Together with my collaborator Sophia Hersi Smith I couldn’t be more excited to introduce English-speaking readers to Tove Ditlevsen’s poetry. This project marks our second full-length collaboration, and we are immensely grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for affording us the luxury of time so that we may dedicate ourselves to this daunting, thrilling, and long-overdue English translation.

At a time when many contemporaries had long since discarded rhyme and set meter in favor of modernistic free verse, Tove Ditlevsen’s most popular poems were commonly dismissed as archaic, sentimental, and clichéed. But perhaps this was precisely Tove Ditlevsen’s intention? As Olga Ravn argues in her afterword to this selection, Ditlevsen’s use of an anachronistic style can be read as a working-class poet’s rebuttal of the patronizing, predominantly male literary elite and, at the same time, a way of resurrecting a dismissed language. This subversive tactic enabled her to express her experiences as a working-class woman which could not be articulated in the dominant forms: There lives a young girl in me who will not die.

On the surface, many of Ditlevsen’s poems may seem simple, even straightforward. But quickly it becomes clear that the surface is deceptive; beyond it lurk “secret areas, concealed regions not a soul can access [...] not even her,” as literary critic Niels Barfod once noted. As translators, we will take our cue from Tove Ditlevsen as we attempt to strike the difficult balance she so mastered: reclaiming the outdated, the discarded, the banal, so that it rings true, to create poems that are at once accessible and ungraspable.

About Tove Ditlevsen

In 2021, Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen (1917-76) took the rest of the world by storm with her memoirs The Copenhagen Trilogy (respectively translated into English by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman).  Born and raised in Vesterbro, a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen, Ditlevsen is the author of approximately 30 books of poetry, essays, short stories, and novels. Much of her writing deals with themes of abuse and addiction, often embodied by female characters plagued with anxiety and despair, trapped within the confines of marriage and domesticity.This translation of There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die will, for the first time, introduce Ditlevsen’s vast English-speaking readership to her poetry, which constituted a vital part of her oeuvre. Ditlevsen always considered herself first and foremost a poet, her greatest dream since childhood—“I wanted to be a widow, and I wanted to be a poet.”