what is Danish literature?
Danish literature emerges from the Scandinavian/Viking continuum of runic inscriptions and alliterative verse some time around the 10th century, with the advent of Christian culture and Latin script. Such is the world of Saxo Grammaticus, who in the 12th century wrote Gesta Danorum. A new lease of life comes with the Lutheran Reformation and the inevitable translation of the Bible into Danish. And then one of the highlights is Jammers Minde, expression of the sorrows of a royal prisoner, Leonora Christina, a daughter of king Christian IV, written in 1673-1698 in Blåtårn, the famous Blue Tower of the Copenhagen's Castle. The 18th century is under the sign of Ludvig Holberg, a kind of Danish Molière (at least as far as he is the author of such plays as Erasmus Montanus).
What is called a Golden Age in Denmark comes with the Romanticism and covers the first half of the 19th century, even if two most celebrated figures of the Danish letters come rather at the end of that period. I speak of course of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Another highlight, inscribed in a larger Scandinavian context, is the so called Modern Breakthrough, corresponding roughly with the advent of naturalism (1870-1890). The product of that time is the realistic novel and short story formula of Henrik Pontoppidan, the Nobel Prize winner in 1917. Finally, the 20th century culminates in Karen Blixen's Out of Africa (1937) and Winter's Tales (1942). Of course, there are also Lego bricks (1958), and the movies of Lars von Trier.
What is called a Golden Age in Denmark comes with the Romanticism and covers the first half of the 19th century, even if two most celebrated figures of the Danish letters come rather at the end of that period. I speak of course of Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Another highlight, inscribed in a larger Scandinavian context, is the so called Modern Breakthrough, corresponding roughly with the advent of naturalism (1870-1890). The product of that time is the realistic novel and short story formula of Henrik Pontoppidan, the Nobel Prize winner in 1917. Finally, the 20th century culminates in Karen Blixen's Out of Africa (1937) and Winter's Tales (1942). Of course, there are also Lego bricks (1958), and the movies of Lars von Trier.
I have readDorrit Willumsen, Marie: en novel om Marie Tussauds liv (1983)
Hans Christian Andersen, Tales Søren Kierkegaard, Diary of a Seducer (1843) |
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I have written... nothing ...
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dust & flames
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It was one of those books that my mother was about to burn in her cast-iron stove. It was me who bought it at an occasional price and brought it to my parent's home; I hoped that my mother might enjoy reading it one day, so I didn't take it with me when I left; I didn't want to leave them in a bookless home, in that sort of desolation, stripped of all civilized living. Yet for my mother books were a dead weight, something that she refused to dust. It had never really crossed her mind that she might be supposed to read them, rather than just dust them. So one day when I returned home for the burial of my uncle, I saved this book from the flames; my mother was burning them one by one, in a cast-iron stove, just because they were dry and caught fire so easily. It was the only pleasure she could draw from them, the heat of the burned paper for her autumn evenings. Her only hygge.
I saved this books and I remember reading it on a night train. The cheap, brittle copy is still with me. I end up throwing it, after so many years, as I clean my library of old books in Polish. Perhaps it makes little difference; it could as well be burned. Dorrit Willumsen's Marie, a fictionalized biography of the maker of the famous wax figures museum, is not a great literature. It is minor. We had a lot of such translations of minor literature in Poland, toward the end of the communist era. There must have been a reason. Perhaps the royalties were more affordable for Polish editing houses, or perhaps the authorities believed that mediocre literature would fill our brains without making us reflect too much. But it is a readable book; I suppose that today it is almost completely forgotten (?). It shows a female life against a European panorama of the late 18th century, with Voltaire, and the court just before the French revolution, and such things. The whole panorama of social and intimate change, across the beginnings of the Romantic era. Abusing of the present tense, the author gives some sort of sensual freshness to her narration. She pays attention to smells, and tastes, and moods, and the feeling of the body. And more than everything, the touch of the matter, different kinds of matter, silk textiles, wood, wax. The interaction between the female personhood and matter. Little pearls, frills, laces. Dolls. Eroticism and sex. Certainly, it was not a suitable book for my mother. She lived separated from matter, from bodily feelings, from emotions, from the remotest possibility of little pearls or laces. She built a glass wall of defensive indifference between herself and the world. She banished all forms of fancy, of desire. This is why books served to be dusted, at the most. And why she refused to dust them. Dorrit Willumsen, Marie: en novel om Marie Tussauds liv [1983]; read in a Polish translation: Maria. Powieść o życiu Madame Tussaud, Poznań, Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1990. Kraków, 10.09.2021. |
pak ind |
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There is a Danish author that means a lot to me, and that's more than obvious. Hans Christian Andersen. Means so much to me that I actually went as far as reading some of his fables in Danish and absorbed at least one Danish word into my translingual private speech; that word is gammel, as there was gammel slåbrok that the hero of Den flyvende Kuffert had for his last attire:
Sønnen fik nu alle disse penge, og han levede lystigt, gik på maskerade hver nat, gjorde papirsdrager af rigsdaler-sedler og slog smut hen over søen med guldpenge, i stedet for med en sten, så kunne pengene sagtens gå, og det gjorde de; til sidst ejede han ikke mere end fire skilling, og havde ingen andre klæder end et par tøfler og en gammel slåbrok. Nu brød hans venner sig ikke længere om ham, da de jo ikke kunne gå på gaden sammen, men en af dem, som var god, sendte ham en gammel kuffert og sagde: "Pak ind!" Those tales accompanied me since my childhood, yet they make me cry even today: the soothing, happy, transforming kind of crying. Each of them tells my private, intimate story, reopens a wound hidden somewhere deep in me. I am all of them, the Ugly Duckling in his final moment of joining the swans where it belongs. And the son of the merchant who receives an old coffer, forced to fly away just like I had to fly away, very far away from my ruinous, exhausted and dilapidated universities in Poland (squandered legacies). And a traveller who steadily goes deeper into snow and frost just because a splinter of the Devil's mirror landed in my eye. Whatever might happen to me in the future is written in Andersen's tales. And I will see it when the time comes, and cry, and the splinters in my eye shall be washed away. |