Leif Panduro

[hdw]

Leif Panduro (1923-1977) was a leading Danish novelist, playwright, film and TV scriptwriter. I've just finished his novel Den Ubetænksomme Elsker (The Thoughtless Lover), but haven't reviewed it under Recently Finished Books as it doesn't seem to be available in English translation, so I didn't want to send you all panting after it.

I thought his portrayal of a doctor in a small Danish coastal town who falls in love with a beautiful but seriously disturbed young girl was well done, and when I looked for some biographical data on the author I discovered that mental illness and the general theme of alienation from society's norms is one of the main characteristics of his books. Like not a few other Scandinavian writers, he wrote about defects in the welfare state and the hollow materialism of the post-war world. You get the same themes in the stories of fellow Dane Anders Bodelsen, but Panduro has a fascination with unconventional mental states.

In Fern fra Danmark (Mr. Fern from Denmark), Fern is in hospital recovering from amnesia, and as his memory gradually comes back he doesn't like the picture of himself that emerges.

In Rend mig i traditionerne (Kick me in the traditions), he basically re-writes Catcher in the Rye. His adolescent "hero" thinks society is mad, but he's the one who ends up in the asylum. As lots of Panduro's characters do eventually.

This book is available in English translation. Here's a review from Amazon:-

"I'm Icelandic and I have to read this book at school. This is one of the most boring and uninteresting books I have ever suffered through."

That kid has real potential as a literary critic! I wonder if he does restaurants too.

The English Wikipedia entry for Panduro and other English biogs. I've seen are scrappy, so I've taken the following from the Danish Wikipedia. He had a difficult childhood, spent mostly in children's homes and with foster-parents, as his parents split up shortly after he was born and his mother was sectioned in a mental hospital.

Panduro as an adolescent supported the Danish Resistance but they liquidated his father, who was a Nazi sympathiser. On the very day of Denmark's Liberation from the Nazi yoke Panduro was wounded by a stray shot. His maternal uncle Gregers Panduro and his wife brought him up in Roskilde, but he rebelled against them although he was close to their son, his cousin Rudi.

Here's one for all you amateur psychologists. Panduro never went to visit his mother in the asylum, although his books are full of sympathetic portraits of psychologically damaged people and individuals who rebel against society's norms. Nor did he even attend her funeral. He was terrified that he had inherited the family ailment. His manic-depressive aunt Jessica committed suicide in 1949. His mother spent 24 years in the asylum, and refused to believe her son had qualified as a dentist, insisting that he ran a café in Ålborg.

As a dentist, Panduro was liked by his patients but he had no business sense, and went bankrupt. He was a man of regular habits. One day a week, always the same day, was set aside for going to the library. On sunny days he and his wife got their bikes out and went to the beach for a swim. Very Danish.

I'm sorry there aren't more of his books in English, but at least now you have some motivation for learning Danish.

Harry

[Eric]

I've seen the name Leif Panduro many times, but had never actually looked up who he was. He sounds to have been an interesting, if tragic, character. Perhaps Harry can translate a book or two of his into English. He looks like one of those older authors in need of a revival, especially in English. Are any of his works available at the Norvik Press?

Looking at what Harry says plus the Danish Wiki (the English Wiki article is truly pathetic), one of the roots of his problems right from the start was no doubt the divorce of his parents, plus his mother them entering mental hospital. Being brought up in foster homes and institutions can't have been fun. But he made it to the Danish Academy.

[hdw]

Originally Posted by Eric

I've seen the name Leif Panduro many times, but had never actually looked up who he was. He sounds to have been an interesting, if tragic, character. Perhaps Harry can translate a book or two of his into English.

I will if you'll pay me. You'll find my rates very reasonable! I know some people will translate a favourite piece of literature on spec then look for a potential publisher, but that's a bit foolhardy in my opinion for anything bigger than a poem, essay or short story. As the good Doctor opined, "None but a fool ever wrote except for money".

I suppose Panduro hasn't impinged on English-language publishers' consciousness because he doesn't write sadistic blood and torture thrillers with a veneer of social criticism. Actually, I can't think of any Danish writer in the Mankell or Stieg Larsson mould. Is it because the Danes are too cheerful and optimistic by nature, unlike their gloomy neighbours to the north and west? I do like the occasional broad generalisation and sweeping statement.

Harry

[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.

[hdw]

Originally Posted by Eric

Expect me to pay you? Made of money do you think I am?

No, I was having a laugh, as they say. The idea of a translator paying for anything ...!!

I'm enjoying taking a break from Swedish to catch up with a bit of Danish literature. Haven't got a translation project on the go at the moment, but I have just been propositioned by a Swedish academic who wants me to check the English of a book he has just written in our lingo about past Nobel prizewinners for science. This guy was permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and professor of virology at the Karolinska Institutet, but his email suggests his English might need more than a little tweak. I'm thinking about it. Don't know why he couldn't just have written it in Swedish then commissioned a proper translation.

Harry