Andersen Nexø, Martin

Martin Andersen, who wrote under the name of Martin Andersen Nexø, was born in 1869 in an impoverished area of Copenhagen, where he lived for the first 8 years of his life. In 1877, his large family – his mother had 11 children - moved to the town of Nexø on the island of Bornholm (in 1894 he adopted the name of this town as his last name). After studying two years at the Askov Folk High School, Nexø graduated in 1897 as a teacher and worked at a school in Odense. As a young man, he spent extensive periods in southern Europe, and later in life he lived for long periods at Lake Constance in Germany (1923-30). During the Nazi occupation of Denmark in 1941 he was arrested by the Danish police for communist affiliation. He took refuge in Sweden and then moved to the Soviet Union and back to Denmark. In 1951, Nexø settled in the German Democratic Republic. Nexø died in Dresden, East Germany, on 1 June 1954.
His best known and most translated book is Pelle Erobreren (4 vols.), which appeared between 1906 and 1910. The film version of the novel by Bille August, Pelle the Conqueror, won both the Palme d'or at Cannes and an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.

Thorborg Andersen, Troels

Troels Thorborg Andersen, born in Kolding in 1988, has studied in Copenhagen, among others translation studies at Copenhagen University, and has translated and published Rave by Rainald Goetz (Det Poetiske Bureau 2018) from German.

He has worked as teacher in Hundested, Northern Sealand, and is now a Ph.D.-student at FU Berlin.

 

Baggesen, Jens

Jens Baggesen, in full Jens Immanuel Baggesen (born February 15, 1764, Korsør, Denmark, died October 3, 1826, Hamburg, Germany) was a leading Danish literary figure in the transitional period between Neoclassicism and Romanticism.

In 1782 Baggesen went to Copenhagen to study theology. Three years later, at age 21, he had an unprecedented success in Denmark with his first collection of poems, Comiske fortællinger (1785; “Comical Tales”). Later, after his libretto to the first major Danish opera, Holger Danske (1789; “Ogier the Dane,” music by Friedrich Kunzen), received adverse criticism (mainly because of its supposed lack of nationalism), Baggesen traveled through Germany, Switzerland, and France. The journey became the basis of his most important book, the imaginative prose work Labyrinten (1792–93; “The Labyrinth”), a “sentimental journey” reminiscent of the work of the 18th-century English novelist Laurence Sterne. Baggesen was variously a Germanophile, a great admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an ardent supporter of the French Revolution, a disciple of Immanuel Kant, and a Romanticist and early admirer of Denmark’s foremost Romantic poet, Adam Oehlenschläger. Later in life he vigorously opposed Romanticism, carrying on a seven-year feud with Oehlenschläger.

A perennial traveler, attracted to existential harmony but always torn between material and spiritual values, Baggesen found himself at home everywhere and nowhere. His restless existence was tempered only by his sense of humour and absurdity. He has been called a European spirit who “held a passport to the whole world except his own heart.”

Bjerg, Anne Marie

Anne Marie Bjerg was born in Copenhagen in 1937 and has since the late 1960s been active as a literary translator, free-lance, gradually with a production of more than one hundred titles. She has been resident in England and Sweden (during the 70s). The American and English authors translated by her include: Anne Sexton, Erica Jong, Anita Brookner, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce; in 2009, she made a new translation of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Her translated Swedish writers include among others Per Wästberg, Göran Tunström, Theodor Kallifatides, Agneta Pleijel, Kerstin Ekman, except from the classic Selma Lagerlöf in her new translation: Gösta Berling’s Saga, Christ Legends, The Emperor of Portugallien, Jerusalem, Mårbacka I-III, Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey through Sweden, The Story of the Family Löwensköld etc.

Her writings include: Kærlig hilsen, Signe, 1979; Friste livet, tales, 1985; Vandfødt, novel, 2000; På dansk ved … Et essay om litterær oversættelse, 2007.

Cand. phil. in Danish from Copenhagen University in 1970. Anne Marie Bjerg was awarded several prizes, among them the Danish Academy's translators' prize in 1989, Natur & Kulturs translators' prize by the Swedish Academy in 2004, and the Mårbackaprize in 2012.

Blicher, Steen Steensen

Blicher was born in Vium near Viborg in 1782 and grew up close to the moors of Jutland. He became a parson like his father and from 1825-1847 served in the parish at Spentrup where he died, after his dismissal, in 1848.
After first publications of tales in literary magazines in the late 20's he developped into being one of Denmark's foremost novelists. His Diary of a Parish Clerk, published in 1824, was his break-through story.
Today he is regarded as the pioneer of the Danish short story and regional writing, and his novel Præsten i Vejlbye was adapted in the Danish Kulturkanon as one of the 10 Order of Merit novels in 2006. His special skills lie in the descriptions of his moor landscape and its peasantry, in Romantic scenery and realistic psychology. Blicher also wrote poetry and patriotic songs.

Bjelke, Henrik

Born in Aarhus in 1937, Bjelke died in 1993. After studying law without completing a degree, he made his debut in 1968 with Første person ental, a collection of short stories. His first books were published by the avant-garde publishing house Arena, and his later work by Gyldendal in Copenhagen. The novel Saturn, published in 1974, is Bjelke's magnum opus and offers a bold combination of a fascination with France, the Epic of Gilgamesh and homosexuality, an often almost impenetrable narrative style, references to great works of world literature and detailed, partly ironic notes. His novel Togplan for Otto (1990) was also published in German.

Bjelke received a number of awards, including the Danish Academy's Beatrice Prize in 1984.