Essay from The Literary Review

Life in Another Language

Thomas E. Kennedy

Garrison Keillor, who spent a lot of time in Denmark, once said, “No Dane would look you in the eye and say, ‘This is a great country.’ You are supposed to figure that out for yourself.” I think it is a great country. And that’s why I’m still here, nearly half a life-time after migrating to Europe from my home in the United States. I’ve lived in France and travelled frequently throughout much of Europe and elsewhere, but my home-base since the mid ’70s has been Denmark, even if I am still an American citizen, still vote and files taxes in the us—as well as here.
          The expatriate life, for me, has been a good one, although it does complicate one’s identity. There is no doubt that living in another country, more importantly in another language, changes your view of things. I know that I will never become completely Danish, yet somehow I also know that I am not quite completely American anymore either. And just as I could never find it in my heart to surrender my American citizenship, I don’t think I could bear to leave Copenhagen for more than the few visits I make to the States each year.
          As a writer I worked for years in the us and never published a thing. Not until I had been living in Denmark for a while did I begin to write things that interested American publishers. And I think this was at least partly thanks to the opportunity of viewing my native culture through the lens of the new one—because I was still writing fiction about American characters in American settings. Only after my fifth book of fiction did I venture to set a novel in Denmark and include Danes among the characters —a challenging and liberating experience, casting Danish sensibilities into English. The novel I’ve just finished is through the eyes of a Chilean torture survivor and a 40-year-old Danish woman, who is the book’s central consciousness—I don’t know what that might say about the changes I’ve been going through.
          I was born in New York City, in Queens, but travelled and lived a good deal around the us before leaving. The atmosphere in which I grew up was one of repression—the ’50s and early ’60s, a time when apartheid was official policy in some states, unofficial in others, a time of fear—fear of communism, of nuclear invasion, racial integration, sexual liberty, even of language.
          Books were routinely banned. The novels of Henry Miller were contraband, as was D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Even if Joyce’s Ulysses—thanks to Bennet Cerf and a us District Judge named Woolsey— had been legal since 1933, no American publisher was willing to take a chance on J. P. Donleavy’s wonderfully funny The Ginger Man, inspired by, though far milder than, Joyce’s masterwork. Aristotle once advised, “The word dog does not bite,” but in the America of my youth the word “fuck” could land you in jail—as people like Lenny Bruce and the San Francisco woman who published a poem entitled “To Fuck with Love” would learn, even if it and other assorted illegal words were in daily use in the popular vocabulary. In Berkely, in 1964, there was even a movement whose adherents wore signs on their chests proclaiming, “Fuck, Verb,” in protest against this unconstitutional prohibition of free speech.
          As the 1960s progressed, many gains were made against such narrow-minded fear of language, free expression, thought, the human body, and politics left of Barry Goldwater. Films like Dr. Strangelove and books like Candy (originally banned even in France) won the war with laughter. Legislators struggled with definitions of pornography—how to ensure freedom of speech without opening the gate to pornography? Eventually, the impossibility of doing so was recognized. Freedom of expression is freedom of expression. For a time it seemed as though the concept of liberty was breaking through the shell of repressive fear in a society that insisted it practised “liberty and justice for all”—though liberty and justice were reserved primarily for certain classes of the so-called “classless” American society.
          And in some ways freedom of expression has triumphed, although speech-control and mind-control take many forms. As noted in a recent New Yorker essay by Adam Gopnik, “After the Kennedy assassination the great divide began in which America turned to the right politically while becoming increasingly liberated in its personal manner. By the time Ronald Reagan was President, you could say ‘cocksucker’ in any comedy club in Philadelphia . . . ” Striking that this observation should appear in the pages of a magazine that a mere 20 years ago was adamantly committed to keeping any such word from its pages. Today, a rapper is free to spout the word fuck at the speed of frustration, while book and curricula content is controlled by school boards and funding agencies, and professors and school teachers may face serious consequences for certain utterances, for teaching certain books, for risking the wrath of harrassment charges (over something as innocent as hanging the painting of a nude on your office wall).

          But it was not only such issues that inspired my migration. In the early 1970s, the so-called summer of love had long since gone sour, replaced by violence, drugs, guns, racial and political animosity. I had a girlfriend on East 2nd Street between Avenues B and C—Alphabet City—and because she had a dripping faucet, one of her neighbors emptied a rifle through her door one day. Fortunately, she was not hit, but I think seeing those bullet holes in the door, combined with my own couple of experiences of people shoving guns into my face, ignited my wish to try life in Europe—a wish, admittedly, that had long been fueled by my reading: Dostoevski, Camus, Huxley, Balzac, Flaubert, Gide, Orwell, Grass, Mann, Mansfield, Hemingway, et al.—and most notably James Joyce with his Dedalus proclamation in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church; and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.”
          Following the Alphabet City shooting, my girlfriend grew troubled. What had attracted me to her was the simple clarity of her nature, her slender, freckled confidence and level-headed healthiness. After the bullets, she developed the conviction that I was bribing the mailman to spy on her and that she was in telepathetic contact with Yuri Geller. Today, in Denmark, it is standard practice to offer psychological crisis help after such an experience. I don’t know if any of the States do that now, but there was no such offer back then in laissez-faire New York.
          Right about then I was working for an international organization which sent me to Copenhagen to attend a conference. My first evening here, out alone sampling the good Danish beer, I lost my way amidst the dark, narrow, winding streets, my footsteps echoing on the cobblestones, and I felt quite relaxed. I thought, Here is where I want to live. It was such a contrast to the night, after an Elton John concert in Central Park, when I lost my way somewhere toward the North Meadow and did not feel at all relaxed.
          But it was not only the peace, not only the Danish beer, virtually everything about Copenhagen attracted me: the elegant old buildings, the thousand-year history, the people, their calmly friendly manner, the Danish smile, and the Danish distance as well—I liked the fact that Danes grant a perimeter of solitude. This is a contrast to the open-hearted jovial welcome that Americans tend to extend to new-comers.
          Another thing that won me was the Danish light—the light nights of summer and the big sky, especially compared to New York City where the sky is mostly just another tall, thin building among tall thin buildings, but also the profound darkness of winter with its quiet, moody beauty and the many candles that Danes light against that darkness. At the height of summer, the day starts around three a.m. and ends around ten at night; in deep winter, the day starts near ten a.m. and ends around four in the afternoon.
          Perhaps those short winter days are particularly attractive to a writer. They give a quiet and a peace that is conducive to meditation. But best are the summer evenings, yellow skies that take long, slow hours to fade into a pale, ever-darkening blue with the streets going dark more quickly than the sky. It is like the Magritte painting, “Empire of Light”—a dark street scene beneath a daylight bright sky, one of his many paradoxical pictures (is it night or day?); but here in the north that paradox is plain reality.
          The impact of the changing seasonal light, in fact, inspired the four-novel progress I am in the process of publishing, my Copenhagen Quartet, each new novel “embedded,” if you will, in one of the four Danish seasons.
          And I recall walking one summer afternoon at the end of the ’70s along the bank of one of the street lakes on the north side of Copenhagen and seeing there, lying alone and unafraid on the sloping grass, a purely naked young woman sunning herself, eyes closed in the warm pleasure of the light, and that remains for me in memory a symbol of the northern Europe which drew me to it.
          That might seem a frivolous or romantic vision, but for me it it neither. In the us of my youth, public nudity was illegal and, to the best of my knowledge, still is most places. A woman breast-feeding a child in public is a matter of controversy. Yet what could be more lovely? How odd that human beings will pay large sums of money to watch two men punch one another bloody yet are disturbed by a woman breastfeeding a baby. One of the oldest public monuments in Copenhagen, the four-century old Charity Fountain, depicts Charity sculpted as the Virgo Lactans, translated literally from the Danish name as “The Nipple-Giving Virgin”—the fountain’s water sprays from the Virgin’s breasts.
          The easy acceptance of the body and human sexuality in Denmark, in most of Europe, seems to me also an aspect of the mind-set upon which Danish society is built. Most Danes would smile incredulously to learn that not until 2003 did the American Supreme Court declare unconstitutional the laws in 13 states prohibiting consensual homosexuality (and/or assorted acts of heterosexual “sodomy”); here same-sex marriages and consensual sexual behavior have been a human right for years.
          This sense of openness, fairness, mutual personal respect has produced a social system by which, for example, comprehensive medical care is provided to all in an equal manner. Education, through university, including medical school, is provided equitably and free of charge. In fact, university students here receive a small salary from the state, for to study is considered an effort on behalf of the public good. By contrast, on the day of writing this, I saw an article in the New York Times subtitled, “Millions of college students will have to shoulder more of the costs of their education under federal rules imposed last month.”
          Full dental care for children is provided free of charge here until the sixteenth year, by which time most Danes have a good set of teeth with which to start their adult lives. By the time I was 16, my mouth looked like a silvermine of fillings; my two kids—born and raised here—at that age had never had a single cavity.
          There are also humane laws governing employment conditions, working hours, and firing procedures—you can’t just kick someone out here—and well-organized unions for everybody, with tax-deductible union dues.
          And the death penalty is unconstitutional, as it is in all Member States of the European Union. How sad to think that for one brief shining moment in the US there was a moratorium on executions—until a psychopathic killer in Utah challenged the system and demanded his right to face the firing squad, thus unleashing a system over the past decades by which many hundreds of people have been exterminated by gas, electricity, bullets, noose, and lethal injection—some percentage of them, as indicated by dna technology, innocent. Equally distressing to consider that the current President of the United States was governor of the state which has the highest execution record and according to at least one report even privately mocked a woman on death row who begged him for mercy. His brother, too, governs a state that pointedly made no apology for the faulty electric chair that burned a condemned man to death. That’ll show ’em what they get!
           It strikes me as less than fortunate that The Land of the Free has an inordinate proportion of its citizens in prison for nonviolent crimes. If you take a ride on a Greyhound bus most places in the United States you will have an opportunity to meet any number of people on their way home from prison. Earlier this year, riding the dog from Greenville to Beaufort, South Carolina, one of my fellow passengers was a 23-year-old black man carrying his worldly possessions in a shoe box and brown paper bag, on his way home from prison where he had been since he was sixteen. For what? I didn’t ask him, but I could guess: drug abuse. He was a quiet, non-aggressive, self-effacing young man, frightened at the prospect of changing buses on the way, afraid he could not find the connection. I helped him, and in Beaufort his mother and sister were waiting for him; before hurrying into their arms, he turned to me, pressed his palms together, bowed his head and said, “Thank you, sir. Thank you for your kindness.”
          There is so much to admire about America, a land of vast natural beauty and bounty, of friendly generous hospitable inventive industrious people. The record of its generosity and accomplishments speaks for itself. It put a man on the moon, helped rebuild Europe and Japan after World War II. It has the world’s best paper towels, toilet paper, doorknobs, band-aids, plumbing, cola, potato chips, pretzels, refrigerator baggies, staplers, supermarkets, aluminum foil and plastic wrap. But it also, for example, breeds global plagues such as McDonalds, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, 7-Eleven, Pizza Hut . . . On the Champs Elysses in Paris is a McDonalds. In Moscow, Beijing, London, Dublin, everywhere, you find them. The prime corners of Copenhagen at the City Hall Square are blemished with the gaudy facades of a 7-Eleven, Burger King, and kfc. At one corner of the ancient and beautiful Amager Torv, where Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard once took their coffee, is a McDonalds. At one corner of Copenhagen’s excellent east-side Triangle square, in a building where one of the Czars of Russia once slept, is a 7-Eleven with another going up not 500 yards away in one direction, a McDonalds and 7-Eleven 500 yards in another. I once recited this Jeremiad to an American poet I met in Geneva, assuming she would be sensitive to my distress, and she exclaimed, “Why, McDonalds are delicious! What right do you have to criticize? You jumped ship!”
          Perhaps that also precludes me from lamenting the fact that the us has contributed to the education of torturers to support corrupt regimes. The response of Denmark to this ghastly phenomenon—the widespread use of torture—has been to establish a Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims from around the world, a model for the many such centers which have now been established in numerous other countries. In the post 9/11 world, where new categories of imprisonment are devised to evade even the most minimal humanitarian requisites, concern about the employment of torture is perhaps even less pronounced than before; but research conducted in the Copenhagen Rehabilitation Center has shown that torture is not merely employed to extract information that might prevent future terror or rebellion; it is as often employed to break the spirits and bodies of strong human beings who might pose a threat to the status quo. Just as one might be forgiven for wondering what junk food does to the strong bodies of the poor. (In fairness, I should add that the American Congress a few days ago paid public tribute to the Danish physician Inge Genefke, a founder of Copenhagen’s first torture rehabilitation clinic, for her continuing international crusade).
          Other, less dramatic aspects of the Danish society which I admire include the fact that there are no tolls on Danish highways, that there are excellent public transport systems, that the authorities see to it that streets, sidewalks, public buildings are kept in relatively good repair.
          Now you may ask, who pays for all this?
          The taxpayers. All of them. Even those on the dole—for even if you are on the dole here you pay tax. And the tax rates are formidable. A blanket sales tax of 25% on virtually everything. Income tax rates up to around 60 %. And luxury taxes that are hard to believe; it is said that when a Dane buys a car, he buys two cars, one for himself and one for the State. (Personally I turned mine over to my first duchess when we parted and have not owned, needed or wanted one since, content with my bicycle, the excellent public trains and buses, and the taxi system.)
          I admit that the Danish internal revenue service can seem like a legalized terrorist organization. There are also excesses in the administration of the tax system here—both in the taxing and in the doling out. When I received my first paycheck in Denmark, I was shocked at how little was left after state and county taxes were withheld. Seeing my distress, my father-in-law called me aside. “Look,” he said. “Don’t focus on what’s written on your pay stub. Ask yourself if you have a good life. Do you live well? Eat well? Do your children have a good environment? Does your family have a good life?” And he was right. I had and continue to have a good life here regardless of the discrepancy between my gross and net income.
          My two children are currently studying at Copenhagen University. In the United States, if you have two children entering the university, it is time for most people to take out a second mortgage on the house. Here, I’ve already paid it over the years through my taxes. More importantly, no one here is denied a good education because they don’t have the money. As Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, “With taxes you build civilization.” And as Thomas Friedman put it recently in the New York Times, “Democrats should ask the voters to substitute the word ‘services’ for ‘taxes’ everytime they hear the President speak.”
          Now Denmark is, of course, a country of a mere 5.2 million, immensely smaller and immensely easier to administer than the us. Life is far from perfect here, but some important values do tend to take the front seat, even if the current minority right-centrist government—which also supported the second American excursion in Iraq in search of those, at this writing, still infamously elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction—seems to want to curtail some of those values.

          One of the aspects of the Danish society that initially surprised me is the amount of free time one has. When I lived in the us it was standard practice for private employers to provide one week’s vacation per year for the first three years of employment, doling out extra weeks over the course of the next 20 years. In Denmark, when I learned I would have six weeks vacation a year right from the start, I was stunned: Impossible! I thought. How will we ever get anything done? Which now sounds to me like a slave asking how he’ll ever manage without his manacles. In fact, the Danes are an industrious people. They work hard and get the job done with lots of time left over to play—or to follow an avocation. At present, I have seven weeks holiday and two weeks personal-development time a year. I work a 36-hour week, and like all Danes I have a five-day weekend for Easter, and a number of other three-and four-day weekends as well as three days off for Christmas. This has made it possible for me to manage two careers—a full-time executive job as well as my literary career which by itself would not have provided sufficient income to give my family a good life.
          And I do like the way Danes celebrate their holidays—particularly with that most sublime of creations, the traditional Danish lunch, a table laden with anywhere from five or six to 20 or more delicacies: a variety of herrings (marinated, pickled, curried, sherried, fried, smoked), smoked eel, boar paté, fish fillets breaded and fried, raw chopped beef with raw egg yoke and onion, roast pork with crackling, cod roe boiled or smoked, smoked cod livers, the eggs of various fishes, shrimp, liver, heart, meat drippings, fried onions, remoulade sauce, red cabbage, cress, chives, half a dozen excellent breads with butter—actual butter, and a variety of cheeses, including if you are lucky, one so old it is tinged pink and delicately radiates your gums as you eat it, demanding to be chased with strong beer and a chilled aquavite—also known as “snaps,” from the German, to snap it down.
          I like the rituals of the lunch, too. The initial formality that slowly gives way with the beer and snaps. The ritual of the skål—raising the glass, looking each person at the table in the eye, saying “Skål!”, taking a sip, “presenting” the glass again with a slight, formal nod, then proceeding with the herring. Fish must swim, the Danes say. Such rituals are valuable to a society, to a culture.
          Some people complain that Danes drink too much, and no doubt some do. The minimum drinking age is fifteen! A lawyer-colleague recently told me, “Everytime I have a beer I feel like a new man. The trouble is, that new man wants a beer, too.”
          But in fact, beer and snaps is a ritualistic drink which is part of the traditional social fabric here. At Christmas time, for example, Danes take drink with their meals to celebrate a combination of things—not really so much the Christian feast as the winter solstice, the closeness of family and friends and the belief that the long, dark Danish winter is not death, but rather the beginning of the birth of spring. At that very dark time of year —and it does get dark, Shakespeare chose his setting for Hamlet well—ritual is important: the mellowing of the spirit, the so-called living light of burning candles on the living Christmas tree, the joyous dance around it by all present holding hands in a circle, the calm peaceful stillness in the streets of Christmas Eve in this city of a million souls is awe-inspiring: The city stops. The quiet is sacred. This darkest night of year wraps around you, wherever you are, in the heart of your family, surrounded by friends, even alone, the silence is calming, beautiful in its mystery.

          Being a small society with a largely homogeneous population, the Kingdom of Denmark is held together by its language, well-defined customs and manners and a liberal humanistic view of life regardless of who sits at the helm of government. Naturally, Danes cherish their language and its rich literature and wealth of psalms, a national treasure accessible only to those who know Danish. The language is nourished by its poets and writers of whom there are many, though few well known beyond the Danish borders—Hans Christian Andersen, of course, one of the world’s great writers, erroneously considered an author of children’s books. Andersen wrote poetry, drama, novels, travel books, but as his friend, H. C. Ørsted, who discovered electromagnetism, once correctly predicted, “Your novels have made you famous, but your tales will make you immortal.” Søren Kierkegaard is another of the great Danish writers, known as the father of existentialism, the philosophy that became so important to the battered consciousness of the 20th century. Karen Blixen, too, also known as Isak Dinesen, though perhaps better known now as Meryl Streep in Out of Africa. A better Blixen-inspired film is Babette’s Feast, which won an Academy Award in 1988, based on her fine short-story, contrasting the spiritual sensuality of France with the anti-sensual religion of the black-clad Jutland Christian sect of the Inner Mission (roughly equivalent to the extreme American Baptist). Another Danish fiction writer—admired greatly by Joyce, Rilke, and Freud—is J. P. Jacobsen, and from the novel and film Smilla’s Sense of Snow, many will know the contemporary Peter Høeg.           In recent times there has been international recognition of Danish film (Lars van Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, Gabriel Axel, Bille August, and others), but most Danish writers remain unknown in the world beyond Scandinavia. And the reason for this could only be that even the most skillful translation might fail to convey the context and special qualities of a language and its literature.
          Perhaps the most essential quality of Danish is the way in which Danish speakers employ irony, understatements so dry that even an outsider who speaks the language might miss them. Irony—and perhaps especially self-irony—is an important component of the Danish language and nature, just as it is important here not to be too enthusiastic. Danes value calm and understatement.
          And irony is not to be confused with sarcasm—a mean-spirited cousin of the more playful irony in which one speaks in reversals: “Lovely weather,” a Dane might say when it is cold and rainy. Or, “That wasn’t the worst dinner I’ve ever eaten” to mean it was delicious. Or if something is very unclear, a Dane might say, “Klart nok,” meaning literally, “Clear enough,” although the message is, “Murky.”
          Recently I heard a Danish fellow describe a pleasant experience by saying, “It was not pure suffering,” and once, in a Danish serving house late at night, I heard a Danish fellow try to express his admiration for a woman by saying, “You are not the ugliest woman I has ever seed.” In some parts of the country, in northern Jutland for example, I am told that if a person goes to the doctor and says, “I think I have a kind of uncomfortable feeling in my stomach,” he must be rushed to the hospital.
          Self-irony is important here just as self-seriousness is bad form. You have to be able to laugh at yourself. If a Dane falls in the street, he or she will likely laugh or smile. But more likely than not, one or several hands will reach to help.
          The special character of the language and the near untranslatability of some Danish can be demonstrated by rendering a very literal version of some of the most Danish of things, the songs of the poet Benny Andersen, for example: The refrain of one of the best-loved of them would translate literally: “Life is not the worst thing one has / And soon the coffee is ready.” And, “Nina comes naked from the bath / While I eat a cheese sandwich.” Of course, in Danish, these lines rhyme, but something simple and sound about the sentiment expresses an essence of the Danish joy of life.
          There are other things that sound utterly mad in translation. For example, a not uncommon thing to hear in response to the giving of a gift is, “Hold da kæft, er du rigtig klog?” Which literally means something like, “Shut your mouth, are you really stupid?” I guess the spirit of it is, “You must be stupid to give me such a wonderful gift!”
          It is also enchanting how direct Danish can be: In English, we have the delicate word “brassiere” whose Danish equivalent, “brystholder,” is literally, “breast holder.” The Danes do not believe in calling a spade a shovel. Some words are rather poetic, though: Midwife in Danish is literally “earth mother” (jordemor). Nor does Danish tend to prettify itself with Latinate words: A dentist is a “tooth doctor,” gingivitis is “tooth meat infection” and a vagina in common Danish parlance is a tissekone—literally, a “piss-wife.” The “lavatory” or “sanitary arrangements” are the “toilet”—nor do you “go to the bathroom” in Danish; you go “on the toilet.” But Danish can also be circumspect. To be in “vældig godt” humor (very good humor) or to have “a couple under the vest” is to be pretty drunk.
          The Danish language is not one that you would be likely to study without good reason: James Joyce, for example, studied Danish to be able to read Ibsen in the original.* My own Danish is far from perfect. When I was interviewed in the Danish daily, Politiken, last year, the otherwise very kind journalist, who generously praised my writing, could not resist poking fun at my accent. One of the banes of my existence as a writer in Denmark is that I have great difficulty getting my mouth around the Danish plural for books—the singular is no problem, but the plural comes out—in English equivalent—something like “boks,” and my Politiken interviewer could not resist an orthographic spelling when I spoke about my “boks.”
          Friendly teasing. In fact, in all my time here, people have seldom com- mented on my accent, other than occasionally to call it “charming” (though of course in the world of Danish irony, one might consider what that means). Perhaps four times in nearly thirty years people have mocked my accent, and only once in a truly nasty manner.
          I was interviewed in Danish by two Danish tv channels in connection with the publication of my first Copenhagen novel, in each case a five-minute spot which took many hours to produce since I was interviewed on location against a variety of the city’s backgrounds. In both cases, the interviewer at the end of production confided apologetically that the station might decide to use subtitles as they occasionally do when someone with a heavy Danish dialect speaks on the channel. They were afraid the viewers at home might not be able to understand my Danish so, to assist them, the words might appear simultaneously in print beneath the picture. “We do it for Swedes,” the journalist said consolingly (Swedish and Danish are very close linguistic cousins). This inspired a series of interesting emotions—that after all these years here, my Danish might seem so utterly foreign to the native-speakers that I might as well be speaking some impenetrable dialect. A thought that can make a person feel lonely, like Tony the fruitman of the literary world. That in the end they chose to let my Danish run raw was a relief—though perhaps akin to passing an important exam by the skin of the teeth.
          But it also helped to inform my writing of the novel Greene’s Summer about Bernardo Greene, a Chilean refugee who in his homeland was tortured because his teaching curriculum included the work of a poet who had been executed for verse deemed revolutionary in championing the poor. Deprived of the daily use of his mother tongue, Bernardo must revert to a choice between broken Danish and broken English. In the language school he attends to learn Danish, he meets other refugees, from Palestine and Israel, who can speak four or five languages, but none with mastery. They have no mother tongue—a prospect which terrifies Nardo for he recognizes—as did Balboa exploring the new world—“Por no saber paner los nombres, no las expresos”: Because I do not know the names of things, I cannot express them.
          Human beings are extremely sensitive to the manner in which their language is spoken. In my old New York neighorhood, I was surrounded by an exciting array of accents—Italian, Greek, Yiddish, Hispanic, Irish, German, not to mention the variety of American patterns. Today Americans seem truly to wish to embrace the multicultural basis of their society; in those days, we were less kind—even to our fellow whitebread citizens. Americans from anywhere outside the New York metropolitan area spoke, we were convinced, “like hicks.” Bostonians sounded stupid because they said “ruf” instead of “roof,” “ca” instead of “car.” Upstate New Yorkers rolled their rs—or perhaps it was just that they pronounced them—and we didn’t like that either. And southerners and westerners—fu-ged-aboud-id! Of course, I’ve tried it on my travels in the states, too; I remember a Michigan sergeant in the army who cracked up everytime I said “water”—warda—and a kid in Stockton, California who used to visit me just to hear me say the word “dog.” “Ha! Dawg!”
          When my Danish wife visited New York the first time, the occasional American would guffaw in her face for a mispronounced word amidst her otherwise impeccable English. Once because she had pronounced the word “mayonnaise” as “myonnaise,” another time because she pronounced the y in “syringe” as a long i. The latter case involved a relative of mine with a PhD in science who, when she mouthed that long i, leered at her as though he’d just seen her naked. And it occurred to me how edgily parochial and fear-driven is the compulsion to pronounce words “correctly” and to recoil from or pounce upon those ignorant of the “preferred” sound, who thus exhibit their “otherness”; as though saying “sighringe” instead of “suhringe” had stripped away the deceptive garment of my wife’s excellent English so my provincial cousin finally clearly saw the nakedly subversive, half-commie Dane she really was.
          At Dulles airport last year I chatted with a young woman who asked where my accent was from; I told her New York via Copenhagen and asked about hers. “We don’t hay-ave accents whare Ah was born ’n bred,” she solemnly informed me.
          There is a brilliant scene in the 1980 remake of the film, The Postman Always Rings Twice in which Frank Chambers (Jack Nicholson) conforms to his Greek boss’s mispronunciation of the word “neon”; the establishment decides how we are to pronounce things, and the establishment is whoever owns the joint and administers the food and money. Hearing someone say “De Good Nyews Bout Jedus Christ Wa Luke Write” might be amusing or worse to the provincial ear, but delightful to those who recognize it as the official Gullah Sea Island Creole translation of “The Gospel According to Luke,” in which Luke tell wa dis Book taak bout.
          Secretly I loved the variety of accents that abounded in my childhood. I loved the way the parents of one of my Puerto Rican friends would add an ‘e’ before any initial s—“The United E-states.”—and sounded an initial v as b (“Bery good!”). After school for a while I worked for a Greek shoemaker who pronounced rubber as woba and gloves as golves; I lived for the times he would ask me to bring him his “woba golves.” And I admired the manners of the Latins whose casa was always your casa and were, despite the stereotype of the Latin temper, in fact much slower to anger than my Irish friends, some of whom took any form of address as provocation:
          “How ya doin’?”
          “The fuck ya mean by that? I don know you.”
          Though I read in today’s New York Times an account by 21-year-old Ozzie Garcia, an ex-gang member in LA, who asked some guys in the street, “What’s crackin’?” whereupon they drew guns and shot him in the neck, breaking his jaw. In a sense, it seems chillingly apt that the bullets broke his jaw, as they were a response to his words. The current House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, attributed the Columbine school shootings to words, too—the teaching of evolutionary theory in the schools. Some seven states, in fact, have succeeded in prohibiting the teaching of evolutionary theory; yet even if the us has the highest gun casualty rate in the world, little success has been achieved in prohibiting them. To some, it seems, words are still more dangerous than guns.
          Not until I felt comfortable enough with my Danish that I could attend a party without reverting to English did I really begin to get a feeling for the Danish psychology, the Danish use of irony and understatement and the humor, and begin to feel at home here. I have known a couple of expatriates who lived here for years seeming essentially uninterested in Denmark, as though that which is different here is an affront to their own national characteristics, people who did not like where they were and do not like where they are now, clustering together in isolation, cheating themselves of an immersion in the Danish culture and language.
          Nor am I talking here on behalf of the current catch-phrases, “integration” and “assimilation.” Those from other cultures, the Danish jingoist minority insists, must embrace the Danish values and tongue, must dress and act like Danes, young Muslim women must uncover their heads, etc. And the Danish language must not admit foreign words—which is surely the best way to kill a language, by denying it flexibility. France tried it in an effort to maintain French as the international diplomatic language, and the result is that French has been forced to give ground on every front.
           But language cannot successfully be legislated from above; linguistic development is from street to dictionary. Danes, who have no real equivalent for the multi-purpose English word fuck, have already assimilated it. In Danish, the “curse” words are still literally curse words; the traditional words of “strong” language in Denmark are satan and hell, although a gaudy array of vulgarities such as ass banana are also available if needed.
          I wish that some of the wonderful phrases in Danish would be adopted by English. Consider a term like kæreste sorg—literally “sweetheart sorrow”—an expression to denote the sadness one feels when a love affair is over or in danger. In fact, “sweetheart sorrow” can be an acceptable excuse for a late school assignment or for missing a day of work. It gives an idea of the humanity here.
          There is another Danish saying, skam ros—“shame praise,” to lay it on so thick the praise becomes embarrassing and perhaps ironic. Lest I be accused of shame-praising Denmark, perhaps I should conclude by pointing to what I see as some of the faults of the society and the culture.
          Of course, the whole array of western problems is here, increasing crime, soccer hooliganism, shop-lifting, homelessness, even street violence I am sad to say (though thankfully, so far, still a poverty of guns), and all of the western sorrow of disintegrating family patterns—though I sometimes wonder whether the problem is that the family unit is disintegrating or that it is not disintegrating quickly enough, that the alternative of extended families and networks is not yet sufficiently in place and functional.
          One of the most noted foibles of the Danish character is the so-called Law of Jante—defined in a novel by the Danish-Norwegian writer Axel Sandmose. The Law of Jante is a kind of modern ironic re-rendering of the 10 commandments for a hung-up society; these commandments caution people not to try to be clever and excel lest they be noticed, envied, and thus disliked for—another Danish expression—“carrying your flag so high your feet don’t touch the ground.”
          The first Law of Jante is: “You shall not believe you are someone.”
          “You shall not believe you are more clever than we.”
          “You shall not believe you are good at anything.”
          “You shall not believe you can teach us anything new.”
          But the fact that Danes greatly appreciate the much-quoted Jante Law seems to me equally a sign of their opennness to criticism of their own society. In fact, unlike some other nationalities, Danes are often positively amused to have foreigners identify some of their foibles, as long as it is not done with malice. Danes generally respond well to stimulus. For example, it is said that when you see a group of Danes standing in a circle, talking in low animated voices, if you move closer to them and listen, you will hear one of them saying, “And then we had . . . and then we had . . . and then we had . . . ,” giving a blow-by-blow description of a wonderful meal. With a single exception, I’ve yet to meet a Dane who wasn’t delighted with that bit of teasing about the Danish love of good food—in fact, I first heard the story from a Dane.
          Sadly, one of the things the Danish society has been having trouble with in recent years is learning to make room for other cultures—something that the United States seems finally to have begun to learn to do, making real efforts in the direction of multiculturality, to eliminate not only open racism but also its more covert forms and the kind of colonial thinking that looks down upon cultures other than the white Christian.
          In Denmark today, about five percent of the population consists of immigrants and refugees—about 250,000 out of 5.2 million, and there have been cultural misunderstandings in recent years of a sort that might seem foreign to some Americans today. Emotional flare-ups over things as simple as a Muslim girl wearing a kerchief on her hair in school or a cashier wearing one on a check-out line in the supermarket and misguided attempts to make rules forbidding it.
          As I look back on my early youth in New York, it seems to me that an enormous proportion of us—perhaps like most Germans under the Third Reich—managed to be sufficiently ill-informed to avoid considering that America was a racist and sexist nation. Racist practices finally became illegal—that is, the stated principles of the Founding Fathers finally began to be applied—the apartheid of the American south that was practised right up to the ’50s and ’60s was eliminated and things got better, though of course many of the residual problems are far from solved. Just consider the disproportionate number of African-Americans in the terribly overcrowded American prison system and their disproportionate poverty.
          Denmark, however, comes from a situation where racism and bigotry were virtually unknown—no doubt precisely because the society was so homogeneous. Of course there was the whole array of ugly bigot patter, racial and national slurs—non-whites were fejlfarvet (an alliterative phrase meaning literally “wrong-colored”), southern Europeans were “spaghettis,” Pakistanis and Turks lumped under the slur, Perker. But it came as a shock recently to find that an extreme right wing party could garner a ten-percent chunk of the electorate in Denmark mostly on the background of xenophobic attitudes and blatant anti-Islamic assertions, something even George Bush took pains to avoid even after 9/11.
          An amusing recent cartoon in the Danish newspaper Politiken focuses on the fact that this same party sponsored a penguin in the public zoo. In the cartoon—a daily strip by the political satirist, Jakob Martin Strid—the penguin in question protests, refusing to be sponsored by racists; advised that he is liable to action for calling the party racist, he responds, “I’m an animal! I don’t have to obey laws! They’re racists! Racists! Racists!” (I should add that, as we go to press, the Danish Supreme Court decided in favor of the person being sued for having referred to the head of the party in question as racist.)
          That party—the Danish Folk Party—has also begun to force through some quite ridiculous and alarming legislation—intricate regulations, for example, regarding the background of a foreigner that a Danish citizen may marry. Which will make it interesting to see how the Crown Prince, currently involved with an Australian woman, will manage to get around those laws. His younger brother, in fact, married a Chinese woman, from Hong Kong, whom Danes love as the Brits used to love Princess Di, and the Queen herself is married to a Frenchman with an accent not unlike my own.
          More or less the only time I get to meet immigrants with a non-European background is when I take a taxi or buy something from one of the small local convenience shops, known here as “kiosks.” This would seem to indicate that applications for employment from people with non-Danish sounding names are not regularly included on the short-lists. Statistics seem to confirm this, too—I understand that 65% of immigrants in Denmark are unemployed. Some claim that the lowest-paying jobs are no more lucrative, after taxes, than welfare payments, and that this is a disincentive for those on the lowest rung of the society here to take a job. I don’t doubt that there are some working the relatively generous welfare system—there are more than a few Danes doing that, too—collect unemployment or a social allowance and work off the books, even buy a dog because there is an extra allowance for pets, too. But I find it difficult to believe that this can account for the entire immigrant unemployment statistic, or even a major part of it.
          In my work, I do a great deal of travelling and usually get out to the aiport by taxi. More often than not the driver is a non-European or second-generation immigrant (a so-called “New Dane,” itself a questionable expression) from Turkey, Pakistan, Palestine, Morocco, Bangladesh . . . Because of my accent they often speak frankly with me. I recall one young man in his mid-20s who was, in fact, a Danish citizen but who despised Danes. He was so angry he made me angry, but I tried to use the 20-minute drive to the airport playing good-will ambassador, highlighting positive aspects of the Danish culture; I don’t know if it helped, but he seemed less angry when we parted—even got out of the cab to shake my hand and wish me a good journey.
          Another young man—also a Danish citizen with a brown face—asked where I came from. I told him and asked his nationality. In perfect Danish, he said, “Danish. I was born here, but I’m not treated like a Dane.” He said it quietly, a mannerly, well-spoken young man, a medical student who drove a cab on the side. He was about my own son’s age, and it saddened me to think that he was not being treated well, that people were prejudiced against his appearance and his Turkish family name.
          I am not saying there is not another side to this, too—where Danish liberality is sometimes interpreted, and abused, as weakness or the freedom of Danish women as immorality. All based on lack of communication and misunderstanding.
          Not too long ago I took a taxi from the hospital where my wife had just been admitted for an operation, and my Pakistani cab driver asked if I had been visiting a friend there. “My wife,” I told him. “She’s going to have a tumor removed. We don’t know what it is.” In heavily accented Danish, the driver said, “I am very sorry to hear that. I will pray for you both. We are all in God’s hands. I will pray for you.”
          How unusual it seemed to have a total stranger express such sympathetic concern. I was moved, and it occurred to me how well it spoke of his culture, and how many things might be gained by an opening of the Danish way of life to include some of the ways of other cultures, too—not merely to integrate or assimilate the others and encourage them to embrace Danish values of democracy and humanism. That, too, but also to work for an atmosphere that would allow the different cultures here to exist together and share of each other’s experiences, wisdom and manners.
          I’m an optimist. I continue to hope for the best. I can remember a time when I was surrounded by terrible bigotry and racial hatred in New York— when the word “nigger” was hardly recognized for the obscenity it is. I still remember forty years ago, when I was 18, a woman I worked with in a Manhattan office sneering at a rhythm and blues song on the radio. “Some nigger is driving around in a Cadillac with the money they make off that.” It struck me as such a hopelessly hateful statement I thought our world would never get beyond it. Yet today, African-American music is amongst the most central of musical influences, not only in the United States but around the world. Interest in African-American studies in American universities has soared, museums on the era and effects of American slavery and apartheid are now finally earning the support and attention of the American society at large, and African Americans are increasingly being voted into public office.
          The movement toward multiculturalism and postcolonial thinking has, I believe, brought us a long way in a relatively short time—even if it took centuries to get started! It is beautiful to see the flowering of tolerance in contemporary times—the retreat of sexism, the continuing liberation of women from a situation that was, even in my own lifetime, very nearly servitude, the continuing disappearance of homophobia, the fight for economic democracy.
          Denmark—like the other Nordic countries and many of the countries of Northern Europe—has been well advanced in these struggles, and I believe that the essential humanism of the Danish people will continue to prevail.