Yesterday at about dawn Arne's sister, Lise, and her family flew away from Denmark. We stood out on the grass waving as the plane flew overhead, but I don't think they saw us, and then we spent a good part of yesterday moping around the house. It was a fortuitous coincidence that Arne and Lise had sabbatical years at the same time, and it was perhaps not so much a coincidence, but certainly fortuitous, that Arne's and Lise's studies brought them both to Denmark.
Here we are (plus our niece Karin and minus me, the photographer; notice the sign)
Lise has been translating the square stories of Louis Jensen, a Danish writer who lives in Århus. Jensen was born in 1943 and trained as an architect and then began writing stories for children. He's also written for adults. Jensen has won the two big awards for children's writing in Scandinavia, the H.C. Andersen award and the Astrid Lindgren award. He is little known in the U.S., but Lise is about to change that! How lucky we will all be when we can enter Jensen's wacky world.
One of Jensen's current projects is to write 1001 square stories. Each story is just a few sentences, arranged on the page in the shape of a square, and in the world of these stories anything can happen. An umbrella dances, a book decides to get married, a mouth decides to stop talking.
On Wednesday this past week I had the good fortune to be included (thank you, Lise) in a roundtable at the Children's Literature Library where Lise talked about the work of translating Jensen and then Louis Jensen himself entertained questions. I was a good listener, even when it was all in Danish! (We also enjoyed a spread of the most delicious smørrebrød I've ever had, and then rich dark coffee with chocolate.) Jensen is an impish fellow who, given the opportunity, will talk and talk, his answer to a question unwinding in joyous directions. The six other women around the table included two Ph.D. candidates, one from Germany, and the director of the library, all six of them smart and funny and completely absorbed in the conversation.
Lise spoke eloquently about the challenges of translating from Danish to English, about the traditions that have informed Jensen's writing, and about the current state of children's lit scholarship. It was a special treat for me to see her at work. Jensen surely must know just how lucky he is to have Lise as his representative in the U.S.
Then on Thursday, the eight of us went to Corona La Balance, a children's theatre company in Copenhagen, to see a production of some of Jensen's square stories. Fortuitous coincidence?
Here's how the production works. When we entered the theater we were given a ticket with a number on it. Each ticket also had a little picture. The two actors put their half of the tickets into a box and the box then went into drawer #50, one drawer in a big cabinet of 100 drawers of all sizes and shapes. That cabinet was the set. The actors would then select a number from the box in drawer #50 and the person in the audience with that number would tell what the picture showed.
Okay, so imagine the eight of us with our little pictures. Not one of us is completely fluent in Danish, and some of us have almost no Danish at all. So we had a little scramble trying to figure out the words for our pictures. Anika's picture was a fan. Quick, what's the word in Danish for “fan”? Lise asked her neighbor. It's “vifte.” Kaj's picture showed a man with an ear horn and Axel's showed some of the heads from Easter Island. What do the Danes call Easter Island? No one knew. What's an ear horn? Who knows--we just made up an English phrase for what was on the picture. Never mind the Danish word or phrase! Needless to say, whenever the actors pulled a number from the box, some of us were chanting silently that the number not be ours!
So the performance was in Danish. Otto said he understood 90% of it, which is a sign of how far he's come with the language since August. I understood very little, but it didn't keep me from enjoying the show. The two actors were physically and emotionally energetic and creative and they brought the stories to life for us in wild and funny and sad ways.
Here is one of
Jensen's stories, translated by Lise. Enjoy!
A seventieth time there was a monkey called Peter Madsen who lived in a foreign land, where the trees grew upside down in the nighttime and the fish swam through the air in the daytime, and the ducks turned into dogs when it rained. And when the sun shone (which it did for one minute every other day), all the flowers sang in Danish. But since everyone kept a good attitude, everything went along fine. Hah!
The Danes say that if Christmas is green, then Easter will be white. On this white Easter holiday we made our own fun.
While the snow fell outside, Anika, Otto, Kaj (our nephew), and I played exquisite corpse. Rule number one of the game is to write a couple lines of a story or poem, then fold back some of what you've written and pass the sheet. We played the game twice. On the first round, our second rule was that you had to use one word from the previous person's exposed line. On the second round, we all wrote favorite words on sheets of paper and then picked one word and incorporated it in our next line. Some of those favorite words: koala, befuddled, fandango, mirage, titillated, verily.
Arne listened in on the game and gave us the two titles: “Garbage Disposal” and “Jealousy.” Here are three of the crazy results.
Garbage Disposal
The monkey pondered the addition of a garbage disposal
to its cage. The way it glinted in the sun, the
green, ugly, muddy paint covering the surface of the
sun-tainted edges. Phew!! I said, as I walked by
my tainted darling
my sunstruck peach of a darling
licked peach juice off her sticky hands
and purred like a well-oiled motor
oiled like the back of a fat American tourist in a Swedish spa
still suffering from jet lag, and thinking he shouldn't have eaten
that fifth bad of bacon crisps.
Jealousy
It's a mirage, they said, but still I felt pangs of jealousy for the
people lounging under palm trees in the land of the Rhinoceroses.
What we didn't know was that the people were imagining
all of the stars doing the fandango.
To our eyes though, the stars seemed mere pigeons
flopping about
under gargantuous baobab trees
where the titillated daughters hid their painted faces.
Had they not botched the paint job,
they would be able to show their faces. Verily!
What if they disturbed the koalas?
What if they became utterly befuddled?
Jealousy
High school is a knowledge mirage.
We just want the rhinoceros of an education that is college.
We want them to be able to dance the fandango
and have the same opportunities as any pigeon.
But the lumbering, gargantuous land animals did not have
those titillated places to go to . . .
the Ministry of Destinations had botched the signage
so verily did the lumbering animals wander over hill
and dale as though in a fog of forgetfulness.
Only the koala stood, penetrating the fog with her pointed titties
completely not befuddled like the rest,
but totally jealous.
In the public library in Roskilde, there's a big display case of brochures of “vandreturs”, wandering tours, around Denmark. These brochures, put out by the Ministry of the Environment, contain maps of natural areas with walking and biking paths and text about natural and cultural highlights along the way. Some of these wandering tours are in forests or along the coastline, while others cut along farmlands and wetlands. Often the tours take you onto private property, but here in Denmark, some private land is made public for the general enjoyment of birders and nature lovers.
Arne, Otto, Axel (our nephew), and I enjoyed a wandering tour in an area just south of Roskilde called Ramsødalen. We parked on a residential street in Gadstrup and walked two blocks to the trailhead. So we enjoyed a good four hours walking through the dale with pretty modest hills and a very modest creek but a big wetland teeming with birdlife. We neglected to take our bird guidebook, but we did take the binoculars. We saw coots and mallards, goosanders and other mergansers, a couple grey herons, warblers, a hawk (not sure what kind) and a kestrel, and one oystercatcher, and many other birds. We climbed up into a bird tower (fugletårns are pretty common on the landscape) and had a sweet view over the wetland.
And there were a few moments of excitement along the way for Otto who had too-close encounters with an electric fence and a big mud puddle.
Enjoy the pictures!
The Danish government is set to erect a slew of new wind turbines and they'd like to put them where there's the most wind. Unfortunately local governments are balking at this; they feel the turbines should be spread evenly around the country. Residents have two complaints about the turbines: they're noisy and they cast shadows.
I'm mentioning this because it gets at two things you notice about the Danes almost right away. They are very quiet people and they love light.
Well, who wouldn't love light when it's in short supply for such a long time? In December the sun barely reached over the rise of dirt and gravel between the back of our house and the former gravel pit turned wilderness. In Morris the sun reaches up toward the zenith of the sky throughout the year, but here it's shy in the winter. So the Danes have found a variety of ways to capture and enjoy light.
For one thing the architecture here features lots of windows and lots of sky lights. Public buildings incorporate rooflines that face north at steep angles and feature sky lights and so they not only bring in as much light as possible but they also help lower energy usage. In private homes it is not unusual to see living rooms with two whole walls of windows, sometimes floor to ceiling glass, and for other community rooms, the kitchen and dining room, to be dominated by windows. You never see curtains or shades drawn during the day and even at night it is common to see windows completely uncovered, revealing the lighted rooms within.
And in those long winter evenings, candles provide a reminder of what's to come. The candle section in every grocery store is big. Right now, in readiness for Easter, there's new inventory of bright yellow and green candles.
Houses and apartments have patios and porches and gazebos or other spots to enjoy the outdoors. As so as the weather warms up here, everyone will spiff up their outdoor furniture and soon all the Danes will be enjoying meals outdoors, under umbrellas or in the full light of the sun. That first meal outdoors, in April or early May, is one of those deeply anticipated moments here. Crocuses, fine, apple blossoms, okay, but fellowship outdoors--now that is something else entirely!
But it will be quiet fellowship, nothing that would intrude on the outdoors pleasures of the neighbors. Everywhere you go, Danes are being quiet together. Most stores have no music on a PA system, you rarely hear cars with speaker systems blaring, people on trains speak to one another in low voices. I once saw a rider on a train get up and go a few seats back to ask a couple women to be quiet, please. The “noisy” women were speaking in normal tones, not laughing out, not being obtrusive in any way. They would have been utterly normal on a train or bus in Minnesota. They lowered their voices politely.
Who knows, maybe the shy winter sun has set an example for the Danes: enough but not too much, why advertise yourselves?
At any rate, living in the shadow of a turbine, with its whirring drone in the background, is pretty much intolerable to the Danish sensibility. Yes, turbines are good, everyone agrees, but enough is enough.
