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Grubbe, but he lets us feel all the promise and the tragedy
of her life in the description of her eyes as a young girl—a
paragraph of marvellous poignant beauty.
Jacobsen once jestingly compared himself to the sloth
(det berömte Dovendyr Ai-ai) which needed two years to climb
to the top of a tree. It was necessary for him to withdraw
absolutely from the world and to retire, as it were, within
the character he wished to portray before he could set pen
to paper. It cannot be denied that the laboriousness of the
process is sometimes perceptible in his finished work. His
style became too gorgeous in color, too heavy with
fragrance. Yet there were signs that Jacobsen’s genius was
freeing itself from the faults of over-richness. The very last
prose that came from his hand, Fru Fönss, has a clarified
simplicity that has induced critics to place it at the very
head of his production. Indeed, it is difficult to say to what
heights of artistic accomplishment he might have risen
had his life been spared beyond the brief span of thirty-eight
years. As it is, the books he left us are still, of their kind,
unsurpassed in the North.
The translation of Marie Grubbe (a book which Brandes
has called one of the greatest tours de force in Danish
literature) was a task to be approached with diffidence. The
author does not reconstruct exactly, in his dialogue, the
language of the period; nor have I attempted it. Even had
I been able to do so, the racy English of the Restoration
would have been an alien medium for the flourishes and
pomposities of Jacobsen’s Danish. On the other hand, it
would clearly have been unfair to the author to turn his
work into ordinary modern English and so destroy that
stiff, rich fabric of curious, archaic words and phrases which
he had been at such pains to weave. There seemed only one
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