In the summer of 1937, Ernst Bloch, the redoubtable German-Jewish literary critic, utopian humanist, and exile from Nazi persecution, was browsing the paper in his new home of Czechoslovakia when an item brought him up short. The novelist Henrik Pontoppidan had died at the age of 80 in his native Denmark. Bloch moved swiftly to set down his thoughts and sent the resulting, impassioned eulogy to another newspaper, the German-language Prager Weltbühne, for publication. “A great writer has been pronounced dead,” he lamented:
This is one of those dark instances in which the world cheats itself of the few great things that are in it. Most people, it would seem, do not recognize the name of Pontoppidan, despite the Nobel Prize that crowns it. Even fewer have read Hans im Glück, that dense, deep, unique work.
The title was from the German edition of Pontoppidan's magnum opus, Lucky Per (Lykke-Per in Danish). Published in two volumes in Copenhagen in 1905, the book had also appeared in Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Romanian, and Dutch; won praise from such luminaries as Thomas Mann; and propelled its author to a 1917 Nobel Prize for Literature. Twenty years on, Europe may have had bloodier matters on its collective mind, but Bloch, ever hopeful, found himself dreaming of a more pacific world where Lucky Per would “be counted among the essential works of world literature”—a “near future,” he wrote, in which Pontoppidan might “finally begin to live.”
The embarrassment of this prediction was not so much that it was wrong as that it was premature. Bloch soon received a note from Pontoppidan, who pointed out tactfully that he was not in fact dead, but at home in a coastal suburb, celebrating his ninth decade. And what's more, still writing; the third volume of his memoirs would appear the following year, a fourth in 1940. (Only in 1943, after an abridgment of the whole had been published as On the Way to Myself, did the novelist, now 86, finally breathe his last.)
The historical record in English doesn't indicate quite where the adjective “erroneous” belongs here—whether Czech journalists had accidentally misreported Pontoppidan's death or whether, as seems likely, they were simply saluting a Nobel laureate on his 80th birthday, and Bloch, still adjusting to a new language, had misread. But perhaps the ambiguity is fortuitous, one of those places where life gusts up to reveal its stitching. In Denmark today, Lucky Per is a literary touchstone, and the basis for the most lavish film production in the country's history. Elsewhere, the name of Pontopiddan is virtually unknown. And because his legacy has amounted, in essence, to a tale of two audiences—one at home, one abroad—it seems only fitting that the first false report of this great writer's death should arise from things lost in translation.
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Even in 1937, Pontoppidan's readership in his mother tongue was larger and more durable than Bloch, stranded elsewhere in a fragmenting Europe, could have understood. A pastor's son and engineering-school dropout, Pontoppidan had made his name and a modest living with his very first story collection, Clipped Wings, published in 1881, when he was 24. Two more collections and assorted journalistic piecework followed over the next decade, along with a handful of promising books in the half-invented genre he called “smaa Romaner”—novellas, give or take a few thousand words. This early writing focused on life in the peasant towns of Jutland, the easternmost lobe of the Danish archipelago. It was Pontoppidan's home territory—his pen-name in the Copenhagen Morgenbladet was “Rusticus,” the man of the country—and he aimed to “delyricize” it in the manner of a Nordic Flaubert, flensing away the sentimentality of his Romantic elders.
The titles alone suggest a posture of wintry pragmatism: From the Huts, The Polar Bear, “The End of Life,” “The Bone Man”; “Fate was not kind,” a story called “A Death Blow” insists, perhaps superfluously. Yet these tales betray a tender streak, too, a kind of gallows humor, along with a deep-running feeling for the place. Even the bleakest of them abound with a quality of passionate seeing: the sun “melting the tar out of the timber walls,” the wagon rolling out of the forest “as if out of another century.”
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