THE RAGS
OUTSIDE THE FACTORY THERE were bundles of rags
piled up in big stacks, gathered up from far and wide. Each rag had
its story—each had a tale to tell, but we can’t listen to all of
them. Some of the rags were domestic, and others came from foreign
countries. There was a Danish rag lying right beside a Norwegian
rag. The one was Danish through and through, and the other was
utterly Norwegian, and that was the entertaining thing about them,
as every sensible Norwegian or Dane would agree.
They recognized each other by their speech,
although the Norwegian said that their languages were as different
from each other as French from Hebrew. “We go to the mountains to
fetch our language raw and original, and the Dane makes his
sugar-coated mushy gibberish.”1
The rags continued to talk, and a rag is a rag in
every country. They only count for something when they’re in a rag
pile.
“I am Norwegian!” said the Norwegian rag. “And when
I say that I’m Norwegian, that’s all I need to say! I’m as firm in
my fibers as the primordial mountains of old Norway, a country that
has a constitution just like free America! It tickles my threads to
think of what I am and to let my thoughts clink like ore in words
of granite!”
“But we have literature!” said the Danish rag. “Do
you understand what that is?”
“Understand!” repeated the Norwegian. “You flat
land liver!—I should lift you into the mountains and let the
Northern lights enlighten you, rag that you are! When the ice thaws
in the Norwegian sun, then old Danish tubs sail up to us with
butter and cheese, actually edible wares, but Danish literature
follows along as ballast! We don’t need it! Where fresh water
bubbles, you can dispense with stale beer, and in Norway there is a
well that hasn’t been drilled, that the newspapers haven’t spread
around and made known all over Europe, and that hasn’t been
disseminated through camaraderie and through author’s travelogues
to foreign lands. I speak my mind freely, and you Danes must get
used to these free sounds. You will do that because you have a
Scandinavian attachment to our proud mountainous land, the world’s
primeval mountains!”
“A Danish rag would never talk like that,” said the
Danish rag. “It’s not our nature. I know myself, and I’m like all
our rags. We are so good natured and modest. We think too little of
ourselves, and that doesn’t gain you anything, it’s true. But I
like it. I think it’s completely charming. But, by the way, I can
assure you that I very well know my own true worth. I just don’t
talk about it. No one can accuse me of that failing. I’m soft and
flexible, tolerate everything. I don’t envy anyone, and speak well
of everyone. Except that there isn’t much good to be said for most
others, but let them worry about it. I just make fun of it all
because I’m very gifted myself.”
“Don’t speak to me in that soft gooey language of
your flat country—it makes me sick!” said the Norwegian rag, and
was able to get free from his bundle with help of the wind and move
to a different pile.
Both rags were made into paper, and as chance would
have it, the Norwegian rag became stationery on which a Norwegian
wrote a faithful love letter to a Danish girl, and the Danish rag
became a manuscript for a Danish ode in praise of Norway’s vigor
and splendor.
So something good can come from rags, when they get
away from their rag pile and are changed to truth and beauty. Then
they shine with mutual understanding, and there’s a blessing in
that.
That’s the story. It’s quite amusing and won’t
offend anyone at all, except—the rags.
NOTE
1
Possibly a wordplay in the original since the Danish aas
(mountain ridge) is similar to the name of Ivar Aasen (1813-1896),
the Norwegian who created nynorsk (New Norwegian), one of
the two official languages of Norway. The other official language
is bokmål (book language), which is derived from
Dano-Norwegian, the written language of Denmark/Norway for hundreds
of years.