UI law professor Marc Linder translated several Danish novels, and I think I may have reviewed all of them, beginning with this one. Because the portrayal of the religious in fiction is a particular interest of mine, I found this book rather fascinating. I always enjoyed interviewing Linder (though we never talked about this cleverly titled book featuring his legal research).

This review ran under the headline and subhead “The Great Danish Novel: Classic Danish novel finally finds its way into English thanks to a Hawkeye law professor.”

This spring, University of Iowa law professor Marc Linder was walking by his bookcase when an old birthday present caught his eye. The present was Danish novelist Hans Kirk’s The Fishermen, given to Linder back in 1975 while he was teaching in Denmark. Linder’s initial reaction to the book, the best-selling Danish novel of all time, wasn’t very positive.

“I read about 50 pages and I thought, ‘What is this? I’m not interested in these religious freaks,'” Linder said in a phone interview.

A year later, however, Linder gave the book a second look and his entire perception of the work changed–from distaste to what he calls, “fanatic passion.” Part of that passion was a desire to translate the book, written in 1928, into English. An English translation had never seen the light of day for a variety of reasons, not the least of which many have been Kirk’s membership in the Danish Communist Party.

Linder made some preliminary inquiries to Penguin Books, the company that had originally obtained the rights for an English edition but had never actually produced the book. Though a translation was evidently prepared in the late ’40s or early ’50s, Penguin never released it. Linder had no success getting information about the status of the rights when he contacted the publishing house in the ’70s.

“Evidently, I was not resourceful or persistent enough,” he said. “I couldn’t get anyone’s attention there.”

So the translation was put aside and Linder headed to law school. For the past decade he has taught labor law at the UI, and while he completed a couple translations of German fiction, The Fishermen languished on his shelf.

Until that day in March

“I was walking by my bookcase and there was the book,” Linder remembered. “I said to myself, ‘There’s a loose end in your life.'”

He began a translation of the work and once again set out to unravel the mystery of who controlled the English rights. A phone call to Tina Nunnally, herself a translator of Danish books through her Seattle-based company Fjord Press, led to a new contact at Penguin. Eventually Linder confirmed with a rights manager at Penguin that the company no longer held the rights to the book. Linder contacted the Danish publisher and at long last–“It evidently wasn’t important enough for them to expedite it,” Linder said–gained the English rights to the book.

He spent the summer of 1999 translating the book, revising his work more than 20 times and putting in as many as 16 hours a day.

“You can’t lavish this kind of attention on a translation if you’re doing this for a living,” Linder said.

Among the many challenges to overcome was how to deal with the dialect spoken by the fishermen. “It’s not like a southern accent,” Linder explained. “It’s a dialect; it’s like another language. You can’t reproduce that.”

Linder also searched out a professor in St. Paul, Minn., who translates hymns, a Danish/English Bible on the Internet, and the help of several native Danish speakers in an effort to accurately present Kirk’s work in English. Readers of excellent literature should be profoundly grateful.

As you might guess, The Fishermen tells the story of a group of fishermen who move from the North Sea coast of Denmark to the west coast in an effort to improve their lot in life. There, the transplanted families must adjust to a new lifestyle while struggling to remain faithful to the pietistic form of Christianity.

Kirk (1898-1962) himself was far from being a member of the Church Association for the Inner Mission, the movement to which his characters belong. “He was a godless Marxist,” Linder said. “There’s no doubt about that.” Nevertheless, the beauty of the book is it sympathetic portrait of the fishermen and their wives and children. Indeed, according to Linder, even member of the Inner Mission find that the book casts them in a fairly favorable light.

“Although Kirk was someone with very decided political views,” Linder explained, “he had a very deft hand for drawing characters.”

A prime example of Kirk’s gift is the character Tea Ron, a woman desperately devoted to her religion but also blind to her own self-righteousness. Tea is confronted by the local pastor when her daughter Tabita becomes pregnant out of wedlock. At first humble and ashamed, Tea quickly comes to regard the pastor’s condemnation of her daughter and of herself as too strong to allow. Tea’s subtle shift from a rigid legalist to a more compassionate soul is one of the most effective passages in a novel made up of exceptionally moving moments.

It is rare to find a novel that so carefully examines the lives of people of faith and their struggle to live by that faith as mores and morals change over time. Kirk avoided the snare of condescension that often trips up non-beleiving writers who tackle questions of religion. Kirk’s fishermen may never see God, but neither are they made to look like fools for believing in God. Rather, The Fisherman offers the reader a moving tale of true faith facing growing challenges both from within and without.