You never knew if the others would come. The custodian with the flat nose let them, for a price, and he listened, everyone knew he stood outside and listened, holding his own meat in his greasy hand. Sometimes you were asleep and then you woke, and it was the same dark but now you knew someone was there, three, four of them, in the dark, and you opened your mouth to scream, but it was covered so all you heard was your own muffled groaning and their breath, the muttered words.
—from A Passion in the Desert, by Thomas E. Kennedy
New Releases
AWP Panel on Kennedy’s Work
In March of 2007, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) at its annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia (USA) sponsored a panel on Kennedy’s fiction, entitled, “Thomas E. Kennedy: A Lifetime in Literature.”
At the panel, six professors, writers, and editors spoke about various aspects of Kennedy’s work. Those presentations by Duff Brenna, Robert Stewart, Walter Cummins, Gladys Swan, Michael Lee, and Greg Herriges will be published in the coming months in South Carolina Review, New Letters magazine, Cimarron Review, and Perigee.
The Fall 2007 and Spring 2008 issues of South Carolina Review will include a focus on Kennedy’s work, including a full 29-page bibliography, an in-depth interview, several essays and photographs, and original fiction by Kennedy.
- Editors’ Forum
Appears in South Carolina Review, Issue 40.1, Fall 2007
NOTE: Both of the following essays are published online in a single PDF document, “Editors’ Forum,” with the essay by Stewart appearing on the first two pages of the document.
“Passing the Test of Time: The Essays of Thomas E. Kennedy”
by Robert Stewart
“The Revelation of Character Inside Out: Stream of Consciousness Techniques in the Work of Thomas E. Kennedy”
by Walter Cummins
-
- A View from Across the Sea
Interview of Thomas E. Kennedy by Melanie Tortoroli
Appears in South Carolina Review, Issue 40.1, Fall 2007
This in-depth interview (9500 words) with Kennedy about his experience as an expatriate writer was conducted by Melanie Tortoroli as a Harvard senior project.
-
- “Let Everyone Forget Everyone”
Excerpt from Kennedy’s novel, Danish Fall
Will appear in South Carolina Review, Issue 40.2, Spring 2008
-
- View excerpt at the Clemson University website. (Link opens in new, resizable window.)
-
Frank’s First Literary Conference Call
“A Literary Conference Call” appears in Issue 18 of Frank, an international journal of contemporary writing and art.
Frank’s first Literary Conference Call is, as the journal describes it, “an innovative dialog bringing writers and readers into direct contact. Story writer Thomas E. Kennedy in Copenhagen engages in a lively exchange with novelist Duff Brenna in San Diego, moderated in Paris by Frank Editor David Applefield.”
Kennedy has five books in manuscript, now available for publication. These books include a novel, two collections of stories (many of which have received various distinctions), and translations from the Danish of two nonfiction books.
- Roaring Boys — a novel set in Queens, New York City, in 1964, about a group of young men about to be drafted into service in the Vietnam War.
-
- Mistress of the Sunrise — a collection of stories, all of which have been published in nationally distributed North American literary journals. Most of these stories have received various distinctions.
-
- A View of the World — a collection of stories set in various cities in the US and around the world, all of which have been published in nationally distributed North American literary journals. Most of these stories have received distinctions.
-
- Silence Was My Song: The Bombing of the French School — Kennedy’s translation from the Danish of the book by Alice Maud Guldbrandsen.
-
- Ms. Guldbrandsen is a Danish painter, photographer, and writer who survived as a five-year-old child the accidental destruction by RAF bombers of the school she was attending — and the ensuing years of silence about the tragedy, silence forced upon the survivors and their families via advice from well-meaning but terribly mistaken experts.
-
- Ms. Guldbrandsen broke that silence sixty years later with her book, Silence Was My Song (Tavshed Blev Min Sang), in which she includes her account of the ordeal, along with 34 others from survivors and witnesses.
-
- Kennedy completed his English translation from the Danish of Silence Was My Song in November 2007. He writes in an essay about that work:
-
- “Reading and translating this profoundly moving book, I was struck by the fact that each of the 35 stories of this same event had its own distinct character – even when recounting the same or similar details and responses to it, the individual personality of each of the girls – now women – shone through and demonstrated unforgettably how this was not a single tragedy but more than 100 tragedies.”
-
- Full text of Kennedy’s essay appears at this website under Silence Was My Song: Two Mistakes Were Made That Day.
-
- The Meeting with Evil: Inge Genefke’s Fight against Torture — Kennedy’s translation from the Danish of the book by distinguished political journalist, Thomas Larsen.
-
- Published in Copenhagen in 2005, the book’s subject is a Danish physician and humanitarian by the name of Inge Genefke. It includes a foreword by Tom Lantos, United States Congressman, himself the survivor of a camp during the Second World War; and an endorsement by Isabel Coixet, who directed a heartbreaking and hopeful film, The Secret Life of Words (2006), which deals, in large part, with the work of Inge Genefke.
-
- Also included in the book are endorsements by Tim Robbins and Sarah Pally who starred in The Secret Life of Words, as well as by Julie Christie, who portrayed Inge Genefke in the film.
-
- Dr. Inge Genefke is a Danish physician who has been fighting for more than 30 years against the use of torture, and on behalf of its victims to provide them treatment. She has received many awards and distinctions from many countries throughout the world for her efforts and has been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Her struggle is not political, but humanistic, apolitical. Her aim is to stop the torturers and help the tortured.
-
- New Letters magazine of the University of Missouri Kansas City will run a three-part series carved out of Kennedy’s translation of The Meeting with Evil. The series will run consecutively in the Fall 2007, Winter 2008, and Spring 2008 issues of New Letters (Volume 74, numbers 1, 2, and 3).
-
- In addition to the book excerpts in the New Letters series, you can learn more about Dr. Genefke, Thomas Larsen’s book about her and Kennedy’s translation of it, and organizations such as the United Nations Convention Against Torture, in the essay, “A Shout from Copenhagen 6: The Meeting with Evil.”
New Books: Published
Kennedy has several books scheduled for release during 2008. Information about two of those books follows below, and details about the others will appear at this website as soon as they become available.
- What do writers do to eat and live while they write? For 20 sample solutions, see Writers on the Job: Tales of the Nonwriting Life, by Thomas E. Kennedy and Walter Cummins.
-
- Riding the Dog: A Look Back at America is a collection of essays that were originally published in New Letters magazine of the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Three of the essays also received honorable mention in the Pushcart Prize, and one was republished in the anthology, New American Essays.
-
- Riding the Dog opens with a Foreword by the Editor of New Letters, Robert Stewart, who discusses the craft of the essays and their literary value. The book also includes an Introduction by the author, discussing the pleasures for a fiction writer of taking up creative nonfiction.
More details about Kennedy’s most recently published books follow below, where books are listed by publication date, in reverse chronological order.
Riding the Dog:
A Look Back at America
Book Cover Image (opens in new, resizable window and shows wrap-around view of front and back covers)
Reviews / Blurbs
Release Date: October 2008
Publisher: New American Press
ISBN: 978-0-9729679-6-9
This collection comprises a quintet of essays:
- “Riding the Dog,” about a ride through the South on a Greyhound bus
-
- “In the Dark,” an account of being in New York City during the 2003 blackout
-
- “The Bridge Back to Queens,” a description of a visit back to Kennedy’s hometown in Queens
-
- “Land Where My Fathers Wrote,” an essay about writers and bars in New York City
-
- “Life in Another Language,” excerpted elsewhere at this website
Writers on the Job:
Tales of the Nonwriting Life
Release Date: July 2008
Publisher: Hopewell Publications
ISBN: To be announced
Publisher’s Announcement
(opens in new, resizable window)
|
|
Cast Upon the Day
This collection includes a story which won first prize in the Gulf Coast competition, and several stories that received other awards, including honorable mention in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories.
Release Date: August 2007
Publisher: Hopewell Publications
ISBN: 1-933435-151
Excerpts
Reviews / Blurbs
Buy from Hopewell Publications
Buy from Author
|
|
A Passion in the Desert
A novel about love and unfaithfulness in its various forms, in which a man’s long forgotten past circles back to stalk him.
Release Date: April 2007
Publisher: Wordcraft of Oregon
ISBN-10: 1-877655-52-X
ISBN-13: 978-1-877655-52-4
Excerpts
Reviews / Blurbs
Buy from Wordcraft of Oregon
|
|
New Essays
“The Junk We Carry” is featured in the May 2008 issue of The Writer magazine, which describes the article this way: “How an accomplished fiction writer found some of his best stories in notes, scraps and souvenirs.”
NEWSFLASH: KENNEDY ESSAY WINS NATIONAL MAGAZINE AWARD!
Judges choose “I Am Joe’s Prostate” from among six finalists for a 2008 National Magazine Award in the Essay category. Finalists also included essays by Walter Kim, Stephen King, Katrina Onstad, Tim Page, and Sallie Tisdale.
The 43rd annual National Magazine Awards, the magazine industry’s highest honor, were awarded at a gala event in New York City on the first of May. Named after the Alexander Calder Stabile “Elephant,” the 2008 “Ellies” represent a record-setting 1,964 entries from 333 print and online magazines.
“[The Essay category] recognizes excellence in essay writing on topics ranging from the personal to the political. Whatever the subject, emphasis should be placed on the author’s eloquence, perspective, fresh thinking and unique voice.” (American Society of Magazine Editors)
See complete list of categories and finalists (link opens in new, resizable window).
See event photos at Media Bistro: To see Kennedy and Robert Stewart with the “Ellie” award, scroll down to the fourth photo under “Ellies ’08: Snapshots and Snippets.” Here’s the caption:
Writer Tom Kennedy got an Ellie for his New Letters essay “I Am Joe’s Prostate,” and he ain’t letting go. Related: He bad-assedly rocked that leopard fez at Ellie events all week.
Excerpt from the Washington Post, 2 May 2008:
Geographic Wins Again at Magazine Awards
By Peter Carlson, Washington Post Staff Writer
New Letters snagged the essay award for “I Am Joe’s Prostate” by Thomas E. Kennedy. “‘I Am Joe’s Prostate’ steals its title from the 1950s Reader’s Digest series, but Reader’s Digest was never like this,” the judges wrote. “Wince-inducing, outrageously honest and wickedly funny, Thomas Kennedy’s account of his prostate-cancer scare is essay writing at its most original. Laugh the whole way through, then ponder the subtext of medical testing gone haywire.”
We will pause at this point to enable our male readers to take a deep breath and compose themselves.
Read the full article (link opens in new, resizable window).
Where You Can Find Kennedy’s Essay
“I Am Joe’s Prostate” appears in New Letters quarterly magazine, Volume 73, Issue Number 4. Read an excerpt…
This essay shares top billing for the New Letters Readers Award for the Essay, 2006-2007. See list of categories and winners (link opens in new, resizable window).
Kudos for “I Am Joe’s Prostate”:
- “Thank you, many times, for … ‘I am Joe’s Prostrate.’ It was achingly good. In all ways. Brilliant. A fabulous piece, and I hope that it will win New Letters The National Magazine Award next year for essay.”
-
- “[This essay is] dark and hilarious!”
-
- “I just read Kennedy’s essay … Not sure I have laughed that hard in weeks.”
-
- “… yesterday, I get home, and there’s New Letters waiting for me with your killer essay, ‘I Am Joe’s Prostate.’ Really, man, I just can’t get it out of my mind — maybe it’s my age, but also, as painful as the piece was to contemplate, it was just beautifully made. That’s all I can say.”
-
- “I thought maybe the essay was based on your own experience, but I was hoping not; it was so damn torturous just to read — to live it: man, you should get the purple heart!”
-
- “I laughed and laughed. I wonder if [my husband would] find it so funny. I thought it a stitch.”
“Who Says You Can’t Shift Point of View?” is featured in the October 2007 issue of The Writer magazine.
From The Writer, referring to Kennedy’s essay: “Who says you can’t shift point of view? Our writer begs to differ on this old edict, and he’s not alone.”
New Stories
“The Baboon Dream” appears in Issue 18 of Perigee.
“This is a strange fish of a story — with a monkey in it!” says Ellen Visson, four-time Pushcart nominee.
Read three short excerpts from “The Baboon Dream.”
“Fellow Travelers” appears in the Summer 2007 issue of Glimmer Train. This is Kennedy’s fourth appearance in the journal: in Issues 10, 30, and 35 (which also includes an interview with him), and now in Issue 63.
“He remembered one Christmas dinner, when he was still new to the family, where he had excused himself from a table of smiling people to use the bathroom and returned to find them all on their feet, shouting at each other, some angrily pulling on overcoats, others weeping or arguing.”
—From “Fellow Travelers” by Thomas E. Kennedy
Excerpt appears on back cover of Issue 63 of Glimmer Train
New Translations
Torture Series in New Letters:
The Meeting with Evil: Inge Genefke’s Fight against Torture
New Letters magazine of the University of Missouri Kansas City will run a three-part series carved out of Kennedy’s translation from the Danish of the book by Thomas Larsen entitled, The Meeting with Evil: Inge Genefke’s Fight against Torture. The series will run consecutively in the Fall 2007, Winter 2008, and Spring 2008 issues of New Letters (Volume 74, numbers 1, 2, and 3).
Inge Genefke is a Danish physician who has been fighting for more than 30 years against the use of torture, and on behalf of its victims to provide them treatment. She has received many awards and distinctions from many countries throughout the world for her efforts and has been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Her struggle is not political, but humanistic, apolitical. Her aim is to stop the torturers and help the tortured.
In addition to the excerpts from The Meeting with Evil that will appear in the New Letters series, you can learn more about Dr. Genefke in the essay that follows, “A Shout from Copenhagen 6: The Meeting with Evil.”
(NOTE: The Medicine and Torture section at this website also includes links to sites about Dr. Genefke and rehabilitation of torture victims.)
A Shout from Copenhagen 6: The Meeting with Evil
Blog entry dated November 13, 2007
by Thomas E. Kennedy
“Now more than ever, the world needs to be told about the extent to which men, women and children are being subjected to torture. Thomas Larsen’s book about Inge Genefke’s Meeting with Evil and her 30-year fight against it bears that witness.”
— Tim Robbins, star of The Secret Life of Words
“Fifty years ago, the Nobel Laureate Albert Camus said, ‘For every man tortured, ten terrorists are born.’ Inge Genefke and the organizations she founded are working to help the victims and stop the torture. What better way to wage the war on terrorism?”
—Julie Christie, who plays Inge Genefke in The Secret Life of Words
“As Thomas Larsen says in his introduction to The Meeting with Evil, torture victims are the loneliest people in the world. Their tormentors inflict upon them excruciatingly painful abuse which they are helpless to defend themselves against and which can permanently damage or completely destroy their bodies and spirit. As the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to the United States Congress, and one who has personally experienced a concentration camp during the Second World War, I feel compelled to ask, Who will speak out for these unfortunate human beings in their loneliness and suffering? It is a comfort and reassurance to know that there is at least one human being who has dedicated the major force of her adult life to doing so. That extraordinary woman is the subject of Mr. Larsen’s book — Dr. Inge Genefke, a Danish physician, an outstanding humanitarian, and a distinguished medical doctor who uses her training and compassion to bring healing to those who have endured the pain of torture.”
—Tom Lantos, United States Congressman (in his foreword to The Meeting with Evil)
I just dotted the last ‘i’ on the translation of a book which was at one and the same time terribly distressing and enormously heartening to work with. Translating it into English made the horrific things described in it seem to be unfolding in slow motion and the courageous fight against these things, also related in the book, awesomely heroic.
In English, the book — which is currently in search of a publisher — will be titled, The Meeting with Evil, and subtitled Inge Genefke’s Fight against Torture. The book was written in Danish by the distinguished political journalist, Thomas Larsen, and published in Copenhagen in 2005. Its subject is a Danish physician by the name of Inge Genefke.
The book includes a foreword by Tom Lantos, United States Congressman, himself the survivor of a camp during the Second World War, as well as endorsements by Isabel Coixet who directed a heartbreaking and hopeful film dealing, in large part, with the work of Inge Genefke, and Tim Robbins and Sarah Pally who starred in that film, The Secret Life of Words (2006), as well as Julie Christie, who portrayed Inge Genefke in the film.
Inge Genefke has devoted the past half of her 68 years fighting against torture and struggling to ensure that the world is aware of the terrifying extent to which torture is being employed throughout the world as well as to see to it that care is provided for those whose lives have been broken by these crimes against humanity and to fight against the continuing existence of this inhumanity.
Her efforts and those of her colleagues have resulted in a situation where undeniable evidence now exists to disprove the lies of those political and military regimes who seek to deny the fact that torture of the most heinous sort not only exists but is being widely employed. Employed — as Inge Genefke states — not to obtain information really, but to eradicate the personalities of courageous individuals taking a stand in society. “Torture,” she says, “does not produce reliable information. Under torture, a person will say anything to make the torture stop, will confess to crimes he knows nothing about, will sign blank pages to make the pain stop.”
Inge Genefke’s efforts and those of her colleagues have resulted in the establishment of two centers for rehabilitation and research against torture in Copenhagen which formed the model for scores of other centers throughout the world, providing treatment for hundreds of thousands of victims and gathering research for the treatment of the victims as well as evidence which can be used to prove that torture is in use and produced in court against those responsible.
The pages of Thomas Larsen’s book are filled with equal parts of horror and hope and contain a portrait of the woman who has had the courage and tenacity to fight for all these years against this ugliness. Inge Genefke provides the hope. It is encouraging to know that there exists a force in the world willing to confront this evil — she and her husband, Dr. Bent Sørensen, and all her colleagues at Copenhagen’s Rehabilitation Center for Torture Victims and the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, and those throughout the world who have been trained and aided by them in their own fight against torture and struggle to help its victims.
Inge Genefke has received many awards and distinctions from many countries throughout the world for her efforts and has been repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Her struggle is not political, but humanistic, apolitical. Her aim is to stop the torturers and help the tortured.
Thanks to the United Nations Convention against Torture — which is also analyzed in Thomas Larsen’s book — torture, for all signatory countries, is a crime without a statute of limitations and one which can be tried anywhere, not only in the country where it has been committed. And the effects of this have already been seen. Torturers like Augusto Pinochet are no longer safe to travel freely in the world, enjoying the profits they have reaped from their activities. There is no more immunity for such people. Torturers, from the top on down through the hierarchy, are no longer safe in their misdeeds. A soldier or military policeman or “special adviser” is no longer free to claim that he was only following orders. The UN Convention makes it clear that such orders are unlawful and that it is unlawful to obey them.
The distinguished, 70-year-old literary magazine, New Letters, published by the University of Missouri Kansas City and edited by Robert Stewart, beginning with its Autumn 2007 issue, will publish a series of articles with excerpts from Thomas Larsen’s book about Inge Genefke. For a preview of what will appear in the book, readers are invited to read those issues of New Letters.
At the same time, a forthcoming on-line publication, Exploring Globalization, co-edited by Walter Cummins (who also edits The Literary Review, currently celebrating its 50th anniversary), will include in its inaugural number my interview with Inge Genefke and Bent Sørensen.
Readers with questions about this important topic, publishers who are interested in acquiring the English translation of this book, and periodicals interested in articles or interviews are invited to contact me via this blog or my website.
(NOTE: This essay also appears in the blog at Absinthe New European Writing, dated November 13, 2007.)
New Translations:
Silence Was My Song: The Bombing of the French School
Alice Maud Guldbrandsen is a Danish painter, photographer, and writer who survived as a five-year-old child the accidental destruction by RAF bombers of the school she was attending — and the ensuing years of silence about the tragedy, silence forced upon the survivors and their families via advice from well-meaning but terribly mistaken experts.
Ms. Guldbrandsen broke that silence sixty years later with her book, Silence Was My Song (Tavshed Blev Min Sang), in which she includes her account of the ordeal, along with 34 others from survivors and witnesses.
Kennedy completed his English translation from the Danish of Ms. Guldbrandsen’s book in November 2007. In the essay that follows, Silence Was My Song: Two Mistakes Were Made That Day, he talks about how his close reading of Ms. Guldbrandsen’s book during the translation has affected him and how he hopes her “darkly beautiful song” may affect others as well.
(NOTE: The Artists and Galleries section at this website offers other facets, too, such as the link to an interview of Alice Maud Guldbrandsen by Duff Brenna, as well as reprints of several of her paintings.)
Silence Was My Song: Two Mistakes Were Made That Day
Blog entry dated November 20, 2007
by Thomas E. Kennedy
Suddenly I heard a quivering voice whisper, “Sister, do you think we’re going to die?”
“Yes,” I whispered back. “Yes, I think we are going to die.”
“Do you think it will take long?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I replied. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
—From Silence Was My Song: The Bombing of the French School, by Alice Maud Guldbrandsen
On March 21st, 1945, the Royal Airforce sent a fleet of mosquito bombers toward Copenhagen on a precision bombing mission: to take out the Gestapo headquarters in German-occupied Denmark.
Admirably, under difficult conditions, the RAF managed to destroy Gestapo HQ without killing the Danish resistance prisoners on the top floor of the building, which the Gestapo was using as a human shield. However, as too often happens in such “precision” undertakings, there was “collateral damage.” One of the planes hit a light mast and went down beside a school; the smoke that rose from the exploding plane misled those coming just after into mistaking the school for their target. Before the mistake was discovered, the school building had been bombed.
The school — the so-called French School — was in session at the time, and many children and teachers were buried beneath the building. Some of the children were boiled alive in the water from burst pipes heated by the fires caused by the bombs. Others drowned in that water. Still others were simply crushed beneath beams and chunks of walls and staircases.
In all, over 100 civilians were killed, 86 of them children. 394 children and 34 adults were rescued — and had to live with the memory of what they went through and witnessed that day.
One five-year-old girl, Alice Maud Guldbrandsen, was buried beneath the rubble, but managed to claw herself halfway out and was saved by heroic rescue workers who risked their own lives to get the children and nuns who were still alive to safety before the building collapsed totally. Alice Guldbrandsen was brought to a hospital in the Frederiksberg section of the city and was told to join a line of children before a desk where a nurse sat writing down their names. When she got to the head of the line, the nurse asked her name, but Alice was unable to speak, so she was sent to the back of the line, but when she got to the desk again, she still could not speak. Finally, she was placed under a blanket in a bed in one of the over-filled wards where, finally, after many hours of frantic searching, her father recognized a lock of her blond hair peeking out from beneath the blanket and brought her home.
Then another mistake was made. The parents of the surviving children were told that it would be unhealthy for them to discuss what had happened with the children. If the children tried to speak about it, they should change the subject, or say, “We’ll just forget about that now and put it all behind us.” But such things can not be forgotten or suppressed. They come back in dreams, in the form of anguish and fear — fear of elevators, of basements, of airplanes, of dust and plaster, a haunting sense of loss… They linger and fester in the forced silence.
Nearly sixty years later, Alice Guldbrandsen decided finally it was time to break that silence. She contacted some of the girls who had been in the school with her — neither had the children who experienced the catastrophe discussed it with one another — and invited them to her home to talk about what had happened to them that day and the after-effects in their lives since then, through the years.
At last the silence was broken, and Alice Guldbrandsen asked the women who had joined her that evening to write down their memories of the day — or she interviewed them and wrote down their recollections. She contacted others — the nuns, some of whom were still alive, up in their 90s, those still living parents of the children who had survived and some who have since died, rescue workers, doctors, nurses, firemen, a photographer. She even got hold of one of the RAF airmen, a navigator, now in his 80s, who wrote his description of the day and told her that the disaster had haunted him for all those years.
Alice Maud Guldbrandsen says, “In the course of time, during my research for the book, I scrutinized very many reports from the period of the war but didn’t come upon a single book that told the whole story about that disaster. At most it is dealt with in a single short sentence or two, summed up in a quick phrase — ‘The French School in Copenhagen was by a fatal mistake bombed…’ So there was still reason for me to put words to this apparently ‘forgotten’ event.”
Out of the thirty-five accounts that she gathered, including her own, the key report, Alice Maud Guldbrandsen put together a mosaic of what occurred that day, creating a record that would for all time defy the silence that had been imposed upon the children who survived those dreadful events. And she discovered that on that very day, in the very hospital to which she had been brought, unable to speak, one of Denmark’s most celebrated contemporary poets was born and years later had written a poem about the bombing, which begins, “Like most people, I was born during a war…” Alice Maud Guldbrandsen used that poem as an epigraph to the book she wrote and published in Danish in 2005, entitled (in English translation), Silence Was My Song: The Bombardment of the French School in 1945.
At this writing, I am nearly finished translating the book into English. A major excerpt from the translation was published in The Literary Review (Vol. 49, No. 2, Winter 2006, pages 23-48), including the poem by Henrik Nordbrandt. The book sold well in Danish — its hardcover edition sold out and a paperback version was issued in 2007. The English version is now ready to be offered on the English-language market.
Alice Maud Guldbrandsen tells that her reason for writing this book was not merely to give words to the dark silent song within her, but to put a face on human catastrophes of this sort, including those that occur now, everywhere in the world. So that when one reads in the newspapers and sees on television, as one does weekly, daily even, about civilian collateral damage during military conflicts, terrorism, torture, persecution, and other violent abuses — the bombing of a school, a hospital, a refugee camp — that it will not be seen as one undifferentiated lump of a mistake. But as a series of individual human beings and their families and their friends who suffer the loss of their lives, whose bodies are damaged, their minds and spirits hurt for all time.
“Fortunately, there were many who survived,” says Ms. Guldbrandsen, “but most of them have since then carried the burden of that experience in their bodies and minds — some of which might have been avoided if they had not been met by silence in response to their inner suffering. That was the only ‘crisis help’ offered in those days — when the best advice given to the shocked parents of the shocked children was, ‘Don’t talk about it — they’ll forget.’ But none of them forgot.”
Reading and translating this profoundly moving book, I was struck by the fact that each of the 35 stories of this same event had its own distinct character — even when recounting the same or similar details and responses to it, the individual personality of each of the girls — now women — shone through and demonstrated unforgettably how this was not a single tragedy but more than 100 tragedies — more, it was a tragedy for those lost as well as for all of those who were deprived of all those loved ones and for all of the children who survived as well and the adults who witnessed the terrible sight of children broken and dying because of the predictable imprecision of a so-called “precision” bombing.
Of course, the Second World War was different than most wars. Perhaps it was inevitable. There was an honorable cause. But what about all the wars which could be avoided, which are pure and unadulterated stupidity? What about all the victims of those wars?
Personally, after reading this book, I will never feel the same about any catastrophe I read about in the newspapers. It will never be a plane that went down or a hospital or school or bus that was bombed; it will be a plane full of people, a school full of children, a hospital or bus full of human beings.
I know Alice Maud Guldbrandsen personally. She is a beautiful, kind, and loving human being. And her beauty and compassion are reflected through her book. One can be thankful she survived that tragedy as well as the silence that followed it, that she lived to find the words for this darkly beautiful song — a song of sorrow but also of hope.
If readers are interested in more information, or if publishers are interested in seeing the manuscript of the translation for possible publication, or if magazines are interested in publishing excerpts from the book or in interviewing the author, please do not hesitate to contact me via this blog or my website.
(NOTE: This essay also appears in the blog at Absinthe New European Writing, dated November 20, 2007.)
A Shout From Copenhagen: A Weekly Blog
Link to Kennedy’s Blog at MySpace
Link to Kennedy’s Blog at Absinthe: New European Writing
Link to Kennedy’s Blog at Blogspot
7 October 2007: Kennedy launches a weekly blog at MySpace: A Shout From Copenhagen. The first entry is entitled, “Visit to an Open Prison.”
Kennedy invites MySpace members to subscribe to A Shout From Copenhagen and looks forward to reading their comments. Non-members are welcome to preview this blog before deciding whether to join the community. Joining MySpace and subscribing to this blog are both free.
6 November 2007: Kennedy’s blog is “syndicated” via Blogspot and Absinthe: New European Writing.