Life in another language

Literary Review, Fall, 2003 by Thomas E. Kennedy

The Danish language is not one that you would be likely to study without good reason: James Joyce, for example, studied Danish to be able to read Ibsen in the original. * My own Danish is far from perfect. When I was interviewed in the Danish daily, Politiken, last year, the otherwise very kind journalist, who generously praised my writing, could not resist poking fun at my accent. One of the banes of my existence as a writer in Denmark is that I have great difficulty getting my mouth around the Danish plural for books--the singular is no problem, but the plural comes out--in English equivalent--something like "boks," and my Politiken interviewer could not resist an orthographic spelling when I spoke about my "boks."

Friendly teasing. In fact, in all my time here, people have seldom commented on my accent, other than occasionally to call it "charming" (though of course in the world of Danish irony, one might consider what that means). Perhaps four times in nearly thirty years people have mocked my accent, and only once in a truly nasty manner.

I was interviewed in Danish by two Danish TV channels in connection with the publication of my first Copenhagen novel, in each case a five-minute spot which took many hours to produce since I was interviewed on location against a variety of the city's backgrounds. In both cases, the interviewer at the end of production confided apologetically that the station might decide to use subtitles as they occasionally do when someone with a heavy Danish dialect speaks on the channel. They were afraid the viewers at home might not be able to understand my Danish so, to assist them, the words might appear simultaneously in print beneath the picture. "We do it for Swedes," the journalist said consolingly (Swedish and Danish are very close linguistic cousins). This inspired a series of interesting emotions--that after all these years here, my Danish might seem so utterly foreign to the native-speakers that I might as well be speaking some impenetrable dialect. A thought that can make a person feel lonely, like Tony the fruitman of the literary world. That in the end they chose to let my Danish run raw was a relief--though perhaps akin to passing an important exam by the skin of the teeth.

But it also helped to inform my writing of the novel Greene's Summer about Bernardo Greene, a Chilean refugee who in his homeland was tortured because his teaching curriculum included the work of a poet who had been executed for verse deemed revolutionary in championing the poor. Deprived of the daily use of his mother tongue, Bernardo must revert to a choice between broken Danish and broken English. In the language school he attends to learn Danish, he meets other refugees, from Palestine and Israel, who can speak four or five languages, but none with mastery. They have no mother tongue--a prospect which terrifies Nardo for he recognizes--as did Balboa exploring the new world--"Por no saber paner los nombres, no las expresos": Because I do not know the names of things, I cannot express them.