In February we shall take our literary salon to Denmark’s capital – Copenhagen. Together with Lada Halounová, a translator from Danish, we will discuss the world’s rediscovery of Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy. The Czech translation was published by Host in 2022.
You can watch the live stream on Thursday February 9, 2023, at 8PM on the Scandinavian house Facebook page, or later when it will be posted our YouTube Channel.
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency, originally published as three novellas, is long considered a classic in Denmark. The storyline takes place in Copenhagen between the 1930’s and 70’s. Tove Ditlevsen tells her life-story of endless attempts to escape her working-class life via literature. The narrative describes complex women’s friendships, marriage without feelings nor mutual understanding, motherhood and unintended pregnancies, love affairs and infatuations, feelings of being torn between two men, alcohol and drug addiction, but most importantly: an addiction to writing.
Lada Halounová has graduated Theatre studies alongside with Danish at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and Digital design at Aarhus University. Next to Czech translations of novels and plays (Kaspar Colling Nielsen, Lars Husum, Anne Cathrine Bomann, Tove Ditlevsen etc.) she cooperates with publisher Silkefyret in releasing Czech literature (Jáchym Topol, Egon Hostovský, Václav Havel) in Denmark. Besides translations, she has worked for a non-profit organization Post Bellum since 2018 on “Our Neighbours’ Stories” project, furthermore she collaborates with University of Southern Denmark on a topography project concerning legacies of Danish Jews in Theresienstadt.
The partner of the Nordic Literary Salon Online is Czech Translators of the North – an association of translators of Nordic-language fiction into Czech.
The event is part of the Scandinavian House’s year-long project “Nordic Literature in the Heart of Europe 2023,” which is financially supported by Prague Municipality and the Ministry of Culture in the Czech Republic.
