Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, in a 1972 photo, four years before her suicide.Scanpix Ritzau / TopFoto
"Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you cannot escape it without help." With this amazing phrase, which could well be part of the first verses of a poem, one of the chapters of the book
Infancia
begins
,
the first volume of the
Copenhagen Trilogy,
a kind of memoir by Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen that was originally published separately: the first two volumes,
Infancia
y
Juventud,
in 1967, and the third,
Dependencia,
in 1971. In Spain, with good judgment, Seix Barral offers it to us in a single volume. Continuous reading of the three booklets helps to understand the flow of a complex life.
This book comes to my hands from a stranger to Spanish readers; Mesmerized from the first pages by a prose between stark and ironic, synthetic, beautiful in its lack of rhetoric, I begin to inquire who this singular writer was born in a working-class neighborhood of Copenhagen, Vesterbro, in 1917. For the Danes there is no mystery: Ditlevsen is one of its most popular literary figures, especially as a poet. His verses live in the collective memory thanks to the fact that many of his poems were converted into songs considered and part of the popular heritage. The poet Ditlevsen is a true creature of the people, daughter of Ditlev, a worker with deep socialist convictions who once dreamed of being a writer, and of Alfrida,A woman who takes out the frustrations that a miserable life causes her by imparting to her daughter an education free of sentimentality, with the determined desire to strengthen the girl in the face of a life in which you have to wake up so that they do not trample you. Tove grows up knowing that she won't be able to attend high school and that she will have to find a boyfriend to support her in order to secure a home. But this lanky girl, absorbed and detached from the rudeness of the neighborhood, has written verses since she was eight years old that no one teaches, because she has heard her father affirm that girls cannot be poets. The fear of the mockery that the literary vocation can provoke leads her to fable in secret and the desire grows in her to find the person who will help her pursue her dream. These childhood experiences inspire again and again the work of Ditlevsen,making him return in many of his stories and poems to those streets from which he always thought to escape.
The second volume,
Youth
, begins with Hitler's rise to power; the echo of what is happening in Europe appears in the background, with the inescapable presence of the occupation, although not in the foreground. Tove Ditlevsen is not a political character in the strict sense, his penetrating intelligence is so directed to win a future, as his mother has instilled in him, in climbing even that step that avoids misery, that his presence in the political avatar seems to us as that of a sleepwalker. Young Tove would find in an old Jewish bibliophile, Mr. Krogh, the first person to regard her as a writer, allowing her to rummage through her crowded library and believing her capable of ambitioning a literary future. One day, when he goes to see his old friend, he discovers to his amazement that the house where he lives has been demolished. Will not see it again,but a strange advice will resonate in his memory: people always want something from each other, there is no such thing as disinterested friendship.
Tove is placed in precarious jobs, reluctantly fulfilling her obligation to bring money home, and dreams of being independent. Suffering that ungrateful life, she meets young dreamers like her, who write, chat, drink, dance, approach the bohemian life. He publishes his first verses in an alternative magazine and marries the editor, Viggo F. Moller. Although he rises socially, he will never be able to get rid of a permanent dissatisfaction that backs up his way of being.
It is unprecedented that in all the biographies that give an account of Ditlevsen's life, it is remembered that he was married and divorced four times, as if that added attraction to his literary work. The truth is that these memories are full of sentimental swings, but we could not describe her as a passionate woman, not even with the children she is raising. In the third book,
Dependency
, he gives an account of his strange relationship with a deranged doctor who gives him demerol to ease the pains of an abortion and who ends up becoming a husband and a drug dealer. Despite ending that pathological relationship, she will never completely free herself from her dependence on addictive substances, which will drive her to suicide in 1976.
Ditlevsen's literature had traveled little, condemning her to be a local writer, but in recent times there has been a miraculous rediscovery. The publication in Penguin Classics has unleashed a series of enthusiastic reviews that have also shaken the canon of his own country, in which Karen Blixen was the only woman who inhabited the literary Olympus. Although she was always loved by the public, she had not garnered critical acclaim. Tove Ditlevsen is a writer raised in poverty and the awareness of that origin permeates all her work. The old neighborhood, Vesterbro, is today a sophisticated place, far removed from the misery in which she grew up, but every corner recalls this author of musical and expressive verses.Danish public television is preparing a series with these memories and they are reissued from a pragmatic love affair that he published in the press to his children's stories. There is no doubt that the recognition of his talent has involved the interest of women to shake the foundations of a fundamentally masculine canon.
After reading these hypnotic memories, sometimes macabre, ironic, painfully true, one remains trapped for days in the
Ditlevsen universe.
In fair correspondence, I would not like you to pass through our country without the glory it deserves.
Copenhagen Trilogy
Author:
Tove Ditlevsen.
Translation by Blanca Ortiz Ostalé.
Publisher:
Seix Barral, 2021.
Format:
432 pages.
21.50 euros.
Buy for € 20.42 on Amazon
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