Olav H. Hauge

Olav Håkonson Hauge was born on August 18, 1908, in Ulvik in Hardanger. Working his entire life as a smallholder and apple orchardist on his family homestead Hakastad, he quietly assembled a vast multilingual library and taught himself English, French, and German.

Hauge translated Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Emily Dickinson into exquisite Nynorsk. His own poems, published across volumes such as Dropar i austavind (Drops in the East Wind, 1966), combine traditional western fjord imagery with Chinese Daoist simplicity. In 2016, his poem 'Det er den draumen' (It Is That Dream) was voted Norway's Greatest Poem of All Time.