''All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.''
- Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), Danish author.
As quoted in The Human Condition, Epigram, ch. 5, by Hannah Arendt (1958).
Karen Blixen / Isak Dinesen
Born in in Rungsted, Zealand, Denmark, April 17, 1885
Died, September 17, 1962
A Danish writer, who mixed in her work supernatural elements, aestheticism, and erotic undertones with an aristocratic view of life, Blixen always emphasized that she was a storyteller in the traditional, oral sense of the word. She drew her inspiration from the Bible, the Arabian Nights, the works of Homer, the Icelandic Sagas, and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, who was her great fellow countryman. She wrote in English and in Danish. -
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Seven Gothic Tales
Originally published in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, the first book by "one of the finest and most singular artists of our time" (The Atlantic), is a modern classic. Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe.
Contents of Book
The Deluge at Norderney
The Old Cevalier
The Monkey
The Roads Round Pisa
The Supper at Elsinore
The Dreamers
The Poet
Out of Africa
In this book, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives: of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom: of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her: of primitive festivals: of big game that were her near neighbors--lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes--and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful.
Babette's Feast
"Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost." So writes Isak Dinesen in "Babette's Feast" as she spins a tale of friendship's ultimate sacrifice and the deepest values of life. In "Sorrow-Acre" Dinesen probes the heart of a mother who sows a field single-handedly in an attempt to save her son. These two complete stories echo Babette's plea with haunting poignancy.
Other Works by Karen Blixen (Source: Wikipedia)
Some of Blixen's works were published posthumously, including tales previously removed from earlier collections and essays she wrote for various occasions.
- The Hermits (1907, published in a Danish journal under the name Osceola)
- The Ploughman (1907, published in a Danish journal under the name Osceola)
- The de Cats Family (1909, published in Tilskueren)
- The Revenge of Truth (1926, published in Denmark)
- Seven Gothic Tales (1934 in USA, 1935 in Denmark)
- Out of Africa (1937 in Denmark and England, 1938 in USA)
- Winter's Tales (1942)
- The Angelic Avengers (1946)
- Last Tales (1957)
- Anecdotes of Destiny (1958) (including Babette's Feast)[13]
- Shadows on the Grass (1960 in England and Denmark, 1961 in USA)
- Ehrengard (posthumous 1963, USA)
- Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (posthumous 1977, USA)
- Daguerreotypes and Other Essays (posthumous 1979, USA)
- On Modern Marriage and Other Observations (posthumous 1986, USA)
- Letters from Africa, 1914–1931 (posthumous 1981, USA)
- Karen Blixen in Danmark: Breve 1931–1962 (posthumous 1996, Denmark)
Biography of Karen Blixen
Karen von Blixen-Finecke (17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962), née Karen Christenze Dinesen, was a Danish author also known by
her pen name Isak Dinesen. She also wrote under the pen names Osceola and Pierre Andrézel. Blixen wrote works in Danish, French, and English.
Blixen is best known for
Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and one of her stories,
Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into highly acclaimed, Academy Award-winning motion pictures. Prior to the release of the first film, she was noted for her
Seven Gothic Tales, for which she is also known in Denmark.
Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, described it as "a mistake" that Blixen was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature during the 1930s. She never did win, though she finished in third place behind Graham Greene in 1961, the year Ivo Andrić was awarded the prize.
Biography of Karen Blixen
Source: Wikpedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Blixen
Karen von Blixen-Finecke (
Danish: [kʰɑːɑn ˈb̥leɡ̊sn̩]; 17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962),
née Karen Christenze Dinesen, was a Danish author also known by her
pen name Isak Dinesen. She also wrote under the pen names
Tania Blixen,
Osceola and
Pierre Andrézel. Blixen wrote works in Danish, French and English.
Blixen is best known for Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and one of her stories, Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into highly acclaimed, Academy Award-winning motion pictures. Prior to the release of the first film, she was noted for her Seven Gothic Tales, for which she is also known in Denmark.
Early years
 |
| Mattrup Manor, 1861 |
Karen Dinesen was the daughter of writer and army officer Wilhelm Dinesen, and Ingeborg Westenholz, and was the sister of Thomas Dinesen. Her mother came from a wealthy Unitarian bourgeois merchant family. She spent her early years in the bourgeois environment of her mother's estate of Mattrup Manor near Horsens. She was later schooled in art in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome.
She began publishing fiction in Danish periodicals in 1905 under the pseudonym Osceola. From August 1872 to December 1873, Wilhelm Dinesen had lived among the Chippewa Indians, in Wisconsin, where he fathered a daughter, who was born after his return to Denmark. Wilhelm Dinesen hanged himself in 1895, after being diagnosed with syphilis when Karen was ten.
 |
| Karen Blixen Museum, Narobi, Kenya |
Life in Africa
In 1913 Karen Dinesen became engaged to her second-cousin, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, after a failed love affair with his brother. The couple moved to Kenya, where in early 1914 they used family money to establish a coffee plantation, hiring African workers, predominantly the Kikuyu tribes people who lived on the farmlands at the time of their arrival. About the couple's early life in Africa, Karen Blixen later wrote,
Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions, here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams![3]
The two were quite different in education and temperament, and Bror Blixen was unfaithful to his wife. She was diagnosed with syphilis toward the end of their first year of marriage. According to Dinesen's biographer Judith Thurman, there is reason to doubt that Bror Blixen was the cause. Although Dinesen's illness was eventually cured (some uncertainty exists), it created medical anguish for years afterward. The Blixens separated in 1921, and were divorced in 1925.
During her early years in Kenya, Karen Blixen met the English big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, and after her separation she and Finch Hatton developed a close friendship which eventually became a long-term love affair. Finch Hatton used Blixen's farmhouse as a home base between 1926 and 1931, when he wasn't leading one of his clients on safari. He died in the crash of his de Havilland Gipsy Moth biplane in 1931. At the same time, the failure of the coffee plantation, as a result of the worldwide economic depression and the unsuitability of her farm's soil for coffee growing, forced Blixen to abandon her beloved farm. The family corporation sold the land to a residential developer, and Blixen returned to Denmark, where she lived for the rest of her life.
Life as a writer
 |
Jurij Moskvitin (middle) acompaning Karen Blixen/
Isak Dinesen (right) meeting composer Igor Stravinskij
(left) at the City Hall of Copenhagen, May 25, 2959 |
|
On returning to Denmark, Blixen began writing in earnest. Her first book, Seven Gothic Tales, was published in the US in 1934 under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. This first book, highly enigmatic and more metaphoric than Gothic, won great recognition, and publication of the book in Great Britain and Denmark followed. Her second book, now the best known of her works, was Out of Africa, published in 1937, and its success firmly established her reputation as an author. She was awarded the Tagea Brandt Rejselegat (a Danish prize for women in the arts or academic life) in 1939.
During World War II, when Denmark was occupied by the Germans, Blixen started her only full-length novel, the introspective tale The Angelic Avengers, under another pseudonym, Pierre Andrezel; it was published in 1944. The horrors experienced by the young heroines were interpreted as an allegory of Nazism.
Her writing during most of the 1940s and 1950s consisted of tales in the storytelling tradition. The most famous is "Babette's Feast", about a chef who spends her entire 10,000-franc lottery prize to prepare a final, spectacular gourmet meal. The Immortal Story, was adapted to the screen in 1968 by Orson Welles, a great admirer of Blixen's work and life. Welles later attempted to film The Dreamers, but only a few scenes were ever completed.
Blixen's tales follow a traditional style of storytelling, and most take place against the background of the 19th century or earlier periods. Concerning her deliberately old-fashioned style, Blixen mentioned in several interviews that she wanted to express a spirit that no longer existed in modern times, that of destiny and courage. Indeed, many of her ideas can be traced back to those of Romanticism. Blixen's concept of the art of the story is perhaps most directly expressed in the story "The Cardinal's First Tale" from her fifth book, Last Tales.
Though Danish, Blixen wrote her books in English and then translated her work into her native tongue. Critics describe her English as having unusual beauty.[who?] Her later books usually appeared simultaneously in both Danish and English. As an author, she kept her public image as a charismatic, mysterious old Baroness with an insightful third eye, and established herself as an inspiring figure in Danish culture, although shunning the mainstream.
Illness and death
Although it was widely believed that syphilis continued to plague Blixen throughout her lifetime, extensive tests were unable to reveal evidence of syphilis in her system after 1925. Her writing prowess suggests that she did not suffer from the mental degeneration of late stages of syphilis, nor from cerebral poisoning due to mercury treatments. She did suffer a mild permanent loss of sensation in her legs that could be attributed to chronic use of arsenic in Africa.
During the 1950s Blixen's health quickly deteriorated, and in 1955 she had a third of her stomach removed because of an ulcer. Writing became impossible, although she did several radio broadcasts.
In her analysis of Blixen's medical history, Linda Donelson points out that Blixen wondered if her pain was psychosomatic even though she blamed it in public on the emotive syphilis: "Whatever her belief about her illness, the disease suited the artist's design for creating her own personal legend."[7]
Unable to eat, Blixen died in 1962 at Rungstedlund, her family's estate, at the age of 77, apparently of malnutrition. The source of her abdominal problems remains unknown, although gastric syphilis, manifested by gastric ulcers during secondary and tertiary syphilis, was well-known prior to the advent of modern antibiotics.
Rungstedlund Museum
Blixen lived most of her life at the family estate Rungstedlund, which was acquired by her father in 1879. The property is located in Rungsted, 24 kilometres (15 mi) north of Copenhagen, Denmark's capital. The oldest parts of the estate date to 1680, and it had been operated as both an inn and a farm. Most of Blixen's writing was done in Ewald's Room, named after author Johannes Ewald. The property is managed by the Rungstedlund Foundation, founded by Blixen and her siblings. It was opened to the public as a museum in 1991.
Legacy
The Nairobi suburb that stands on the land where Blixen farmed coffee is now named Karen. Blixen herself declared in her later writings that "the residential district of Karen" was "named after me".[8] And Blixen's biographer, Judith Thurman, was told by the developer who bought the farm from the family corporation that he planned to name the district after Blixen.
Blixen was known to her friends not as "Karen" but as "Tania." The family corporation that owned her farm was incorporated as the "Karen Coffee Company". The chairman of the board was her uncle, Aage Westenholz,[9] who may have named the company after his own daughter Karen. However, the developer seems to have named the district after its famous author/farmer rather than the name of her company.
There is a Karen Blixen Coffee House and Museum in the district of Karen, located near Blixen's former home.
Family
Blixen's great-nephew, Anders Westenholz, was also an accomplished writer, and has written books about her and her literature, among other things.
Karen Blixen was also, in addition to being depicted on a Danish banknote, featured on a Danish postage stamp that was issued in 1980.
Out of Africa Movie Poems
http://www.karenblixen.com/moviepoems.html
The screenwriter, Kurt Luedtke, included the following fragments of poems
in his Academy Award-winning filmscript from 1985.
Scene: Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) washing Karen Blixen's (Meryl Streep's)
hair on safari:
(Note: Denys Finch Hatton loved this poem. The lines "He prayeth well, who loveth well /Both man and bird and beast" appear on commemorative brass plaques, once placed by Denys Finch Hatton's brother Toby on the obelisk at Denys's tomb in the Ngong Hills, and still found in Ewerby Church, Lincolnshire, England. In the flyleaf of the copy of the poem owned by Karen Blixen, Denys drew a picture of a rhinoceros. This drawing is reproduced in Isak Dinesen's Letters from Africa, page 140.)
... Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.
Ha, ha, quoth he, full plain I see
The Devil knows how to row.
Farewell, farewell, but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest:
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast."
Scene: At Denys's grave:
by A. E. Housman (1859-1936).
"The time you won your town the race
We cheered you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high...
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose...
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man...
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's."
(Note: A play, "The Invention of Love" by Tom Stoppard, examines the life of A. E. Housman. The play opened in London in 1998 and in Philadelphia in February, 2000.) The (fictional) script written for the movie gives Meryl Streep the further comments:
"Now take back the soul
of Denys George Finch Hatton,
whom You have shared with us.
He brought us joy...
we loved him well.
He was not ours.
He was not mine."
Scene: Karen leaving the farm for good:
From Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), chapter titled "Kamante and Lulu," page 83:
"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"
Scene: "Rose-lipped maidens"
The line "Rose-lipped maidens" appears when Meryl Streep is offered a drink in the Muthaiga Club near the end of the movie, and also before the seduction scene on safari. The following poem was set to music by Samuel Barber (1910-1931).
A. E. Housman (1859-1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896.
WITH rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
the rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.
Karen Blixen / Isak Dinesen
Quotes
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4480096.Isak_Dinesen
“The cure for anything is salt water - tears, sweat, or the sea.”
“When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”
“Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.”
“To be a person is to have a story to tell.”
“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”
“All sorrows can be born if you put them in a story or tell a story about them.”
“Here I am, where I am supposed to be.”
“There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when I thought that I was to live and die in Africa, had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: "Let us drive as far as our graves.”
“The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.”
“I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”
“I don't think...
one gets a flash of happiness once,
and never again;
it is there deep within you...”
“You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my "life has been wasted" here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know.”
“But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.”
“Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence.”
“All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.”
“Alas! as I have lived I have lost the capacity of fear. When you know what things are really like, you can make no poems about them. When you have had talk with ghosts and connections with the devils you are, in the end, more afraid of your creditors than of them; and when you have been made a cuckold you are no longer nervous about cuckoldry. I have become too familiar with life; it can no longer delude me into believing that one thing is much worse than the other. The day and the dark, an enemy and a friend—I know them to be about the same. How can you make others afraid when you have forgotten fear yourself? I once had a really tragic tale, a great tale, full of agony, immensely popular, of a young man who in the end had his nose and his ears cut off. Now I could frighten no one with it, if I wanted to, for now I know that to be without them is not so very much worse than to have them. This is why you see me here, skin and bone, and dressed in old rags instead of keeping near the thrones of the mighty, flourishing and flattered, as was when I was young.”
“I remember an old Danish bishop’s saying to me that there are many ways to the recognition of truth, and that Burgundy is one of them.”
“The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing. The grass was me , and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorn trees.”
“I had a farm in Africa.”
“It is terrible and unbearable to an artist,' he said, 'to be encouraged to do, to be applauded for doing his second best.' He said: 'Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!”
“People love to be frightened. The great princes, fed up with the sweets of life, wished to have their blood stirred again. The honest ladies, to whom nothing ever happened, longed to tremble in their beds just for once. The dancers were inspired to a lighter pace by tales of flight and pursuit.”
“In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself—all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married.”
“At times I believe that my feet have been set upon a road which I shall go on following, and that slowly the centre of gravity of my being will shift over from the world of day, from the domain of organizing and regulating universal powers, into the world of Imagination. Already now I feel...that day is a space of time without meaning, and that it is with the coming of dusk, with the lighting of the first star and the first candle, that things will become what they really are, and will come forth to meet me.”
“Emmanuelson said good-bye to me; he started to walk, and then came back and said good-bye once more. I sat in the car and watched him, and I think that as he went he was pleased to have a spectator. I believe that the dramatic instinct within him was so strong that he was at this moment vividly aware of being leaving the stage, of disappearing, as if he had, with the eyes of his audience, seen himself go. Exit Emmanuelson. Should not the hills, the thorn-trees and the dusty road take pity and for a second put on the aspect of cardboard?”
“What is life when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn?”
“What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine? You may even ask which is the more intense craving and pleasure: to drink or to make water. But in the meantime, what has been done? A song has been composed, a kiss taken, a slanderer slain, a prophet begotten, a righteous judgment given, a joke made. The world drank in the young story-teller Mira. He went to its head, he ran in its veins, he made it glow with warmth and color. Now I am on my way down a little; the effect has worn off. The world will soon be equally pleased to piss me out again, and I do not know but that I am pressing on a little myself. But the tales which I made—they shall last.”
“I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.”
“Man, my friends,is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble. We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!”
“It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings”
“If Miss Malin had now been given the choice of returning to her former reasonable state, and had been capable of realizing the meaning of the offer, she might have declined it on the ground that you have in reality more fun out of life when a little off your head.”
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