Andersen's life

Diana f/Wen

He is ugly and humble, and he has dreamed of getting ahead all his life. He is sensitive and devastated by nature, and he dare not talk about marriage. Finally, he was considered gay. His fairy tales are the best gifts for children all over the world, but in the eyes of most people, he is still just an interesting writer, not a master of literature.

How did such an eccentric and melancholy Andersen write such a brilliant and naive dream?

1874, that is, one year before Andersen's death, he received a letter from a reader, written by an American female student, containing a dollar bill and a newspaper clipping, which published Andersen's weak body and so-called poverty. Before long, other children began to send small amounts of money to repay the so-called "children's debt" owed by a Philadelphia newspaper to the Danish writer. Later, even the American ambassador personally gave him 200 Danish silver dollars. There is no Andersen who is too poor to open the pot and wants to stop it. He wrote to Gibson peacock, the publisher of Philadelphia Evening News, who initiated this charity fund-raising activity, saying that although he was very happy to see that "my stories written in small languages can find readers so far away from the motherland" and was deeply moved by so many American children "breaking the piggy bank to help him as an old writer", he really didn't need and couldn't accept these gifts. He wrote that now he felt ashamed, not proud and grateful, and some satisfaction offset Andersen's embarrassment.

Andersen dreamed of getting ahead all his life and was regarded as a real artist. Sometimes this desire can overcome everything. "My name began to shine, which is the only reason I am alive. I covet fame and glory as a miser covets gold. " This is a letter he wrote to a friend in his early thirties. Now he is 69 years old, and his reputation is widely spread, as evidenced by the activities of American newspapers. He may be more famous than other living writers, and his international reputation is usually based on other celebrities. From 65438 to the 1940s, his works were widely read, although the way was not always in line with his original intention. Stories such as Thumbelina, Ugly Duckling, The Emperor's New Clothes and The Little Match Girl have been translated in large numbers, including those that have destroyed the original works beyond recognition. For example, the infamous MaryHowitt, a British woman who doesn't know Danish, relies entirely on the German version for her translation. Caroline Pitcher, another English translator, deleted the whole paragraph. But there are still some better versions, especially in America. For example, the Danes were Hollywood stars in the 1930s. More than one hundred years after Andersen's death, his literary influence still exists in some form. Moya Schiller's film Red Shoes is more famous than Andersen's original work. Movies and cartoons adapted from Andersen's fairy tales can be rented in any "giant bomb" chain store. Disney insists on rewriting some of Andersen's most beautiful stories to add happy endings to young audiences. Generally speaking, outside Scandinavia, Andersen is recognized as an interesting writer of beautiful fairy tales, not a master of literature.

1952, Danny Kaye (19 13- 1987, American comedy star, formerly known as David Daniel kaminsky. The film "The Biography of Andersen" starring in the film shows this view incisively and vividly. Although this film has nothing to do with the real Andersen-it has never boasted so much-it creates a writer's life, which is as popular as Andersen's fairy tales, and almost becomes a sequel to those fairy tales: a poor boy from odense, a small town on Fane Island, breaks into Copenhagen alone, conquers adversity and finally succeeds. This is the essence of the film, which is quite consistent with Andersen's autobiography. He named it "Fairy Tales of My Life", in which there was no self-mockery. However, according to Frank Loesser (19/kloc-0-1969), a famous American lyrical songwriter, he is also one of the authors of many episodes in the film The Biography of Andersen. According to the records, danny kay's films are regarded as boring in Denmark, which is a bit embarrassing for the tourism industry.

For a long time, Andersen and his works have provided a lot of materials for academic circles. Almost from the day he died, critics and researchers began to dig up his family history, devouring his personal diary and written materials, and even letting go of an earlier and unprocessed memoir. This memoir was not discovered and published until the 1920s. 1993, Johann de milius, director of Andersen Center in odense, published a detailed chronicle of Andersen's daily life. This ongoing work makes the Danes thoroughly understand the details of Andersen's life-as detailed as the frequency of masturbation-and a portrait that is completely out of harmony with other souvenirs found in the famous shopping street in Copenhagen. There are more and more people interested in the real Andersen everywhere: Irish playwright SebastianBarry and American dancer MarthaClarke recently collaborated to rehearse a dance drama about Andersen's life, including Frank Lowther's score. This work premiered in San Francisco last autumn, but critics were a little confused. They marveled at its excellent visual effects, but they couldn't recognize Andersen in the shadows presented on the stage. This work is being rearranged to enter Broadway next season. In addition, Nopf Publishing House will publish a new biography of Andersen this spring by Jackie Shi Lage, a writer of the Financial Times in London. The new biography will add a credible work to the handful of English research works, among which 1975' s biography of Andersen published by Bristol-dorf is the most famous.

In a portrait painted at the age of 29, Andersen looks like a playboy with a high collar and a moustache. But many photos taken later-ugly, embarrassed, indifferent and sad-seem to be closer to Andersen's real state. "If you ask me, Andersen's daily state is sadness," Jonas Collin (then director of the Royal Danish Theatre). His son Edward wrote in his memoirs. Andersen's works also repeatedly reveal fragmentary hints: social indifference, sexual frustration, and fear that the past will engulf it one day.

Throughout his life, he couldn't get rid of the nightmare left by four years' life in Srager Sai Grammar School. There, he swallowed the fear of failure, was abused by the unsympathetic principal, and was forced to stop his uncontrollable writing impulse. He once wrote a letter full of self-pity to Admiral Woolf's wife, his patron in Copenhagen, and Mrs. Woolf replied:

You really spare no effort to trouble your friends. I can't believe it will make you feel better-you keep paying close attention to yourself-and your own end result is that you think you will become a great poet-my dear Andersen! Why don't you think that all your ideas will accomplish nothing? You are going astray.

But Andersen has been unable to extricate himself. He vowed to be a great writer like Shi Lage? Shi Lage, 1779- 1850, is a Danish romantic poet and playwright. A great writer like that. 1826, this mature 2 1 year-old student wrote a sweet and greasy poem called "Dying Children", in which he wrote: "Mom, I am tired, I want to sleep, let me rest by your heart." The following year, this poem was published in a Danish newspaper and the result was very popular. Three years later, a literary magazine founded by J.L. Heiberg, a great literary critic in Copenhagen, selected some chapters of Andersen's fantasy prose "Wandering in Amag Island", and its works became popular again. This made Andersen taste the public attention for the first time, but Ingermann (B.S.Ingemann, 1789- 1862, Danish writer, poet and playwright. Before long, he was accused of pleasing "gossiping, superficial and impetuous readers", which simply surprised Andersen.

Andersen also wants to please another kind of readers: celebrities of his contemporaries. 1883, his first trip to Paris. He was twenty-eight years old at that time, and few people outside Denmark knew him. His direct visit to Hugo was a great surprise. This almost fanatical idolization has just begun, and he has been associated with these people in his life: Liszt, Dumas, Balzac, Mendelssohn, Brothers Grimm (people often compare him with them), Heine-he regards Andersen as a snob ("his behavior shows the flattering servility that princes like." ), Schumann, Rossini, Jenny Linde, Wagner and Dickens are known as the "Swedish Nightingale".

Andersen is eager for attention, but he has been renting a house and living alone. There are also girls who are infatuated with him, usually the daughters of friends, especially Jenny Linde. But when it comes to sex, he loses courage. Women and their bodies always make him panic.

1834 at the beginning, he wrote in his diary that he visited the studio of the painter Albert Kuchler:

I was sitting when a young model 16 years old came with her mother. Kuchler said he wanted to see her breasts. My appearance embarrassed the girl a little, but her mother said, "What are you dawdling about?" Then I unbuttoned her clothes and pulled them all to her waist. She stood there half naked, her skin was dark, her arms were a little too thin, but her breasts were beautiful and round ... I felt my body shaking.

His diary is also surprisingly frank when describing his body. "Penis pain" or similar records abound, with a cross next to it, indicating that he masturbated. When he was nearly 30 years old, he went to Italy, during which he wrote:

My blood is boiling. Headache. Blood flooded into my eyes, and a passion I had never felt before drove me out of the door-I didn't know where I was going, but I … sat on a stone by the sea, and the tide was rising. The red flame spread along Mount Vesuvius. When I was walking back, two men followed me and asked me if I wanted a woman. No, don't. I shouted, but I went home and plunged into the water.

190 1 year, a Danish writer named Albert Hansen proposed in a German magazine that Andersen was gay. Since then, researchers' debate on this issue has become boring. As an adult man, he occasionally falls in love with men as much as he does with women. The most obvious example is the dancer Khaled Shaff. But it is almost certain that Andersen has always been a boy. Anyway, he was a real child in the19th century. Although his novels and plays were originally written for adults, they rarely touched sexual desire in a way beyond the standard literary rhetoric at that time-at most, they were just trembling lips and polite hugs.

Before his death at the age of 75 in 1875, Andersen got what he wanted and won a great victory. Other writers also like him very much, including Thackeray, Ibsen and Longfellow. They all write to each other. He was once close to Dickens, but their friendship ended in abuse. Bryce Madoff described it this way. 1857 In June, Andersen was invited to Dickens' country house in Kent and stayed there for five weeks, which almost drove his master crazy. Dickens' daughter Kate later recalled that her father finally put his cards on the table and said, "hans andersen slept in this room for five weeks-it seems that he will live with this family forever!"

Dickens broke up with him-Andersen didn't understand why until his death.

In his lifetime, Andersen saw that odense was famous all over the world. Visitors poured in to pay tribute to him. He became the darling of the European royal family. He posed for a statue. Last July, people could see a large group of children sitting on the pedestal of the statue of Andersen in new york Central Park, listening to Harry Potter and the Fire. ) However, compared with Ibsen and Strindberg, even compared with hamson and J.P. Jacobson, Andersen is still regarded as the most elusive artist-a literary master who writes entirely in small languages-and, somehow, this is the most elusive. Even when he became famous, Andersen described the blow he suffered in his diary like this: it was purely from a panic without reason:

A dirty stream stopped by the spring. I have a feeling that he may know me and tell me something unpleasant, as if I were an untouchable who was promoted to the upper class.

At that time, American schoolchildren were kind to him at 1874, and he was seriously ill. Within a year, he will die of liver cancer. However, even in the last few months (most of the time he stayed with the family of Moritz Melkaus, a Jewish businessman who had been taking care of him), he was willing and even eager to see any visitor. And in these conversations, people can feel his loveliness, nothingness and heartbreaking desire to be appreciated by others. Edmund Goss, a 23-year-old English literary journalist and critic, did not speak Danish. Later, he wrote about how he met "a tall old gentleman in a brown suit and snuff curls of the same color" at the door. Gauss then wrote:

At that moment, I seemed to be severely poked. His weird and ugly face and hands, his extremely long and dizzy arms ... hans andersen's face is a farmer's face, and his emotional and cultural life has failed to remove the dirt mark on his face.

American consul G.W. Griffin seems to be unable to remember Andersen's physical illness. "When I visited him," Griffin wrote in 1875, "I gave him a letter from Mr. Sist, a poet friend, asking him to copy some of his favorite poems and put them into his anthology." Andersen drew a few strokes on the back of a photo and wrote: "Dedicated to Mr. L.J. Sist.

Life is the most beautiful fairy tale. Hereby. Andersen. Then he took Griffin's hand and said, "Tell Mr. Longfellow that I am very ill." Griffin described the scene with obvious and almost complacent satisfaction. The people he and Andersen agreed to meet a few months before his death didn't seem to ask themselves why they didn't bother to come to the door.

The original text was published in the New Yorker magazine on October 8th, 65438/KLOC-0. Due to the limitation of space, it cannot be fully translated.

The untranslated part includes Andersen's childhood life and a literary feud between Andersen and Kierkegaard, a great philosopher in the future and a teenager at that time.

-Translation

Andersen chronology

1805 was born in odense on April 2nd.

181611My father died at the age of 0.

18 19 14 years old, he left home alone to seek creative opportunities in Copenhagen.

1822 published the trial collection in August, including poetry, drama and stories. This collection was not published because of its humble origins, but it attracted the attention of some people in the cultural circle. 10 In June, he entered a middle school missionary school to supplement his culture, studied for six years, and felt painful about his own educational methods; However, in the past six years, I have read many famous books, practiced writing poems and practicing writing plays. 1827, leave school and return to Copenhagen. The published poems were praised by high-level critics and inspired Andersen's confidence in writing.

1829, he wrote a long fantasy travel book "A Roaming in Amag Island" and published it. The first edition has been sold out. The publisher immediately bought the second edition on generous terms, so Andersen got rid of the oppression of hunger. The comedy Love on the nikolayev Tower was staged at the Royal Opera House. In the same year, the first book of poetry was published.

1830, the first love failed. Start a trip; The second book of poetry was published.

183 1- 1834, love failed again and mother died. Soon after, she published a long autobiographical novel, The Impromptu Poet.

At the age of 30, 1835 began to write fairy tales, and published the first collection of fairy tales, with only 6 1 page pamphlets, including four articles: Light Box, Little Klaus and Big Klaus, Princess on Pea and Little Flower. His works have not received unanimous praise. Some people even thought that he had no talent for writing fairy tales and suggested that he give up, but Andersen said, "This is my immortal work!" " "

1844, wrote an autobiographical work "Ugly Duckling".

1846, he wrote about the little match girl.

1970' s longest work, Lucky Belle, with more than 70,000 words, is based on her own life experience, but it is not entirely an autobiography.

1867 was elected as an honorary citizen by his hometown of odense.

1in the early morning of August 4th, 875 1 1, died of liver cancer in a friend's country house. The funeral was extremely tragic, at the age of 70.