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ABOUT THIS BOOK

PUBLISHER: Austin Macauley Publishers

FORMAT: Paperback

ISBN: 9781849635608

RRP: £6.99

PAGES: 218

PUBLICATION DATE:
March 31, 2015

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Sad Tales from Denmark

John Lynch

A Danish priest marries an Inuit woman in Greenland; an old woman is sent to the village workhouse; a peasant farmer and his wife struggle to rebuild their dilapidated cottage and work hard on their small-holding, only for the wife to die of cancer; three of the moving stories in Sad Tales from Denmark, by Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943), who in 1917 won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his “authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark”. He advocated social and political reform and satirised the authoritarian Danish government of the day. His sympathies lay with the poor rural proletariat, about whom he writes in these stories, with humanity, but with merciless realism and wry humour. An entertaining read for both the student of realist literature and for the general reader of fiction, here rendered elegantly into English by John Lynch, with a Foreword by Lars Peter Romhild, formerly Lecturer in Literature at the University of Copenhagen.

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John Lynch

About the Author The Danish realist writer Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917 for “his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark”. He satirised the authoritarian establishment of Denmark and sympathised with the rural proletariat. His major novels have been translated into English, but the stories presented here are made available in English for the first time. About the Translator John Lynch taught himself Danish and German, and later obtained the degree of BA in these languages at the University of Newcastle. He has taught English in Danish and German schools and has also worked in Sweden and Iceland. After studying at the University of East Anglia, he was awarded the degree of MA in Scandinavian Studies. He holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Librarianship and his varied career included a spell as a college tutor librarian in Banbury. In addition to the present work, John Lynch has also translated a Danish novel The Fantasists, by Hans Egede Schack (published by Austin Macauley in 2013) and A Prussian in Victorian London, an account of London life in the mid-nineteenth century by the German novelist Theodor Fontane (published by Austin Macauley in 2014).