All right, all right, I'll translate the patriotic doggerel and get it out of the way! I was, actually, working on translating some fairly serious poetry when this minor verse of Kipling's came to my attention and insisted on taking up all the lyrical parts of my brain. I ended up translating it out of sheer self-defense just so I could be thinking about some other words than "England's sword unsheathed / put half the world to flight". Kipling wrote this literally as schoolboy history, for "A School History of England", but for all I call it 'doggerel' you can't say he didn't put his best effort into the thing; that repeated bitter "not while" is really quite memorable. One hopes nobody in the Foreign Office in, say, 1956 (or 1941, or 1947, or 1973...) had learned their Atlantic history from the book and allowed it to influence their attitude to the hegemon. Churchill's quip, about the US always doing the right thing after all alternatives have been tried, comes to mind; but he was in school twenty or thirty years too early for the "School History". Kipling's opinion on the colonial rebellion may have been widespread among the British elite - indeed for all I know he got it from his own schoolbooks. At any rate the position that the colonies had been defended at extreme expense and the colonials ought to pay was the core of the whole conflict, and Kipling naturally takes the strongest version of the English side of the dispute. Adam Smith, contemporary to the rebellion, took the opposite side that if the colonies couldn't be made to pay, they should rather be made independent - in which case, presumably, they'd be paying for their own defense whether they liked it or not. But Smith was an economist and thought of incentives and efficiency; Kipling was a patriot and thought of loyalty and duty. Economics be damned, the colonials had a *duty* to the Crown and ought to pay for the Royal Navy the same as every other subject; and by the evidence of the first two verses, he's genuinely angry, more than a century later, that they chose otherwise. The switch from that anger to the elegiac calmness of "After" is a little startling; in the "School History" these verses were separated by the narrative text describing the war, and Kipling may not have thought of them as being two parts of the same poem. It does seem that being angry brought out his best effort; "worshippers at Freedom's shrine" is heartfelt if sarcastic, "too busy to think of war" is conventional. The illustrations for "Before" are mostly paintings of scenes from the Seven Years' War (presumably the specific conflict Kipling had in mind, with "Frenchman gone from the North" and "shattered Spain"); in order, they are: 1. "Half the world to flight" - scenes from the most famous battles in each major theatre: climbing the cliffs to the Plains of Abraham, advancing with fixed bayonets at Minden, and following Clive into the attack at Plassey. 2. "New-built cities" - contemporary map of the English colonies. 3. "Pole to Line" - *Battle of Quiberon Bay* by Richard Paton. 4. "Did not quit her then" - Washington at Monongahela, organising the rear guard after Braddock's disaster. 5. "Foes were driven forth" - *Battle of Quiberon Bay, the Day After* by Richard Wright. 6. "Frenchman from the North" - capitulation of Montreal. 7. "Clean-swept oceans" - *Bombardment of El Morro Castle during the Capture of Havana*, Raphael Monleon. 8. "What they owed" - *Join or Die*, showing eight colonies as pieces of a snake. Norwegian text: Før Ikke mens Englands sverd påny drev halve verden på flukt ikke mens nybrøten bygd og by pustet bak hennes tukt ikke mens England til forsvar ga hen gull, og skip, og blod - disse Frihetens svorne menn: da var de henne tro! Ei før hver uvenn fra kysten fór og England vant deres sak ei før franskmannen rømte fra nord og spanjolens rike lå vrak ei før på ryddet og trygget hav intet fiendtlig flagg å se husket de Frihetens strenge krav og tok til motet for det! Etter Snø ligger tykt over Valley Forge isen på Delaware men de som falt her for kong George de bryr seg aldri mer. Ikke skjønt kusymra smått om senn bryter ut der solstrålen når og knuffende kråkereir kunngjør igjen at vårt England på ny har vår. De rører seg ikke for smeltet fonn eller isen som tiner i fjorden; og de som falt for Washington ligger like stilt i jorden. De rører seg ikke når blomsterflor fordriver furuskogs dis, og i alle steinete beiter gror akeleie og filtkongslys. Hver for sitt land, i åpen strid, kjempet og møtte sin død; og den gode jord, fri for hat og nid, dekker dem i sitt skjød. Hun har ingen tid til menneskers hær; mot vinter og is hennes slag; og se, de årlige blomstene er hvor de var i fedrenes dag! Gullris hvor beite mot skogen lir når kongslysets blomst har falt fra og sumak-løv som høsten gir fargen til blodet de ga.