TIIE A M E RIC A N - S C A 
Books 
Egholm and His God. By Johannes Bucli- 
holtz. Translated from the Danish by 
W. W. Worster. New York: Alfred A. 
Knopf. 
The importation of Scandinavian literature, 
creative and otherwise, has apparently become 
an established custom with us. We have 
passed quite beyond the stage of de store and 
are reaching out for the works of the unac¬ 
claimed. Johannes Buchholtz belongs to the 
latter class. He celebrated his fortieth birth¬ 
day on Washington’s birthday, 1922. He was 
born in Odense, famed forever through its 
connections with H. C. Andersen. He is the 
son of a dentist and for nearly a quarter of a 
century has been an employe of the Danish 
State railroad. Egholms Gud (1915) was his 
first work, though he has written five since 
then and received the Holger Drachman 
legacy in 1917- 
The London Times says of Egholm and 
His God that “it seems curiously detached 
from reality.” This writer feels that it is the 
very heart of reality; that it depicts people 
such as are found not merely on the trains 
and around the stations and in the dentists’ 
chairs of Denmark, but in the common walks 
of life everywhere. And when Egholm joined 
the religious freaks of Copenhagen he was 
doing a thing he could have done with equal 
ease in any state of the Union. 
The one criticism that has been made of 
such Scandinavian fiction as we have brought 
into this country is that it lacks humor; that 
it is unrelieved by touches of homespun fun; 
that it is without its bright spots where 
the author lays aside his sombre ethics and 
jests at the passing show. This criticism 
is out of place in connection with Buchholtz. 
Buchholtz knows people; he knows what hap¬ 
pens when father takes it into his head “to 
get religion” unmindful of the fact that the 
larder is empty, his daughter tricky, his son 
imbecile, or at least uncommonly slow, and 
tlie cradle is about to be hauled down from 
the attic. . 
These are the conditions that confront 
Egholm when, after having had a measure of 
success as a photographer, he loses his luck 
and bends his energy to the making of a tur¬ 
bine that will reverse—an invention which 
is to list him among the millionaires. Of 
course it fails to run, whereupon he burns 
the thing by way of heaping coals of fire 
NDIN AVIAN REVIEW 563 
on God s head—the figure and the words 
are his own—feeling that God’s jealousy 
of his greatness was imminent if not already 
existent. This is delightfully humorous, and 
the manner in which Buchholtz has told his 
story is diverting throughout. 
There is just one word to be said about Mr. 
Worster’s translation, for it applies to all 
the works he has thus far done into English. 
He translates: “Wherever did you get it?” 
That may be British English, but in this 
country we are much more familiar with 
“Where in the world did you get it?” Also, 
he translates here, as always: “Hedvig made 
as if to obey.” You can see the original Dan¬ 
ish sticking out through that like a bone in a 
bad fracture. The more idiomatic rendering, 
or even renderings, will occur to any one, and 
Mr. Worster should adopt them, for he seems 
to have become the official translator for the 
Northern authors. 
Allen W. Porterfield. 
Arthur Ruhl in New Masters of tlie Baltic, 
published by E. P. Dutton, deals with the 
new republics Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, and 
Lithuania which broke away from Russia as a 
consequence of the World War and the Rus¬ 
sian Revolution. Mr. Ruhl, in the chapters 
dealing with Finland, makes a sincere attempt 
to understand the struggle between Reds and 
Whites, which has been too much looked at 
through partisan eyes. He regards Finland 
as a completely Western nation and her eman¬ 
cipation from the Russian rule as inevitable. 
To an American the most encouraging part 
of the book is the account of the charity with¬ 
out stint or measure which our country gave 
Finland in her awful plight when the con¬ 
quered and the conquerors alike were dying 
for lack of food. 
An occasional whisper reaches us that the 
Review is a bit high brow, but the editor feels 
assured that none of this criticism emanates 
from North Dakota. That would seem quite 
out of character from a State whose farmers 
not only produce exceptional original verse in 
maal, but also after the day’s labor, quite un¬ 
daunted by crop failure, drought and hail, sit 
down and find recreation and solace in trans¬ 
lating the Rubaiyat into Danish poetry. A 
new spirited translation of Omar’s quatrains 
has been made by J. C. Hedstrup, a young 
Danish farmer and may be ordered from him 
or from the publisher, The Bowbells Tribune, 
Bowbells, North Dakota. 
