Update on "Jens Bjørneboe in English"

The Wayback Machine is in the process of reconstruction, so the link posted awhile ago no longer works. Try this:
Jens Bjørneboe in English You may have to wait a bit for it to redirect.

The site is way out of date; many of the books listed are out of print. According to Amazon, those currently in print are Amputation, Powderhouse and The Silence. I'm not sure about Moment of Freedom, but the whole trilogy is still listed in the catalog of Norvik Press in England.

Jens Bjørneboe: Ballad of Hiroshima Town

Jens Bjørneboe
Ballad of Hiroshima Town (From The Bird-Lovers)
Translated by Esther Greenleaf Mürer


It was a lovely morning
In Hiroshima town,
One summer morn in nineteen five and forty.
And the sun, how bright it shone
From a sky without a cloud,
One summer morn in nineteen five and forty.

The little girls they played
‘Neath the trees and on the grass,
And everything they did just like the big ones.
They dressed their dollies up
And they washed their dollies’ dresses
And the women sliced the bread back in the kitchen.

And there were many children
Yet lying in their beds,
For this was still an early morning hour,
And the dew lay on the meadow
In the lovely slanting sunlight
And the crowns had barely opened on the flowers.

It was a lovely morning
In Hiroshima town,
One summer morn in nineteen five and forty.
And the sun, how bright it shone
From a sky without a cloud,
That summer morn in nineteen five and forty.

--
Jens Bjørneboe, Samlede Dikt, 1995 ed, p 150f (Fugleelskerne, 1966)
©1977, 1995 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag. English translation ©1997 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer

"Jens Bjørneboe in English" found

Yesterday a friend told me about the Wayback Machine, which has been archiving the web since 1996 or so to preserve sites that disappear. If you google Wayback Machine, you will find a link to a place where you can enter the URL of the site you're looking for. And voila! There were numerous versions of "Jens Bjørneboe in English", archived at different stages along the way. The latest link is:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080211204403rn_1/home.att.net/~emurer/

My other disappeared websites, including my poetry site, seem not to have been archived, but that's OK. This was the crucial one, an internationally known resource on an important Norwegian writer.

Thank you, Tony, for pointing me to this invaluable resource!

What Drove me to the Blogosphere

Soon after I first got online in 1997, I realized that the web could solve a long-standing problem of mine:  My interests run deep and narrow, and I tend to gather extensive information on highly specialized subjects. I saw that att.net's personal web pages would give me multiple venues for sharing such information, and soon I was learning html and making friends with the process of webbing.

Earlier this month I received notice from att.net that as of March 15 they will no longer support personal web pages. Actually the termination was immediate. My four sites were blocked, giving me no chance to notify my readers that they were about to disappear.  Though we had been promised that we could download our files, the site manager was inaccessible.  Fortunately I have everything on my laptop, and well backed up.

The main casualty was Jens Bjørneboe in English, a massive resource about the Norwegian writer (1920-1976) whose work I was involved in translating. I launched it in 1998 and made monthly additions through 2002; many other writers and translators contributed, and it is internationally recognized as the primary resource about Bjørneboe on the web.  I have hopes that an academic institution will provide a new home for it, and regret that I wasn't more diligent about looking for one earlier.

Also gone are:

my poetry website, which I started recently, didn't like all that much anyway, and intend to rethink.
Poetry has been my major interest for the last few years, and I have published in a number of magazines, mostly online. 

Quakerism and the Arts Historical Sourcebook, where I attempted to document the Society of Friends' historic antipathy to the arts and the gradual progress toward acceptance.  Eventually I published a pamphlet, Beyond Uneasy Tolerance, compiling Quaker quotations on the arts from the 1650s to the 1990s, and abandoned the site after that.

Fortunately the fourth site, also massive --- the Quaker Bible Index, a work in progress about Bible citations in 17th-century Quaker writings --- already has a permanent home at the Earlham School of Religion, http://esr.earlham.edu/qbi/

Hence this blog.  It seems a way to bring my disparate interests together and keep folks who share any of them informed while I figure out where to go next.