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.
At the time I was 32, divorced, and working for an airline in Seattle. It was a job that I was glad to get after being unable to find a teaching position in my chosen field of Scandinavian literature. I’d spent 1979 in Copenhagen working on a never-completed dissertation about forgotten Danish women authors of the 19th century, and had several articles printed in Danish and Swedish feminist journals. But when I returned to the States, there were no openings at the few universities that offered Scandinavian Studies, so I did what we all do to pay the bills—I took whatever work I could find, which meant waitressing at two different restaurants. Months later, I was finally hired by the Seattle Visitor’s Bureau to supervise a program that provided interpreters to meet international flights arriving at the airport, and after that I joined the passenger service staff of Scandinavian Airlines in Seattle. I was happy to be using my Nordic language skills, and it was a good (but exhausting) experience for an introvert like me to deal with several hundred (frequently stressed-out) people every day. But my heart was still longing for a life in literature.
So, I started translating Danish short stories in my spare time. I was drawn to contemporary authors such as Villy Sørensen and Peter Seeberg, who wrote strange tales in an experimental style—but it was the work of Tove Ditlevsen that I found most compelling.
I had known about her ever since 1976, when I happened to be in Copenhagen and watched reports of her funeral on the local TV news; I was especially struck by the crowd of women waiting outside the church to say goodbye to this writer who had meant so much to them. Over the years, I bought copies of Ditlevsen’s books in antiquarian bookshops in Denmark, and I began reading her poems and stories. I liked her ironic sense of humor. I liked the way she focused on the daily lives of ordinary women. I liked her direct style and unsentimental attitude. And above all, I admired her honesty. When I read her memoirs in 1982, I fell in love with this young, working-class girl who wanted so much to be a poet, in spite of everyone and everything standing in her way. I wanted my friends to get to know her too, so I decided to try my hand at translating Childhood. It was not an easy task.
Ditlevsen’s writing style appears to be quite simple and unembellished, although she has a great talent for using similes and metaphors that are both vivid and unforgettable: “Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.” But it’s not just the specific words that demand a translator’s careful attention; the tone, or the music, of the original text is equally important. In Childhood, I could hear an underlying wistfulness and longing in Ditlevsen’s voice whenever she wrote about her family, especially her mother—but she can also be very funny in a blunt and sardonic way. The lack of paragraph breaks gives a breathless quality to some of the passages in which she rapidly (and without mercy) describes the adults who both attract and repel her, and the girls her own age whose interests and dreams she doesn’t share. I worked hard on the translation, typing the manuscript three times on my electric typewriter.
Translating Childhood was a labor of love, something I did in my spare time without any real thought of sending it out into the world. But I’d heard about a translation contest sponsored by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and I decided to send in an excerpt from Childhood. While I was waiting for the outcome of the contest, I happened to be invited to a party at a friend’s house; there I met Barbara Wilson, the co-founder of a small feminist literary press. I told her about the amazing memoir of a Danish author that I’d been translating, and much to my surprise, she asked to see the manuscript. I sent her my translation, and three days later I was even more stunned when she called to say that she and her colleagues at Seal Press wanted to publish not only Childhood but also Youth in my English translation. And they would be issued together—as they had been in Danish—under the title Early Spring (Det tidlige forår). It would be part of their Women in Translation series. I was ecstatic.
But that was only the start of a convergence of events that eventually led me to the literary life that I had wanted for so long. And it was all thanks to Tove Ditlevsen.
In August of 1984, I took a day off from work to attend a conference on Scandinavian literature at the University of Washington. I knew that Barbara was scheduled to be on a panel about publishing the work of Nordic authors, which at the time (two decades before the Nordic Noir craze) was neither a profitable nor a very popular endeavor. I was eager to support my new-found publisher, so I went to hear Barbara speak. Joining her on the panel was translator and editor Steven T. Murray, who had started another small literary publishing company: Fjord Press in Berkeley, which specialized in English translations of books from northern Europe. Fjord’s first publication had been a collection of poems by the Finland-Swedish author Edith Södergran, translated from Swedish by Stina Katchadourian.
After the panel was over, I introduced myself to Steve and told him with bold confidence that I was a translator, and that I had a book forthcoming from Seal Press. We continued our conversation over lunch and discovered that we both spoke fluent Danish, we had both lived in Denmark, and we had read many of the same contemporary authors. A year later, we celebrated our marriage in Copenhagen. As an homage to the author who had brought us together, we went to see the apartment building in Vesterbro where Tove had lived as a child. There is a photograph of me standing in the back courtyard, which was just as dreary as Tove describes it, with the wall of the front building “crying as if has just rained.” Despite this backdrop, I felt both awe and gratitude to be in a place that had such a tangible connection to her work.
For nearly twenty years, Steve and I ran Fjord Press in our free time and published books by many Scandinavian authors, including my 1991 translation of Tove Ditlevsen’s The Faces (Ansigterne)—an extraordinary (and terrifying) novel that depicts from the inside the escalating mental illness of a children’s book author.
When Early Spring was published in 1985 by Seal Press in the US, and a year later by The Women’s Press in London, it received numerous favorable reviews, especially in feminist publications. The poet Linda Pasten called it a “haunting, perceptive book, full of pain and intelligence.” The author Tillie Olsen described it as “a poet’s book, written with immediacy and radiance” by “one of the most important writers of her generation.” Yet, it wasn’t long before Ditlevsen’s books in English faded from view, and eventually went out of print. The rights to my translations then reverted to me.
In 2018, I was both astonished and thrilled to learn that Penguin Classics in the UK wanted to reissue Childhood and Youth, along with their publication of Michael Favala Goldman’s recently completed and beautifully sensitive translation of Tove Ditlevsen’s third memoir, Dependency (Gift). Together they formed The Copenhagen Trilogy, which instantly received rave reviews and continues to do so with the American edition from FSG. I’m grateful to Michael for bringing his translation to the attention of the Danish and British publishers so that at long last the great Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen is finding the worldwide audience that she deserves.
My connection to Tove’s work has a long history. We share a love for words and an unwavering desire to write. The “miracle” of Tove’s first book of poetry set her on a literary path that sustained her through some of the most harrowing experiences imaginable, and it was her memoirs Childhood and Youth that opened the way for my own life as a writer and literary translator. For that, I can’t thank Tove enough.
Tiina Nunnally has translated nearly a hundred works from Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Her many awards include an NEA Translation Fellowship, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the PEN/Book-of-the-Month translation prize. In 2013 she was appointed Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for her efforts on behalf of Norwegian literature abroad. She is also the author of three published novels and a book of poetry. Her most recent translations are the four volumes of Sigrid Undset’s medieval epic Olav Audunssøn (Vows, Providence, Crossroads, Winter) published by the University of Minnesota Press.