Lars Olsen from Skrefsrud was a man of words. The first thing he did when he was released from prison, in which he had made up his mind to become a missionary, was to buy French, Greek and Latin grammars. He was already fluent in German and English. At the Gossner Society’s school in Berlin he studied several other languages including Hebrew and, not least, Hindi. In India he taught himself to speak Bengali and later went on to learn four other Indian dialects. Although it is unlikely that he spoke more than forty languages, as some would have it, it would be no exaggeration to call him a linguistic genius. His command of foreign tongues extended all the way down to the most difficult part of all, the actual tone of voice.
It is not that long since I read through my notes for this programme, with a good deal of nostalgia. I was amazed to find how well I remembered the original concept, and particularly all the details relating to Skrefsrud’s efforts to give the Santals a written language — take, for example the mere fact that before anything else he had to create a system of characters, an alphabet of sorts, using fifty ‘letters’ to reproduce the various sounds of the language. Having done this, he then wrote a grammar, while at the same time constantly noting down new words. More and more words. Within a very short time he had collected over ten thousand words which he later passed on to another Norwegian missionary who, in due course, included them in a massive five-volume dictionary. Norwegians have accomplished many great deeds; Roald Amundsen was, for instance, the first to reach the South Pole, but as far as I am concerned — you’ll have to pardon my subjectivity — there can be no greater deed than that of bestowing a written language upon a people which has none of its own. I like to think of Skrefsrud standing in front of a mirror beside a Santal tribesman, pronouncing words, sounds; I picture him mimicking the Santal, before examining his larynx and vocal chords with a laryngoscope. In my mind’s eye I see him roaming the countryside, on horseback, on foot, on his month-long expeditions among the Santals, always with his notebook to hand.
But what intrigued me most was the grammar he wrote. Might this be the most important book written by a Norwegian? I had actually held it in my hands, an exquisite volume with blue covers tooled in gold. I had spent hours leafing through it. A Grammar of the Santhal Language. Published in Benares — that alone: Benares — in 1873. It was hard for me to conceive of such a feat. Skrefsrud believed that the uninitiated underestimated the Santals’ language. He maintained that it was one of the most complex and philosophical in the world, as sophisticated as Sanskrit. The verbs in particular had such an overwhelming wealth of different forms. I flicked through the pages, shaking my head in disbelief at the thought that any man could wrest the intricacies of a language from it in such a way. I came to the part on the verb tenses — there were no less than twenty-three of them. How could that be? I still remember some of them: the Optative, the General Incomplete Present, the Indecisive Pluperfect, the Inchoative Future, the Preliminary Expostulative, the Continuative Future. I leafed through this book, almost enamoured of it — so much so that I really felt like learning Santali.
Suddenly I was struck by a strong sense of déjà vu. I had actually done something like this myself. Skrefsrud’s linguistic interpretations and his attempts to break through the Santals’ sound barrier had their parallel in my own life, in my year with Rubber Soul. I had received a communication from Margrete about a foreign language and had attempted to translate this album into something comprehensible, edifying even.
Where Skrefsrud succeeded I failed. That language remained a mystery to me.
I did not manage to realise my idea of making a programme about a man and a book. I still have a videotape on which I have preserved some lamentably bad clips from it. From these it is easy to see how difficult, not to say impossible, I found it to produce a memorable programme about a book. My powers of imagination laboured under my — then, dare I say — halting relationship with books. I was not well enough read, it was as simple as that.
Unless of course this fiasco had its roots in my inability or unwillingness to understand. My fatal defect. I possessed none of the patient resolve shown by Skrefsrud. Because Skrefsrud understood the full enormity of the task. In order to understand a man’s language you had to understand everything about his society. Her society. Skrefsrud taught himself the Santals’ songs. He, a Christian, participated in their rites, danced with them — danced naked some say. He, a missionary eager to communicate, realised how vital it was for him to acquaint himself with their sayings and ideas, their tunes and their customs, their knowledge of medicinal plants, their tales and legends. Consequently, Lars Skrefsrud also took an interest in the Santals as people and pled their cause with the authorities. Lars Skrefsrud was nothing less than one of the most significant figures in the history of the Santals.
I am not sure, but I have always felt that I should have spent more time on Skrefsrud. Had I done so, I might have gained more courage, and not have recoiled in such fear and cowardice when confronted with the greatest foreign culture I would ever know: a woman. I cannot rid myself of the thought: maybe Margrete would have been alive today.
To understand another human being. A Grammar of the Language of Love. I stood in a house in Ullevål Garden City and watched Margrete beating her head off the wall and I thought to myself: I don’t understand her. This is another culture. With a different god. An unfathomable language. From my viewpoint, in my universe, this was a woman beating her head against a brick wall. In her world, it might be an attempt to shed a skin, emerge from a chrysalis. If, that is, she was not trying to show me something. A chamber of which I knew nothing — of which I was not qualified to know anything. A wordless chamber. One which no words could describe. All at once I felt afraid. Or lost heart. The realisation crept over me: even if I were to intervene, or she were to stop, I would never know why she did it.
In prison I gave a lot of thought to the question of how much two people need to have in common in order for a relationship to work, for them to be able to talk to one another and not past one another. How great would the lowest common denominator have to be? The mission service has a similar problem. A missionary has to try to find areas of common ground. After all, how are you supposed to translate concepts such as conscience and absolution into a language which has never heard of such things? You meet a strange woman and you wonder whether she has something, some sort of mechanism, which enables her to understand your words. Do the two of you have — pretty essential, this — the same word for love? As far as the missionary is concerned, there is, for example, the question of whether he can use the tribe’s name for god as the name for God. The Santals’ highest deity was known as Thakur-Jiu. Elsewhere in India, missionaries used the name Ishwara for God — Ishwara being the Sanskrit word for Lord. Lars Skrefsrud was of the opinion that in Santali God should be called Thakur, but he had to give way on this point: the word finally decided upon was Isor, a Santali version of Ishwara. Could that God ever be the same as Skrefsrud’s God?