Ellen Schou

Danish word art in German. To the translator Ellen Schou on the 45th anniversary of her death

"In the rooms that two hundred years ago saw the feudal pomp of glittering parties, it is now very quiet. For those who live here now, it's closing time. They rest here after a long, often arduous journey through life. The most diverse fates meet here, and the new, changed life is reflected here. All classes and professions are represented here: the working-class woman who has given birth to fourteen children, the writer, the nurse and the widowed teacher's wife - they all live peacefully next door to each other and live together like one big family."

These words come from the writer, journalist and translator Ellen Schou, who spent the rest of her life together with her friend Jeanne Berta Semmig in the Altfriedstein retirement home. She died there 45 years ago, on 24 June 1972. "A laboured journey through life" is a description that also applies to her, because her path was not easy. She was born on 28 June 1886 in Copenhagen, Denmark's capital, into the humblest of circumstances. After her mother, who came from a farming family, died at an early age and her father, a sailor, was lost at sea, little Ellen was left to face the harsh world alone. Hunger in body and soul were constant companions. It is not known what her education was like, but it is known that she successfully completed an apprenticeship as a bookbinder. Paper and letters seemed to have fascinated her, she once said: "I was drawn to writing." She had also dreamed of dancing as a profession. A cousin on her mother's side was an actor and took her into the dazzling world of theatre, culture and stagecraft. This is how she met a Swiss concert singer and began working for her as a secretary and companion. There is no record of how long she worked in this role, but she was probably travelling a lot. In fact, she established her journalistic career by publishing travel letters for various magazines.

One of her country trips took her to Germany, where she visited Dresden and confessed: "I liked it better there than in Berlin, which is probably why I stayed in the Saxon capital. I worked as a correspondent for Danish and Norwegian newspapers." But she also worked as an editor for the "Sächsische Zeitung" and the "Free Farmer".

Her great significance as a translator is undoubtedly the translation of the works of Martin Andersen Nexö (1869-1954), with whom she had a friendship: "As a fellow countrywoman and the person responsible for publishing his works in German, I often had the good fortune to be with him, especially when he was still living in Radebeul." She understood how to transfer Nexö's art of thought and words into the German language. Translation is not just about the simple transfer of a dialect, but about intercultural exchange and mediation between author and audience. The author's meaning and intention must be preserved as well as possible and rendered comprehensibly; the translation process also involves political responsibility. Both of their lives were arduous, in many ways they found common ground, above all they were friends in spirit. The world of poverty and the milieu of the working classes in their realistic living environment are the main themes in Nexö's writing. But he does not describe them without humour and satire, his protagonists are close to his heart: he often endows them with admirable tenacity and the wit to take life in small things by the scruff of the neck. The translator also knew the lack of the essentials. Ellen Schou got to the heart of Nexö's poetry and conveyed it to a wide readership. Examples include the story collections "The Passengers of the Empty Seats", "Train Birds", "The Doll" and "Flying Summer".

The latter is a story of "[] two little creatures who belonged to those depths where the sun does not reach down so naturally." Instead of sitting at school desks, they go on a prank, let themselves drift mischievously and vagabondly, and at the end of a little trip around the world they land at the garden fence of a large villa, with a "big cherry tree, full to bursting with cherries, and hundreds of sparrows making noise and rioting in it." They squeezed through the fence in a flash and sat in the tree themselves. "One hand collected the seeds while the other stuffed them into their mouths - whole fists full at once. They didn't take the time to spit out the pits, there was still time for that later." But the owner of the villa returned home unexpectedly from his seaside holiday to check on his "beloved Morellen", discovered the little emaciated thieves, gave them a scare and let them go. "The cherry stones felt like a small burden in their stomachs - a confirmation that everything had been real. [] There was no reason to doubt it - it had been a marvellous day."

Without Ellen Schou we would have missed it.

Maren Gündel, City Archive

Sources: Ellen Schou: Memories of Autumn; Martin Andersen Nexö: Flying Summer, transl. By Ellen Schou.

Published in: Official Gazette Radebeul, June 2017