samlaget, this time as secretary to the board, however, in reality he was director of the publishing house. Raknes also translated several works of fiction as well as non-fiction into Nynorsk. He did a groundbreaking job in establishing a philological and psychological terminology for the language.(Dannevig, 1975) Raknes was deeply involved in the Nynorsk movement, which included the Høgnorsk movement, and he was a founding member of Norsk Måldyrkingslag ("Norwegian society for language cultivation") in 1928.