I don’t remember why I decided to read Johannes V Jensen, a Danish Nobel laureate who died in 1950, and few of whose works were translated into English. I was lucky to find two books, The Waving Rye (1958, Denmark), a posthumous collection, and The Long Journey (1924, Denmark), but his most famous work is The Fall of the King (1933, Denmark). I bought the books before I moved to Sweden, before I even knew I was going to move to Sweden… although I do have family connection to Denmark.
The Waving Rye was clearly published to generate interest in Jensen, but doesn’t appear to have been successful in that regard. He is still pretty much forgotten. When Anglophone people think of Danish classic literature, they think of Karen Blixen (AKA Isak Dinesen), or maybe Peter Høeg. Not to mention, of course, various Danish “scandi-noir” authors, such as Jussi Adler-Olsen, whose books have been translated into English, and some of whom have even been adapted for television or the cinema (both in Danish and English).
The Danish strain of Scandinavian noir is a relatively recent element of a relatively recent phenomenon. Prior to the success of Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell (both Swedes, but arguably the two authors who kickstarted the current fascination with all things Nordic and criminal), Anglophone knowledge of Danish literature was either Hans Christian Anderson or literary authors such as Blixen.
And yet, despite, it seems, a concerted effort in the first half of last century, Johannes V Jensen appears to be a Danish author whose legacy has not survived in the Anglophone world. This is a shame, just as much as it is for any non-Anglophone writer of his period. Who happened to be a Nobel laureate. True, the fashion for Jensen’s style of fiction has passed, and he doesn’t appear to have cemented himself a position among the literature of the time, which often seems to disregard the original language of publication.
Which is a shame, because the stories in The Waving Rye may be products of their time and place, but they’re readable, interesting, and in several cases really quite good. The title story, for example, recounts a young man’s ride through the country on a penny farthing, and the parts relating to the bicycle are hilarious. The stories are very much products of their time and place — mainland Denmark, between 1900 and 1940. Jensen writes much about the impact of time on the countryside and the changes it has wrought.
One story, ‘Did They Catch the Ferry?’, which details the somewhat dangerous journey by motorbike of a couple, was made into a short film by Carl Theodor Dreyer. Dreyer, of course, is another of Denmark’s great twentieth-century cultural icons, and I’ve seen many of his films — his The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, France) is a superior silent film, but my favourite is Getrud (1964, Denmark), based on the 1906 play by Swedish playwright Hjalmar Söderberg.
Orson Welles adapted a story by Blixen, ‘The Immortal Story’ — the film had the same title, and is recommended — but as a general rule Danish literature does not seem to have prospered historically in the Anglophone world. Blixen was widely translated, and in the last decades of the twentieth century so has Høeg. But there have been three Danish Nobel laureates for literature (the other two, Gjellerup and Pontoppidan, were both awarded in 1917, for poetry and prose; I have not read anything by either), and while the Nobel Prize for Literature may no longer have the cachet it once did, it’s surprising — and not just from a Danish, or Nordic, perspective — how many Nobel laureates have not survived the test of time. You would think some sort of timelessness would attach to such writers. Apparently not.
And yet. the stories in The Waving Rye are timeless, or if not timeless then so well embedded in the time of their setting it doesn’t matter. But popularity has nothing to do with timelessness, or indeed facility with prose. It is likely as, when you come to writers from the first half of last century, fad-driven as much as it is anything else. I saw the same when researching female writers of post-war Britain — there seemed to be no discernible, or logical, reason why some writers continued to be known (Olivia Manning, Elizabeth Taylor) and others were not (Storm Jameson, Pamela Frankau), original success notwithstanding.
Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, born in 1873 in Jutland, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1944. The Waving Rye, a “best of “ collection, with contents dating from 1901 to 1941, published in Denmark in 1958, in English, clearly to promote Jensen to Anglophone readers, is very much a collection of stories of its time and place. And that is its strength. There’s nothing generic about these stories — and if the time they take place throws a few curve-balls, because it’s easy to forget they’re around 100 years old, which makes some of the details initially seem odd until you take the original publication date into account… they can at the very least be read as historical stories specific to their time and place.
I still don’t know why I chose to read Johannes V Jensen, but I did enjoy The Waving Rye — although I have to wonder if the fact I’m a fan of the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer didn’t contribute to that. Perhaps after I’ve read The Long Journey, I may feel differently. But that’s one of the rich and strange characteristics of literature, even more so of literature from a language and culture to which you do not belong…
And, I guess, one of the reasons why we read books in the first place.
