Posts featuring Tove Ditlevsen

How Tove Ditlevsen Opened the Way for My Life as a Translator

June 26, 2023  |  in Essays  |  by Tiina Nunnally

I worked hard on the translation, typing the manuscript three times on my electric typewriter.

In 2021, two publishing giants—Penguin and Farrar, Straus and Giroux—sent Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s collected memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, out into the world. A huge hit upon release, readers praised Ditlevsen’s emotional power, her passionate dedication to the life of words, her wry humour, and her uncanny, incisive gift for description. Long celebrated in her home country, Ditlevsen had taken a long time to find the same audience in the English language—and it is largely thanks to the dedication and prowess of her translator, Tiina Nunnally, that we were finally able to meet this brilliant mind on the page. Now, in this essay, Nunnally tells the story of the discursive journey that the Trilogy took to its now-massive Anglophone audience, and how Ditlevsen opened up the way for her to change her life.

At the end of Youth, the second volume of her collected memoirs, The Copenhagen Trilogy, Danish author Tove Ditlevsen receives a copy of her first published book, a slim poetry collection titled Pigesind (Girl Soul). And for her, it’s a revelation:

My book! I take it in my hands and feel a solemn happiness, that isn’t like anything I’ve ever felt before. . . . It can’t be taken back anymore. It is irretrievable. . . . Maybe my book will be in the libraries. Maybe a child, who in all secrecy is fond of poetry, will someday find it there. And that odd child doesn’t know me at all. She won’t think that I’m a living young girl who works, eats, and sleeps like other people. . . .Tonight I want to be alone with it, because there’s no one who really understands what a miracle it is for me.

When I translated those words in 1984 and then, a year later, saw them in print for the first time, it was an equally momentous experience. My translations of Ditlevsen’s Childhood and Youth were issued by Seal Press in one volume under the title Early Spring. It was my first published book, and how it came to be published at all seemed to me a miracle. READ MORE…

Anger, Sorrow, Compassion: On Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy

April 1, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Strange that to learn about one’s life, it is not sufficient to only live; one must also wander the halls of the past.

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

When I was a young girl, when beginnings were pure and brute in their unknowing, my mother ruled alone over the great realm of truths. There was the education in sensual matters (the fragrance of her unfettered in the mornings, porcelain spoons filled to overflow) and the introduction of worldly wonders (mittens, pinwheels, rock sugar), but mostly she was the insistence of one, axiomatic certainty: no one will ever love you the way I love you. She said it often, matter-of-factly, without any cadence of sentiment or tenderness, to comfort just as well to condemn—no one will ever love you the way your mama loves you. This line never wavered. It never tarnished. And it has stayed with me my whole life.

The memoir can be a baffling genre, and the writer’s memoir most of all. One spends their whole life under the thrall of converting subjectivity into objectivity, studying the essence of things and their multiplicity, studying the losing journey living matters embark on in order to arrive at the page—at the culmination of such a discursive, cognitive, and all-bearing life, what is left for the private language to make public?

“a whole person / is too much to take,” Tove Ditlevsen writes in her ninth volume of poems, Det runde vaerelse. Yet in her memoir, The Copenhagen Trilogy, she still commands the facts of her life with that same prolific, torrential force that has sprawled through dozens of texts, telling of madness and poverty and femininity in the various violences they enact upon a single body, all in a fastidious discernment of what can be made material by ink and paper. In the reading of this monument to a life of letters, one is left with the sense that yes—a whole person is too much to take, in the way that anything, forced to be seen with such unimpeded clarity, is.

To tell the story of a life, there is always the light shone into the intimate, unthinking crevices of origin. Before Tove Ditlevsen was a woman, she was a daughter. The excavation of memory is a conscious act; some things may rise to the surface in gasps and startles, but in Childhood—the first act of the trilogy—the author is herself grasping the glimmers of what can be told to make sense of the now. In the way of Hayden White, who said, “What is at stake is not, ‘What are the facts?’ but rather, how are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another.” The first fact then, is that there was a girl, and there was her mother. It is the people who know you from your first moments who hand you the legends by which the world can be deciphered, and this, as Ditlevsen goes on to tell, is the making of a tragedy. READ MORE…