In December, 2021, The Los Angeles Review accepted for publication four poems by Tove Ditlevsen that I co-translated with my colleague Cynthia Graae. Fourteen other poems have been accepted for publication by a few other journals as well. My and Cynthia’s goal is to eventually publish the first volume of Tove Ditlesven’s poetry to appear in English. The backstory to this project is unusual and follows here, in this Translator’s Note:
Upon witnessing the publicity surrounding The Copenhagen Trilogy, whose third volume, Dependency, was translated by Michael Favala Goldman, Cynthia Graae was inspired to reach out to Michael and send to him her rendering of The Adults. As part of a class she had taken over two decades ago, she had translated this poetry collection by Tove Ditlevsen, author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, into English, and it had been stowed in her desk drawer ever since. Surprised at first by this serendipitous package, Michael, an experienced poet and translator of Danish literature, reviewed Cynthia’s translation and saw the potential for a rich collaboration.
None of Tove Ditlevsen’s (1917-1976) eleven poetry collections had been translated into English, and Michael had never before seriously considered translating Ditlevsen’s poetry, because the great majority of it is written with meter and rhyme. But this collection was different. Published in Danish in 1969, Ditlevsen’s penultimate poetry collection, The Adults (De Voksne) is the only book of her poetry written entirely in free verse, and though challenging to translate, the lack of meter and rhyme makes it infinitely more approachable for a translator. Cynthia and Michael agreed to treat Cynthia’s translation as a draft, and over several months they refined the English text together via emails and video meetings.
Ditlevsen writes with a precision and brevity well-suited to her ultra-short lines, which requires unwavering precision from the translators to gauge not just the meaning of the words, but the emotional content found between the lines. Cynthia and Michael engaged in battles of synonyms in an effort to find the English words that best matched the Danish mood and timbre. They enjoyed defending their choices in discussions that continued with “and one more thought” until they reached agreement. Their differing life experiences gave a richness to their discussions, and provided a higher quality translation in collaboration than either could have achieved alone.
Ditlevsen’s short lines often refer to the phrases both preceding and following, so they had to find English phrases that could offer that same satisfying, unifying syntax. Cynthia and Michael also debated the best translations of Danish words like så (so) and engang (once) which harbor multiple meanings, especially in Ditlevsen’s spare lines. They also considered the best way to treat Danish place names and Danish cultural references like publications and buildings. They had discussions about the word og (and).
Michael brought his poetic sensitivities to the process, and in many places suggested words like windswept instead of blowing, and reeks instead of smells, which evoked the emotion in Ditlevsen’s original. Ditlevsen’s lines are short and straightforward, but their meaning can be obscure, and Cynthia brought a literary logic to deciphering them. A frequent pleasure in their collaboration was finding that a creative solution one of them had proposed “felt right” to both of them.
Ditlevsen used her impoverished upbringing, her fragile psyche, and her long-standing problems with relationships and substances to depict subtly humorous descriptions of quotidian events. Yet there is hardly a happy poem in the collection. Ditlevsen exposes the illusions behind the lengths adults go to to hide their lack of maturity when faced with inescapable life experiences, such as relationship, fear, and loss. As she writes in the final poem of the collection, “Adults 2”: “the adults are gone/and will never come home.”
Tove Ditlevsen’s astonishing insights remain relevant today, forty-five years after her death. Despite the thought-provoking pain in this collection, it is a pleasure to read. Cynthia and Michael hope their collaboration will become Ditlevsen’s first poetry collection published in English.
– Michael Favala Goldman and Cynthia Graae
About Tove Ditlevsen
Tove Ditlevsen (1917-1976) was one of the most notable Danish literary personalities of the twentieth century. She enjoyed great popularity as a writer of both poetry and prose. She used her poor upbringing, her fragile psyche, and her long-standing problems with relationships and narcotics as sources of inspiration for her writing. The result was a long list of unique, honest, uncompromising works with which countless readers have identified. Ditlevsen wrote more than 30 books, including the three memoirs of The Copenhagen Trilogy, recently published in translation by Penguin Classics and FSG.
About Cynthia Graae
Cynthia Graae’s fiction, nonfiction, and translation have been published in the Westview News, Kinder Link, The Washington Review, Paragraph, The Bridge, Canadian Women Studies: les cahiers de la femme, the Hill Rag, Humans in the Wild (a Swallow Press anthology about gun violence), and online on the HuffPost, Barren Magazine, and Maine Public websites. She is currently working on a collection of stories. She lives in New York City and Hiram, Maine.
About Michael Favala Goldman
Danish translator Michael Favala Goldman (b. 1966) is also a poet, educator and jazz clarinetist. Among his sixteen translated books are Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen, The Water Farm Trilogy by Cecil Bødker, and Something To Live Up To, Selected Poems of Benny Andersen. Goldman’s books of original poetry include Who has time for this? (2020), Slow Phoenix (2021) and Small Sovereign (2021). His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and has received rave reviews in the New York Times and The London Times. He lives in Massachusetts, USA, where he has been running poetry critique groups since 2018.