I’m thrilled to announce that a short story by Tove Ditlevsen, titled “The Umbrella,” was published in this week’s edition of The New Yorker (Online and print, October 25, 2021). I translated this story from the Danish as part of a collection of her stories, “The Trouble With Happiness,” which comes out in March 2022.
The New Yorker is very thorough in their process and there was a lot of back and forth as they checked all the details. Part of the process of getting the story published was an interview with Deborah Treisman, who asked me questions about working with Danish literature, translating Ditlevsen, and the significance of her body of work.
Here is an excerpt from the interview:
Ditlevsen, who died in 1976, has long been considered an important figure in Denmark. Why do you think she wasn’t prominently translated into English sooner?
Actually, about thirty years ago, the first two volumes of “The Copenhagen Trilogy”—“Childhood” and “Youth”—were published by Seal Press, and the Ditlevsen novel “The Faces” was published by Fjord Press, all to great reviews, after being translated by Tiina Nunnally. But these were small presses, and the books went out of print. I think it was a stroke of genius on the part of Penguin Classics to publish Ditlevsen’s three memoirs together, which had never been done before. Given the opioid epidemic in the U.S., “Dependency” was a clincher in the series, and the relevance and skill of Ditlevsen’s writing cannot be ignored. It boggles my mind that no translator or publisher made this happen before now.
Do you think that this story, “The Umbrella,” is representative of Ditlevsen’s fiction?
Tove Ditlevsen knows how to read a room. I feel she is so precise about revealing the masks that we adults wear—pride, powerlessness, for example—to cover up our immaturity. Ditlevsen’s fiction tends to be realistic and heavy, with no happy endings. So, yes, “The Umbrella” fits this description.