| Two Women on a Wharf, 1949 by Willem de Kooning |
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The final volume in the renowned Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen's autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy (A masterpiece --The Guardian).
Following Childhood and Youth, Dependency is the searing portrait of a woman's journey through love, friendship, ambition, and addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth century writers
The acclaimed Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen's autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy (A masterpiece --The Guardian) continues with Youth. Following Childhood, this second volume finds the young author consumed in trials by fire that only fuel her relentless passion for artistic freedom--placing her on a devastating and destructive path recounted in the final volume, Dependency.
The celebrated Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen begins the Copenhagen Trilogy (A masterpiece --The Guardian) with Childhood, her coming-of-age memoir about pursuing a life and a passion beyond the confines of her upbringing--and into the difficult years described in Youth and Dependency
| Facing demons … Tove Ditlevsen. Photograph: Per Pejstrup |
FICTION IN TRANSLATION
The Danish writer reflects on success, addiction and divorces in three volumes of compulsive autofiction: Childhood, Youth and Dependency
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It was the Danish writer Dorthe Nors who first introduced me to the work of her countrywoman, the poet, novelist, and memoirist Tove Ditlevsen. This was in spring 2018, when I was commissioning features for the first issue of The Second Shelf: Rare Books and Words by Women, the rare books catalogue–cum–literary magazine of which I’m the managing editor. “She is loved by generations of women and put down by generations of men,” Nors wrote in an email. “She was also nuts and quite extraordinary in her personal life. Many men, drug addictions, often submitted to mental institutions, and LOVED by women readers. I mean: LOVED!”
FSG’S FORTHCOMING EDITION OF THE COPENHAGEN TRILOGY.
This was more than enough to intrigue me, but Nors’s finished piece, “The Suicide of Tove Ditlevsen,” only left me all the more fascinated. In it, Nors describes Ditlevsen—who was born in Vesterbro, a working-class district in Copenhagen, in 1917, and killed herself at age fifty-eight in 1976, after many years battling depression and addiction—as “the Billie Holiday of poetry, accessible, complex, and simple all at the same time. There’s a special mournful sweetness in the earlier poems that belongs to the girlish. Later, her prose turned the dreams and disappointments of life as a woman inside out.”
| Tove Ditlevsen |
John Powers
February 3, 2021
We're living in a golden age for women's writing. The wheels of literary justice are finally giving due process to great women writers whose work has been forgotten, ignored or insufficiently appreciated.
| Tove Ditlevsen |
In 1937 Tove Ditlevsen first had a poem published. The poem can be read as an allegory of her writing career, which was to produce one of the most significant bodies of work written by a woman in the Danish post-war period. Underneath the extremely simple surface, the poem anticipates recurring themes such as female identity, memory, and creativity. Loss of childhood, and especially of the symbiotic relationship to the mother, is the foundation of Tove Ditlevsen’s melancholy poetics.Her writing is one long memory process, first in the form of fiction, but gradually also in essays with an autobiographical reference point and in essayistic fragments of memory, until she published her autobiographical works proper. Once the autobiographical material had been exhausted and all the key characters in her childhood universe – her mother, her father, and her brother – were dead and her husband had left her, Tove Ditlevsen ended her life as she had presaged.
Tove Ditlevsen (1917-1976) wrote poems from the age of ten; in 1937 she managed to get one of them published in Vild Hvede (Wild Wheat), a journal for young writers and artists. The title of the poem is “Til mit døde Barn” (To My Dead Child), the form is traditional, eight four-line stanzas with end-rhyme, but the content is striking: a mother talking to her dead baby boy as she lays him in the coffin.
| Tove Ditlevsen |
On this week’s episode of Well-Versed, FSG author Catherine Lacey talks withMichael Favala Goldman about translatingTove Ditlevsen’s Dependency.
From the episode:
Catherine Lacey: I have a question about the way that Tove Ditlevsen is a household name in Denmark, and yet we weren’t really aware of her here. How is she thought of in Denmark beyond just being obviously celebrated as a genius writer and an important Danish writer? Is she also thought of as a tragic figure?
| Tove Ditlevsen on her childhood street in Vesterbro, Copenhagen, circa 1950 |
February 10, 2021 • By Hannah Kofman
The Copenhagen Trilogy
TOVE DITLEVSEN
TOVE DITLEVSEN’S first novel, A Child was Harmed, was sent back from the publisher with the accusation that she had “been reading too much Freud.” But Ditlevsen says she didn’t know who Freud was, a declaration that, 200-plus pages into her three-part memoir — a clear-eyed exploration of the lifelong echoes of a traumatic childhood — seems just as unlikely coming from her as it would from Elena Ferrante or Jamaica Kincaid. Then again, maybe it’s true. Ditlevsen was born near the end of World War I, when Freud’s cultural hegemony was not yet guaranteed. She wasn’t a particularly voracious reader, and Denmark is pretty north of Austria. Surely memoir doesn’t lie.
| Tove Ditlevsen |
Don’t think yourself odd if, after reading the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen’s romantic, spiritually macabre, and ultimately devastating collection of memoirs, “The Copenhagen Trilogy” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), you spend hours, if not days, in a reverie of alienation. It’s because the author, who died by her own hand in 1976, when she was fifty-eight, makes profound and exciting art out of estrangement. Like a number of dispassionate, poetic modernists—the writers Jean Rhys and Octavia Butler, say, or the visual artists Alice Neel and Diane Arbus—Ditlevsen was marked, wounded, by her own sharp intelligence. Her world—the world she describes in “Childhood,” “Youth,” and “Dependency,” the three short books that make up the trilogy—was cash poor, emotionally mean, and misogynist. The sun must have shone sometimes in Denmark before and during the Second World War, but the atmosphere in “The Copenhagen Trilogy” is damp, dark, and flowerless. It’s not so surprising, then, that one of the first works Ditlevsen published, as a teen-ager, was a poem titled “To My Dead Child”:
Danish poet Tove Ditlevsen’s trilogy about her drug-ravaged life, published in English for the first time, is astonishing
“A
Ditlevsen was born in Vesterbro, Copenhagen, in 1917, the daughter of a fretful, socially ambitious mother and a socialist father who was fired from one job after another for his politics. Their down-at-heel neighbourhood is full of drunks, and the future for Ditlevsen is – at best – one of marriage to a “stable skilled worker”. Already, though, there were traces of the mental illness that will shipwreck her adult life, with a suffocating sense of melancholy settling over her childhood.
THE COPENHAGEN TRILOGY
Childhood, Youth, Dependency
By Tove Ditlevsen
“I know every person has their own truth,” Tove Ditlevsen writes in “Childhood,” the first volume of her beautiful and fearless memoirs. “Fortunately, things are set up so that you can keep quiet about the truths in your heart; but the cruel, gray facts are written in the school records and in the history of the world.”