The League of Youth Pillars of Society Author:Henrik Ibsen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: With reference to the phrase " De lokale forhold," here lamely represented by " the local situation," Ibsen has a curious remark in a letter to Markus Gronvold, ... more »dated Stockholm, September 3, 1877. His German translator, he says, has rendered the phrase literally " lokale Verhaltnisse "—" which is wrong, because no suggestion of comicality or narrow- mindedness is conveyed by this German expression. The rendering ought to be ' unsere berechtigten Eigenthumlichkeiten,' an expression which conveys the same meaning to Germans as the Norwegian one does to us Scandinavians." This suggestion is, unfortunately, of no help to the English translator, especially when it is remembered in what context Aslaksen uses the phrase " de lokale forhold " in the fifth act of An Enemy of the People. PILLARS OF SOCIETY. INTRODUCTION. In the eight years that intervened between The League of Youth and Pillarx of Society—his second prose play of modern life—Ibsen published a small collection of his poems (1871), and his "World- Historic Drama," Emperor and Galilean (1873). After he had thus dismissed from his mind the figure of Julian the Apostate, which had haunted it ever since his earliest days in Borne, he deliberately abandoned, once for all, what may be called masquerade romanticism—that external stimulus to the imagination which lies in remoteness of time and un familiarity of scene and costume. It may be that, for the moment, he also intended to abandon, not merely romanticism, but romance—to deal solely with the literal and commonplace facts of life, studied in the dry light of everyday experience. If that was his purpose, it was very soon to break down ; but in Pillars of Society he more nearly achieved it than in any other work. Many causes contributed to the usually long pause betwe...« less