The melancholy Dane---Andersen
Diana F/Written
He is ugly, of humble origin, and has dreamed of getting ahead all his life. He was sensitive by nature and suffered many hardships. He did not dare to talk about marriage, but in the end he was regarded as a homosexual. His fairy tales are the best gifts to children around the world, but in the eyes of most people, he is still just an interesting writer, not a literary giant.
How did Andersen, with such a weird appearance and melancholic heart, write such a brilliant and innocent dream?
In 1874, one year before Andersen died, he received a letter from a reader, written by an American schoolgirl. Enclosed was a one-dollar bill and a copy of the publication. There are newspaper clippings showing Andersen's physical illness and alleged poverty. Soon, other children began to send small sums of money to repay what a Philadelphia newspaper called the "child debt" owed to the Danish writer. Later, even the U.S. ambassador personally sent him 200 Danish silver dollars. Andersen, who was not too poor to uncover the pot, wanted to stop it. He wrote to Gibson Peacock, publisher of the Philadelphia Evening News, which launched the charity fund-raising campaign, saying that he would be happy to see "my stories in a small language find readers so far from my native country." , and was deeply touched that so many American children "broke their piggy banks to help him, an old writer," but he really did not need and could not accept these gifts. Now, he wrote, he felt humiliated rather than proud and grateful, and a certain satisfaction had outweighed Andersen's embarrassment.
All his life, Andersen dreamed of becoming famous and being regarded as a true artist. Sometimes this desire can overcome everything. "My name has begun to shine, and this is the only reason for my life. I covet fame and glory, just like a miser covets gold," this is a letter he wrote to a friend when he was in his early 30s. Now he is 69 years old, and his reputation has spread far and wide, as evidenced by the activities carried out by American newspapers. He is perhaps better known than any other living author, and international fame is often built on the backing of other celebrities. From the 1840s onwards, his work was widely read, although not always in the way he intended. Stories like "Thumbelina", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "The Little Match Girl" have already been translated into numerous versions, including poor translations that have ruined the original works beyond recognition. For example, the infamous Mary Howitt, a British woman who did not understand Danish, relied entirely on the German version for her translation. Another British translator, Caroline Peach, deleted entire paragraphs. However, some better versions have been produced, especially in the United States. As translated by Jean Hersholt, the Dane was a Hollywood star in the 1930s. More than a hundred years after Andersen's death, his literary influence continues to exist in some form. Moia Shearer's film "The Red Shoes" is more famous than Hans Christian Andersen's original novel. Movies and cartoons based on Andersen's fairy tales can be rented at any Big Bomb chain store, and Disney is determined to rewrite some of Andersen's most beautiful stories with happy endings for young audiences. Overall, outside Scandinavia, Andersen is recognized as an interesting writer of beautiful fairy tales rather than a literary giant.
In 1952, the movie "Andersen" starring Danny Kaye (1913-1987, American comedy star, formerly known as David Daniel Kaminsky. - Translation Annotation) made this kind of The point of view is revealed. Although the film has nothing to do with the real Andersen - and it never boasts of it - it creates a life of the writer that is as deeply rooted in Andersen's fairy tales, and it almost becomes a continuation of those fairy tales: A poor boy from Odense, a small town on the island of Fenn, went to Copenhagen alone, conquered adversity and finally succeeded. This is also the essence of the film. To put it further, it is also quite consistent with Andersen's autobiography. He named it "The Fairy Tale of My Life", and there is no self-mockery in it. However, according to Frank Loesser (Frank Loesser, 1910-1969, a famous American lyricist and one of the authors of many interludes in the movie "Andersen". - Translator's Note), Danny Kaye's film Denmark was considered a boring production and a bit of an embarrassment to the tourism industry.
Andersen and his works have provided a wealth of material for the academic community for a long time. Almost from the day he died, critics and researchers began to dig into his family history, devouring his private diaries and written materials, even a memoir that was written earlier and had not yet been processed. This memoir It was not discovered and published until the 1920s. In 1993, John De Milius, director of the Andersen Center in Odense, published a detailed chronicle of Andersen's daily life day by day. This ongoing work has allowed the Danes to have a thorough understanding of the details of Andersen's life - Down to the frequency of his masturbation - and a portrait found entirely out of place among other souvenirs found on Copenhagen's famous shopping street, Strawgate Street.
People who are interested in the real Andersen are increasing everywhere: Irish playwright Sebastian Barry and American dancer Martha Clark recently collaborated to stage a dance drama about Andersen's life, including Frank Loweser soundtrack. The production premiered in San Francisco last fall, but critics were somewhat bewildered, marveling at its visual splendor but failing to recognize the shadowy Andersen presented on stage. (The production is currently being recast for Broadway next season.) In addition, Knopf Publishing House will publish a new biography of Andersen this spring, written by Jakie Wullschlager, a writer for the London Financial Times. The new biography will add a credible work to a handful of English-language research works, the most famous of which is Brezdorfer's "Andersen," published in 1975.
In a portrait painted when he was 29, Andersen wore a high collar and a mustache, looking like a playboy. But many of the subsequent photos—ugly, awkward, cold, and melancholy—seem closer to Andersen’s true state of mind. “I would say that Andersen’s daily state of affairs was one of sadness,” Jonas Colin’s son Edward wrote in a memoir. Andersen's work also reveals recurring hints of social indifference, sexual frustration, and the fear that the past will one day swallow him up.
For the rest of his life, he could not escape the nightmare left behind by his four years at Slagelse Grammar School. There he swallowed the fear of failure, was mistreated by an unsympathetic principal, and was forced to stop his overwhelming urge to write. He once gave a letter to his patron P. in Copenhagen. F. Admiral Woolf's wife wrote a letter full of self-pity. Mrs. Woolf replied:
You have gone to great lengths to trouble your friends. I can't believe that doing so will make you happy. Better yet - the end result of your ever intense focus on yourself - yourself - is that you think you will become a great poet - my dear Andersen! Why don't you feel that all these ideas you have are going to achieve nothing and that you are going astray.
But Andersen could no longer extricate himself. He vowed to be a great writer - a great writer like Adam Oehlenschlager (1779-1850, Danish romantic poet and playwright. - Translation). In 1826, this mature 21-year-old student wrote a sweet poem called "The Dying Child", in which he wrote, "Mother, I am tired, I want to sleep, let me rest in your heart "The next year, the poem was published in a Danish newspaper and became a hit. Three years later, Copenhagen’s great writer J. L. After a literary magazine founded by Heiberg published some chapters of Andersen's fantasy essay "Adventures on the Island of Amager," his works became popular again. This gave Andersen his first taste of public attention, but Ingemann (B.S. Ingemann, 1789-1862, Danish writer, poet and playwright. - Translator's Note) soon accused him of trying to please "seven mouths" A gossipy, shallow and impetuous reader", which simply shocked Andersen.
Andersen also wanted to please another kind of audience: his famous contemporaries. In 1883, he visited Paris for the first time. At the age of twenty-eight, he was still little known outside Denmark. He surprised everyone by visiting Victor Hugo directly. This almost fanatical pursuit of stars has just begun, and he has been associated with these people in his life: Liszt, Dumas and Little, Balzac, Mendelssohn, and the Brothers Grimm (people often compare him to them) , Heine - he regarded Andersen as a slavish person ("His behavior showed the kind of servile and begging attitude that princes like."), as well as Schumann and Rossini, known as the "Swedish Nightingale" of Jenny Lind, Wagner, and Dickens.
Andersen longs for attention, but he has been renting a house and living alone. There were also girls who were obsessed with him, usually the daughters of his friends, especially Jenny Lind. But as soon as anything had anything to do with sex, he lost all courage. Women and their bodies always frightened him.
In early 1834, he wrote in his diary about his visit to the studio of the painter Albert Kuchler:
I was sitting when a young model of about 16 years old touched me. Arrived with her mother. Kuechler said he wanted to see her breasts. The girl was a little embarrassed because of my presence, but her mother said, "Why are you rubbing, why are you rubbing!", and then untied her clothes and pulled them all down to the waist. She stood there, half naked, with very dark skin. , the arms are also a little too thin, but the breasts are beautiful and round... I feel my body trembling.
His diaries are also surprisingly candid in their descriptions of his body. "Penis hurts" or similar notes abound, with a cross-shaped mark next to them to indicate that he has masturbated. When he was almost 30 years old, he traveled to Italy, during which he wrote:
My blood boils. Headache. Blood rushed into my eyes, and a passion I had never experienced before drove me out of the door - I didn't know where I was going, but I... sat on a stone by the sea, the tide was rising. Red flames flowed down Vesuvius.
As I walked back, two men followed me and asked me if I wanted a woman. No, don't! I yelled, but went home and dove into the water.
In 1901, a Danish writer named Albert Hansen proposed in a German magazine that Andersen was gay. Since then, researchers have debated the issue at length. As a grown man, he occasionally became as fascinated with men as with women, the most obvious example being the dancer Hellad Schaff. But it is almost certain that Andersen has always remained a child. In any case, he was a true child of the nineteenth century, and his novels and plays, although intended for adults, rarely touched on sexual desire in a form that went beyond the standard literary tropes of the time—at most, they Just trembling lips and a polite hug.
Before Andersen died at the age of 75 in 1875, he had achieved what he wanted and achieved a great victory. He was also favored by other writers, including Thackeray, Ibsen, and Longfellow, with whom he corresponded. He was once very close to Dickens, but their friendship ended in bad words. Brezdorfer records that in June 1857, Andersen was invited to Dickens's country home in Kent, where he stayed for five weeks and almost drove the owner crazy. Dickens's daughter Kate later recalled that her father finally said: "Hans Andersen slept in this house for five weeks - as if he would live with this family forever!"
Dickens then said Broken off relations with him - and Andersen did not understand why until his death.
Andersen lived to see Odense become famous for its prestige. Visitors came in droves to pay their respects to him. He became the favorite of European royalty. He posed for a statue to be made of him. (Last July, large groups of children could be seen sitting on the pedestal of Hans Christian Andersen’s statue in New York’s Central Park, listening to Harry Potter and the Fire Embrace being read to them.) But compared to Ibsen and Sterling Fort, even Hamsun and J. P. Jakobson, Andersen is still regarded as that most elusive of artists—a literary master who wrote entirely in a minority language—and, somehow, that most pessimistic of men continues to suffer, a man who believed in anything It's all passing by. Even at the time when he was famous, Andersen also described the blow he suffered in his diary: it came purely from a kind of panic without cause:
A dirty wanderer stood by the spring. I had a feeling that he might know me and might tell me something unpleasant, as if I were a pariah who had been promoted to the upper class.
At that time, in 1874, when American schoolchildren showed great kindness to him, he was seriously ill. Within a year, he would die of liver cancer. But even during his dying months (most of which he spent with the family of the Jewish merchant Moritz Melkos, who cared for him) he was willing, even eager, to meet anyone. Seekers. And, in these conversations, one can still sense his loveliness, his emptiness, his heartbreaking desire for others to appreciate him. The British literary journalist and critic Edmund Goss, who was only 23 at the time and did not speak Danish, later wrote how he met at the door "a tall, elderly gentleman, wearing a full suit He was wearing a brown suit and a snuff-colored curly wig of the same shade." Goss continued:
At that moment, I seemed to be stabbed hard by his weird and ugly face. Hands, his dizzyingly long arms... Hans Andersen's face is that of a peasant, and a lifetime of sensibility and cultural life has not been able to remove the mark of soil from his face.
U.S. Consul G. W. Griffin doesn't seem to remember Andersen's physical ailments. “When I called on him,” Griffin wrote in 1875, “I gave him a letter from Mr. West, a poet friend, asking him to copy some of his favorites for his anthology. Poetry." Andersen scratched the back of a photo and wrote: "To Mr. L. J. Andersen." Then, taking Griffin by the hand, he said, "Tell Mr. Longfellow that I'm terribly ill." Griffin described the scene with obvious, almost smug satisfaction. Neither he nor the people Andersen had agreed to meet with in the months before his death seemed to have asked themselves why they hadn't bothered to show up yet.
The original article was published in the New Yorker magazine on January 8 this year. Due to space limitations, it cannot be fully translated.
The untranslated parts include Andersen’s childhood life and a literary feud between Andersen and the future great philosopher Kierkegaard, who was still a young boy at the time.
——Translator
Chronology of Andersen
Born on April 2, 1805, in the small town of Odense, Fern Island, Denmark.
In 1816, when he was 11 years old, his father died.
In 1819, when he was 14 years old, he left home alone and went to Copenhagen to seek creative opportunities.
In August 1822, he published the work "A Collection of Attempts", which contains three poems, dramas and stories. This collection had no chance of being published due to its humble background, but it has attracted the attention of some people in the cultural world.
In October, I entered a secondary missionary school for cultural remedial studies. I studied for six years and felt extremely painful about the education method. However, during these six years, I read a lot of works by famous writers and also practiced composing poems and operas. In 1827, he left school and returned to Copenhagen. Published poems and received praise from high-society critics, inspiring Andersen's confidence in writing.
In 1829, he wrote a long fantasy travelogue "A Wanderings on the Island of Amager" and published it. The first edition sold out. The publisher immediately bought the second edition at favorable terms, and Andersen was freed from the oppression of hunger. The comedy "Love on Nikolayev Towers" is performed at the Royal Opera House. In the same year, he also published his first collection of poems.
In 1830, first love failed. Began traveling; second book of poetry published.
From 1831 to 1834, love failed again and his mother died. Soon after, he published a long autobiographical novel "The Improvisational Poet".
In 1835, when he was 30 years old, he started writing fairy tales and published his first collection of fairy tales. It was a 61-page booklet, including "Tinderbox", "Little Claus and Big Claus", "The Princess on the Pea" and "Little Ida's Flowers" *** four chapters. The work did not receive unanimous praise. Some people even thought that he did not have the talent to write fairy tales and suggested that he give up. But Andersen said: "This is my immortal work!"
In 1844, he wrote his autobiography Sexual work "The Ugly Duckling".
In 1846, he wrote "The Little Match Girl".
The longest work of his late period, "Lucky Belle", was published in 1970, with more than 70,000 words. It was written based on his own life experiences, but it was not entirely an autobiography.
In 1867, he was elected as an honorary citizen by his hometown of Odense.
At 11 a.m. on August 4, 1875, he died of liver cancer at his friend's country house. The funeral was extremely sad and honorable. He died at the age of 70.