[Eric]

Expect me to pay you? Made of money do you think I am? I'm hoping that Norvik, which is after all, the Number One small British publisher devoted to things Scandinavian, would take a Panduro or two. Then the Danes could subsidise the translation, and the Brits get the kudos for being so pro-European.

I sense that you feel exactly as I do about literary translation. While there are some that bemoan the fact that there are so few translations in Britain, you don't get many offers to subsidise specific works in translation. Even the Arts Council of England, Poetry Society, and other illustrious Brit-bodies is not too vociferous about what they're doing to bring in the foreign authors. I'm sure that the Arts Council of Scotland is somewhat better, given tradition.

What we need is a Danish crime novel called something like "Ripping Yarns" which is a concatenation of sicko ways of murdering people in a Marquis way, plus forty-page descriptions of how the bits and pieces of the bodies are disposed of in acid baths (or, more mundanely, flushed down the lav with Domestos). I'm sure that Georg and Edvard could be dragged from the grave to write oozingly positive things about such a life-enhancing book. The hero will, of course be a smiling-grinning-sniggering-chortling Dane of gentlest disposition who has the unfortunate characteristic of being a psycopath on Tuesdays. The Sherlog Holmesen will in the end discover that some boring bank clerk from Odense called Lärs von Trier-Ripy'rthroat is always ill, outworking or absent in some way on Tuesdays. I like sweebing stadements too.