Copenhagen Tales
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Copenhagen Tales
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Copenhagen
Tales
Stories selected
and translated by
Lotte Shankland
Edited by
Helen Constantine
1
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3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
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# General Introduction Helen Constantine 2014
# Introduction, Selection, and Notes Lotte Shankland 2014
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First Edition published in 2014
Impression: 1
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014936758
ISBN 978–0–19–968911–8
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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,
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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