Copenhagen Tales Read online

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi

  Copenhagen Tales

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi

  Copenhagen

  Tales

  Stories selected

  and translated by

  Lotte Shankland

  Edited by

  Helen Constantine

  1

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi

  3

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

  United Kingdom

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

  It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

  # General Introduction Helen Constantine 2014

  # Introduction, Selection, and Notes Lotte Shankland 2014

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

  First Edition published in 2014

  Impression: 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

  You must not circulate this work in any other form

  and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

  Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Data available

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014936758

  ISBN 978–0–19–968911–8

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

  Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi

  Contents

  General Introduction

  1

  Introduction

  5

  The Water Drop

  Hans Christian Andersen

  13

  Twice Met

  Henrik Pontoppidan

  17

  A Tricky Moment

  Bjarne Reuter

  37

  To Catch a Dane

  Eugen Kluev

  63

  Willadsen

  Dan Turèll

  83

  Eggnog

  Tove Ditlevsen

  107

  The Maids

  Søren Kierkegaard

  117

  The Bra

  Jakob Ejersbo

  123

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi

  vi n Contents

  The Naughty Boy

  Hans Christian Andersen

  149

  Is There Life after Love?

  Jan Sonnergaard

  155

  A Bench in Tivoli

  Katrine Marie Guldager

  173

  As the Angels Fly

  Naja Marie Aidt

  179

  The Trousers

  Benny Andersen

  199

  Nightingale

  Meïr Goldschmidt

  217

  Amelie’s Eyes

  Anders Bodelsen

  263

  Conversation One Night in

  Copenhagen

  Karen Blixen

  289

  The Night of Great Shared

  Happiness

  Merete Bonnesen

  329

  Notes on the Authors

  348

  Further Reading and Viewing

  358

  Publisher’s Acknowledgements

  362

  Map of Copenhagen

  364

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi

  Picture Credits

  Pages 12, 82, 122, 154, 172, 178, 198, 288: © Rune Backs

  Page 16: © MyLoupe/UIG/Getty Images

  Pages 36, 62: © Hugh Shankland

  Page 106: The Carlsberg Archives

  Page 116: Caricature of Søren Kierkegaard, 1870, by

  Wilhelm Marstrand. The Royal Library, Copenhagen

  Page 148: Flower Man paper cut, 1848, by Hans Christian

  Andersen. Centre for Manuscripts & Rare Books, The

  Royal Library Copenhagen

  Page 216: Detail from An Evening at the Royal Theatre,

  Copenhagen, 1888, by Paul Fischer. © Sotheby’s/akg-

  images

  Page 262: Detail from Portrait of a Little Girl, Elise Købke,

  with a Cup in Front of Her, 1850, by Constantin Hansen.

  National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen/© SMK Photo

  Page 328: © 2014 Scala, Florence/BPK, Berlin

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/8/2014, SPi

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi

  General Introduction

  The Danes have been telling stories for a very long time. In

  the magnificent National Museum in Copenhagen you

  find yourself surrounded by the stuff of myth and magic

  and history. Take one story, poetic as well as eerily logical,

  which comes down to us from around 1500 BC. Archae-

  ologists have pieced it together with evidence from abun-

  dant carvings and images of the Sun Ship.

  It is the story of the journey of the Sun around the

  Earth. At sunrise, fish pull the Sun up over the horizon out

  of the night ship into the morning ship; they swim along

  with it for a while before being consumed by birds of prey;

  then the Sun horse takes over the task of pulling the Sun

  on to the afternoon ship; later the snake takes his turn and

  hides the Sun in his coils before submerging him once

  again in the night of the ocean.

  Another story you will encounter in the National

  Museum is not myth but history. One summer day in

  around 1370 BC the corpse of a slender girl of about seven-

  teen, now known as the Egtved Girl, with short blond hair

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi

  2 n General Introduction

  and wearing a short blouse and a cord skirt, was buried in a

  coffin. She wore a belt with bronze decorations, and had a

  thin ring at her ear; in a bark bucket was a mixture of beer

  and wine made from wheat and cranberries. Also found

  with her were the half-cremated bones of a five-year-old

  child. Before the lid was closed, someone placed on the edge

  of her coffin a small yarrow flower.

  Who was she? Why and how did she die? What is the

  significance of the yarrow? Who was the child and why

  was it buried with her in the same grave? This is Danish

  noir, Bronze Age-style.

  Besides the National Museum, visitors to Copenhagen

  will probably make for the most recognizable emblem of

  the city—the Little Mermaid, whose story, which will

  not be found in this collection, is recounted in the tale b
y

  Hans Christian Andersen. The mermaid fell in love, so the

  story goes, with a seafaring prince and, by means of sorcery,

  exchanged her tail for a pair of legs. This much-photographed

  statue sits in the harbour on rocks close to the shore by the

  fortress of Kastellet, where, if she were to turn her head,

  she would see factories and warehouses across the water,

  rather than the marvellous fronds and forests of the deep

  as in Andersen’s story. Hans Andersen is represented in

  this volume by two short fairy-tales, ‘The Water Drop’ and

  ‘The Naughty Boy’, which will probably be much less

  familiar to English readers.

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi

  General Introduction n 3

  That the Danes are still great storytellers is evident to

  all from the phenomenal international success of some recent

  Danish TV thriller series. The Killing and the Danish-

  Swedish co-production The Bridge, or the hard-hitting

  political drama Borgen, all set in Copenhagen, have kept

  millions enthralled, taking us deep into a city and a milieu

  with which few were familiar. Now, with this generous

  selection of Copenhagen tales dating from the early nine-

  teenth century to the present day, readers can discover for

  themselves from what a rich literary tradition this native

  storytelling genius springs. For sheer mesmerising writing

  read Karen Blixen’s ‘Conversation One Night in Copenha-

  gen’ or Benny Andersen’s ‘The Trousers’; for perfect con-

  trol of their touching material try Tove Ditlevsen’s ‘Eggnog’

  or Dan Turèll’s ‘Willadsen’; for the evocation of a memo-

  rable character read Meïr Goldschmidt’s ‘Nightingale’ or

  Bjarne Reuter’s ‘A Tricky Moment’ or Jakob Ejersbo’s ‘The

  Bra’. Those who thirst for the excitement of Scandi noir will

  not be disappointed either: Naja Marie Aidt’s ‘As the

  Angels Fly’ does not spare the reader the city’s seamy side.

  Modern life in the capital, whether tragic or exhilarating,

  funny or passionate, is amply represented.

  Despite Denmark being one of our closest neighbours,

  and despite its markedly Anglophile population, most of

  whom speak excellent English, ‘wonderful’ Copenhagen re-

  mains relatively unexplored by British visitors. Fortunately,

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi

  4 n General Introduction

  and most especially for an outsider, there is no better route to

  understanding the deepest nature of a city than through the

  literature and art it has generated. This selection of short

  fiction, put together and translated by a Copenhagener born

  and bred, goes a long way toward that.

  Readers will find, as always in this series, evocative photo-

  graphs accompanying each story, notes on the authors and

  their texts, and a map at the back marking many of the

  locations brought to life in the tales.

  God læsning! Happy reading!

  Helen Constantine

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi

  Introduction

  ‘Copenhagen contains within it everything which in other

  countries is distributed amongst several other cities. It is

  the capital and the seat of the sovereign and his govern-

  ment, the country’s most important commercial centre

  and the main fortress of the land; here is the one university

  serving two kingdoms; here is the fleet and naval arsenal;

  all significant manufacturers and factories are concen-

  trated here; here is the Academy of Fine Art and the

  theatre; in other words, everything that is curious and

  interesting in Denmark can be found in Copenhagen.’*

  These are the opening words of the first comprehensive

  guide to Copenhagen, written just over 200 years ago by

  Rasmus Nyerup, a great bibliophile and irrepressible enthu-

  siast of the city. Of course all Danes who are not Copenha-

  geners will rightly dispute his concluding claim, yet it

  remains the case that Copenhagen is still the only big city

  in Denmark (and surely the liveliest and most beautiful in

  * Kjøbenhavns Beskrivelser, Copenhagen 1800.

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi

  6 n Introduction

  all Scandinavia) and still very much the heart and soul of the

  country’s commercial, political, and cultural life. To reflect

  this continuity, these tales by some of our finest writers of

  the past two hundred years are loosely grouped according to

  Nyerup’s broad categories, opening with stories of political

  and social import (1–4), followed by three exploring ques-

  tions of work and class, while those touching on the city’s

  cultural life and its role as ‘seat of the sovereign’ and ‘main

  fortress of the land’ compose the last four. ‘Curious and

  interesting’ might apply to all these stories, but I attach it

  in particular to the longer sequence of six tales (9–14)

  presided over by Cupid, or Eros, Hans Christian Andersen’s

  ‘Naughty Boy’.

  Nyerup’s encomium to the city was written at the very

  start of what has come to be called Denmark’s ‘Golden

  Age’ (see ‘Amelie’s Eyes’), an era of exceptional brilliance

  in the arts and sciences roughly coinciding with the first

  half of the nineteenth century, the same century that under

  the pressure of intensive urbanization would see the city

  grow from small capital of a small state into a modern

  metropolis.

  Until 1851 the rapidly expanding population was still

  confined within the ancient ramparts (volden), and this is

  the ‘big city’ packed with cannibalistic ‘creepy crawlies’

  which the disgusted trolls examine through their magnify-

  ing glass in ‘The Water Drop’, a typically ironic tale by

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi

  Introduction n 7

  Hans Christian Andersen which opens the collection.

  Through their own lenses most authors in this anthology

  find plenty to corroborate the two old trolls’ impression

  in later generations. Copenhagen, like almost any other

  modern city, turns out to have a population and culture

  divided by inequalities of income and expectation, trivia-

  lized by the conformities of consumerism and the media,

  menaced by the desolations of drug and alcohol abuse and

  pornography—and on top of that cursed with a political

  class remote from its electorate. The sole tale by an out-

  sider, Eugen Kluev’s ‘To Catch a Dane’, makes bitter fun of

  the prejudice which immigrants often meet with in today’s

  Denmark.

  But, redirected at other corners of the city, and into

  other hearts, the various authorial magnifying glasses dis-

  cover enough decent individuals or innocents struggling to

  live their lives against the worst trends of their times, or

  within themselves. In short, not all in the creepy-crawly

  city are creeps like Kierkegaard’s seducer closing in on his

  next victim on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Frede
riksberg

  Gardens, let alone the horrific ‘Creepy’ in Naja Marie

  Aidt’s tale. Besides, as the reader will discover from the

  very first, a rich vein of humour runs through nearly all

  these stories. Perhaps, for the inhabitants of a small coun-

  try surrounded by mighty neighbours who with depressing

  regularity have defeated it in wars and football and much

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi

  8 n Introduction

  else, a sense of humour is a matter of necessity. As well as

  great writers, Denmark has produced some very great

  caricaturists.

  A further positive is that Copenhageners live in a very

  beautiful city, at least in its old centre. Even in his very

  dark tale of political betrayal in the aftermath of an

  attempt on the life of the deeply unpopular conservative

  Prime Minister Estrup in 1885, Henrik Pontoppidan is

  unable to resist giving an awed description of the sea

  approach to the city of memorable spires. With less lyri-

  cism but comparable accuracy, other stories take us

  deep into the working class districts of Vesterbro, formerly

  the main slum area (‘Eggnog’), and Nørrebro with its lively

  new immigrant quarter so different to opulent but dull

  suburbia (‘To Catch a Dane’), leafy middle-class Freder-

  iksberg (‘The Bra’), the vast dock area (‘The Trousers’), the

  trendy bars and cafés of the centre (‘Is There Life after Love?’) and chic Bredgade, the city’s most elegant eighteenth-century

  street, with its art galleries and auction houses (‘Amelie’s

  Eyes’).*

  Besides a wide variety of subject matter, epoch, and

  voice, there is variety in the short story form itself, ranging

  from Katrine Marie Guldager’s subtle minimalism to the

  * Danish vej, gade, stræde = road, street, alley; plads = square; torv = marketplace; borg = castle, palace (cf.‘Borgen’ for the parliament building Christiansborg, in Tale 3); have = gardens, park; bro = bridge.

  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/8/2014, SPi

  Introduction n 9

  more expansive art of great practitioners like Benny

  Andersen, Anders Bodelsen, and Bjarne Reuter, and the

  striking experiments of their younger contemporaries Jan

  Sonnergaard, Naja Marie Aidt, and the late, very talented

  Jakob Ejersbo. As opportunities for total immersion,

  I have included two longer tales by two of the city’s very