Books

Danish writing’s Gothic labyrinth of self-reflection

Paul Larkin, translator of Henrik Pontoppidan’s A Fortunate Man, on the Danish literary boom

Henrik Pontoppidan: winner of the 1917 Nobel Prize in Literature. Photograph: Getty Images

Paul Larkin
Tue Jul 19 2022 - 06:23

Pastries, beer, pleasing but lowkey interior design and a generally affable deposition are what sums up Denmark and the Danes for most people, but this is to misunderstand them completely. They are the opposite of Hygge. Or rather, they are Hygge and Anti-Hygge. Either/Or in the same psyche. Where do we think the savage irony of Søren Kierkegaard came from? – “Hang yourself, you’ll regret it. Don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret that too,” as ‘The Fork’ Kierkegaard once put it.

Do you think Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales are affable? If so, you haven’t been reading them properly. His Skyggen (The Shadow) beats Kafka hands down for existential trauma and terror. Not forgetting of course that Mr ‘to be or not to be’ split personality himself – Hamlet – is quintessentially Danish. What an irony.

There has been a renaissance of Danish literature on the world stage of late. This is best exemplified by the international success of the Tove Ditlevsen translations, mainly by my friend and colleague Michael Goldman, recently highlighted by The Irish Times among others. Now New York Review of Books (NYRB) has picked up this author’s translation of Henrik Pontoppidan’s Lykke Per (A Fortunate Man), which was originally published in 2018 by Denmark’s Museum Tusculanum Press. In fact, NYRB has also commissioned your author to translate two of Pontoppidan’s greatest short stories – Nattevagt (The Rearguard) and Isbjørnen (The White Bear).

Though generations apart, Tove Ditlevsen and Henrik Pontoppidan share Danish traits that are often missed in the international reception of Danish mores. Firstly, they are both storytellers, with narratives that have a beginning, middle and an end. Thus they are the opposite of modernists. They are also extreme realists who engage in deep psychological studies of their characters. But then, and here is the point, their characters, in turn, not only pursue deep conversations with their own selves, they also probe their readers and authors and interrogate their mindsets.

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The Danes are a labyrinth of self-reflection and reflections on those reflections. This is, of course, a general phenomenon in literature, but it is nowhere near as pronounced in world literature as it is Danish literary output. In Irish literature the self-reflective tends to the comic – Flann O’Brien, James Joyce, whereas in Denmark there is a deep, questioning negative irony at work. Elsewhere I have termed this winding stair of the psyche ‘Danish Gothic’ and Kierkegaard is of course its master.

All those pseudonymous authors, hidden motives and dark, negative irony, which – rather perversely – often feels uplifting. Or cathartic. It is edifying discourse. This is the case with A Fortunate Man, in which the hero Per Sidenius at one point tells a monstrous lie in order to serve, as he feels it in his pounding heart, a greater truth. The reader knows it isn’t true and is challenged to decide the justification, indeed the morality, for this dark ploy. But Per Sidenius is also challenging the author, because of a similar event in Pontoppidan’s own life.

Karen Blixen, we recall, is a byword for pseudonyms and second guessing. She was the Baroness Karen Blixen née Karen Christenze Dinesen, but called ‘Tanne’ by her family and ‘Tania’ by her lover. One of her other names is Isak Dinesen – Isaac means having a laugh. Below the superficial story of a frustrated love, Blixen’s own Babette’s Feast is an exploration of faith (in art) and sacrifice. Babette pins her whole life and her art as a master chef on the making of a single meal. This soul searching, existential Danish point has been missed with the widespread assumption that the tale is about the cultural differences between Catholics and Protestants. This is how deep Danes will go. Einstein embraced the Cosmos. Niels Bohr went ever inwards and split the atom.

I learned Danish almost as a child learns a language - I was only 17 when I joined the Danish merchant navy. The klang of the language entered my synapses without my even noticing that I was beginning to speak and read it. I then went to university to learn the language and its literature formally. What my profound knowledge of Danish tells me is that it is the extremely reflexive nature of the Danish language that ushers Danes into their unique psychological labyrinth. The reflexive means that the verb works back on the subject so that they are both subject and object.

An old remnant of the Nordic reflexive is found in the verb to bask – baða sik – to bathe oneself. Now imagine this construction a hundred fold and you get the idea of introspection and recurrence, with Danes endlessly reflecting, speaking to and interrogating themselves – another term for conscience – and their actions. “I am utter reflection,” Kierkegaard once said.

A Fortunate Man is often pitched as a, by turns, exhilarating then knife-edge psychological tale of a man’s inward journey of self-discovery, but it is a lot more than that. When Henrik Pontoppidan won the 1917 Nobel Prize for Literature, for amongst other works A Fortunate Man, the Nobel Committee stressed his ability to create vibrant portrayals within a huge canvas of Danish life.

Part of that Danish life is Copenhagen’s Jewish community, with which Pontoppidan was intimately acquainted. The figure of Jakobe Salomon in A Fortunate Man is one of the most extraordinary creations in late 19th and early 20th-century fiction and in some ways can be said to be the novel’s real hero. Jakobe far surpasses Anna Karenina as a character and Pontoppidan has rightly been compared with Tolstoy.

As a foretaste of the vast and gripping psychological odyssey by Pontoppidan to come, NYRB will early next year publish my translation of Martin A Hansen’s Løgneren (The Liar). It is a much slimmer volume, but charts a similar existential territory to Pontoppidan’s odyssey. Schoolteacher, and sometime parish clerk on an icebound Danish island, Johannes Lye (don’t say that name too fast), relates his life and frustrated love for one of his ex-pupils via a diary addressed to an imaginary friend – Nathan. But we begin to doubt that Johannes is telling the whole truth.

And what of this remarkable idea that a character might not be all good, but still heroic? This short novel has the extraordinary effect of imparting the slow passage of the centuries and seasons, whilst at the same time hurling the reader at breakneck speed towards a final twist and turn.

Paul Larkin’s translation of Martin A Hansen’s Løgneren (The Liar) will be published by New York Review of Books next March with Henrik Pontoppidan’s A Fortunate Man, The Rearguard and The White Bear to follow, possibly as a box set.

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